You’re scrolling on TikTok and come across this: a burly former oil and gas worker named Hawk Dunlap chronicling a radioactive lake of sludge in Texas created from an abandoned oil well. Playing underneath his video tour of the pollution is the 2002 party anthem “Ooh Ahh (My Life Be Like).”
You click more. You go deeper. And suddenly—if all goes according to plan for the former oil and gas workers turned activists—you’ve joined their crusade to clean up the wreckage of abandoned oil wells in the Permian Basin.
Meet Dunlap and Sarah Stogner—profiled in the latest issue of Mother Jones by Molly Taft—the unlikely vanguard of a Texan brand of environmentalism.
There are millions of abandoned oil wells across the United States, with tons in Texas. Dunlap and Stogner are part of a small, dedicated cohort helping to demand that Big Oil and government clean them up.
As Taft writes:
For Dunlap, it is personal. He is determined to hold an industry that has provided four generations of his family with employment to account. “We’ve been doing things wrong for a very long time,” he said, “and now that we know we’re doing things wrong, we need to start fixing it.”
Interestingly, none of these activists considers themselves liberal. For them, it is mostly a land rights argument, in a place where mineral rights under your property can be owned by companies. Stogner is a Never Trump Republican who holds office as a district attorney.
How did right-leaning former oil and gas workers become social media environmental stars? Read all about it here.
—Jacob Rosenberg
