A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean: A Bicycle Journey Through the Northern Dominion of Oil

by David Goodrich

Overview

In the face of widespread misinformation and misunderstanding, a climate scientist ventures into the vast heart of America’s new oil country on just two wheels.

Recently recovered from his epic bicycle journey that took him from the Delaware shore to the Oregon coast, distinguished climate scientist David Goodrich sets out on his bike again to traverse the Western Interior Seaway—an ancient ocean that once spread across half of North America. When the waters cleared a geologic age ago, what was left behind was vast, flat prairie, otherworldly rock formations, and oil shale deposits. As Goodrich journeys through the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park and across the prairies of the upper Midwest and Canada, we get a raw and ground-level view of where the tar sands and oil reserves are being opened up at an incredible and unprecedented pace. Extraordinary and unregulated, this “black goldrush” is boom and bust in every sense. In a manner reminiscent of John McPhee and Rachel Carson, combined with Goodrich’s wry self-deprecation and scientific expertise, A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean is a galvanizing and adventure-filled read that gets to the heart of drilling on our continent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643134475
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	315,887
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

David Goodrich is the former head of the  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Observations and Monitoring Program, and served as the Director of the UN Global Climate Observing System in Geneva, Switzerland. He is the author of A Hole in the Wind, which was a "One City, One Book" pick for San Francisco, and A Voyage Across an Ancient Ocean, also available from Pegasus Books.  He lives in Rockville, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Cowboys and Indians ix

The Keystone pipeline and a vision on the National Mall

1 The Takeoff Roll 1

The cockpit at Fort McMurray Airport and motivation for the journey

2 The Sky Over the Oil Sands 11

The flight from Fort McMurray Airport and background of the oil sands

3 Apocalypse Then: The 2016 Fort McMurray Fire 23

Canada's worst insured disaster

4 Visit to a Man Camp 35

Into the boreal forest

5 "Significant Uncertainties" 43

Perspectives on the oil industry from offshore Louisiana and inside Washington

6 The Magic Juice Box 53

A moment of grace on a hard road

7 The Water Protectors 63

Battles of Indigenous people on both sides of the border

8 Stewards of the Prairie 79

Oil towns and grain towns along the rail line

9 The Bomb on the Ridgeline 91

Hardisty, the town at the head of the Keystone Pipeline

10 The Birds of Saskatchewan 107

Road trip with a prairie ornithologist

11 Where the Sea Used to Be 123

The story of the ancient ocean, how the Alberta and Bakken oil deposits came to be, and what they mean for the future

12 Meet Me in Moose Jaw 139

A transcontinental rendezvous

13 The Crossing 149

At the most remote US frontier, a visit to the Teacher's Lounge

14 Williston: Boomtown, USA 161

The fracking revolution and its changes to small-town North Dakota

15 The Core of the Core 173

Approaching Theodore Roosevelt National Park through the heart of the Bakken field

16 A Conversation with Teddy 187

What might Roosevelt think about the dominion of oil?

17 A Certain Relentiessness 203

How the seemingly inexorable force of the fossil fuel industry has been turned before

Endnotes 221

Editorial Reviews

06/22/2020

Scientist Goodrich (A Hole in the Wind) examines oil industry–dependent communities in the U.S. and Canada “where the seeds of climate change are sown” in this sensitive, if less than convincing, attempt to show how opposing voices in the debate over fossil fuels might be reconciled. Embarking on a 1,100-mile bike ride—from Fort McMurray, Alberta, the base of Canadian oil-sands extraction, to Williston, N.Dak., epicenter of the fracking boom—he makes vivid observations of how oil extraction can disfigure the landscape, from vast pools of industrial waste in Alberta that look like “foam in latte,” to brine spills in North Dakota that have contaminated groundwater. But he is less assured when considering how to move along the conversation about climate change. Frequently encountering people involved with the oil industry along his journey, Goodrich strives to overcome their suspicions of his background in climate research, while also pushing back gently against their misconceptions, such as that “climate has always changed.” However, he invariably agrees to let the topic drop so as to not disturb the bonhomie. Goodrich is a sure-footed, amiable guide to the science behind climate change, but brings readers no closer to understanding what it’s going to take to move the conversation about climate change forward. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"The text rolls along as easily as his heavily-laden bike must have on those welcome downhill stretches. For a read that engages, entertains, and also educates, I can’t recommend anything better than A Hole in the Wind."

The Daily Local (Praise for A HOLE IN THE WIND)

"Entertaining and instructive, Goodrich’s travelogue showcases one man’s heroic efforts to confront this century’s greatest environmental crisis."

Booklist (Praise for A HOLE IN THE WIND)

"A detail-rich chronicle. The miles fly by."

The Washington Post (Praise for A HOLE IN THE WIND)

"At the end of a high-level career in climate science, David Goodrich cycled from Delaware to Oregon looking for a “hole in the wind”—a human future in the unrelenting march of climate change."

Nature (Praise for A HOLE IN THE WIND)

2020-05-04
Goodrich chronicles his bicycle ride from Alberta, Canada, to the northern plains of the U.S., “intent on seeing where carbon comes out of the ground.”

When he was a young man, the author did some roustabout work on oil rigs off the coast of Louisiana, and then he spent years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and as director of the U.N. Global Climate Observing System. Now retired and a long-distance bicyclist hobbyist, he decided to take a 1,100-mile bike trip from the oil sands of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta south to Williston, North Dakota, and the great fracking operation known as Bakken. “I would go on seeking some clues to the nature of this industry,” writes the author, “at once so tightly woven into modern life and so threatening to it.” Goodrich is an amiable writer. This means that while he is not shy about sharing his firm opinions on the reality and dangers of climate change, he was willing to listen to the personal stories of the oil workers. (He was uninterested, however, in hearing from the industry’s public relations flaks). Goodrich spends considerable time exploring the downside of extraction, from the tailing ponds to the brine spills to the many challenges of moving oil through pipelines. He smoothly lays out the histories of the projects and has a keen eye for the politics involved in their stop-and-go construction. He also does a good job explaining the nature of the opposition to the various pipelines—especially two, the Keystone and the Dakota Access—from fears of water contamination to the pollution of the headwaters of the Mississippi River and the harvesting of wild rice to the massive spills that have proven a hallmark of the pipelines. Goodrich concludes with a canny examination of Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting and the gradual re-creation of those very trusts.

A gentlemanly excursion through dirty oil sites that features a caustic, urgent message.

Kirkus Reviews