New horizontal drilling and fracking technologies have transformed the plains above the Bakken oil shale, which cover much of North Dakota and Montana in the northwestern United States, into swelling boomtowns. The crude oil forced out by sand, water, and chemicals pumped into perforations in the shale brings with it natural gas, a far less lucrative resource. Without the capacity or economic incentive to capture, process, and transport it, approximately 30 percent of natural gas produced in the Bakken is flared (or burned off) at the well site in towering, continuous flames.

Viewed casually from the window of a passing car, the flares signal both the excesses and the banalities of life in the Anthropocene. Amidst debates over energy scarcity, peak oil, and the elusive promise of “energy independence” heralded by proponents of expanded drilling, enough energy to heat half a million homes is expended each day to create a landscape studded with pillars of flame. In satellite images of the nighttime United States, the Bakken fields—formerly a sparsely populated, darkened expanse—are illuminated as brightly as the nearest cities of Minneapolis and Chicago. Gas flares are the ultimate display of luxury in the midst of a landscape and economy transformed by a new class-culture of recently enriched oilfield workers, not to mention their bosses.

At the same time, the flares enact the disruptive temporality of terraforming in the Anthropocene. The slow accumulation of geological time embodied in natural gas, rapidly expelled into the atmosphere, accelerates global warming through emissions equivalent to those of around a million cars. But again, incorporated into a highway vista that is both iconic and banal as a trope of American culture, the flares—captured haphazardly while in motion, like any other roadside attraction—illuminate the profoundly uneventful realities of anthropocenic change. Constantly burning, they reveal the violent underpinnings of the nostalgic roadside view while performing the stasis-in-motion that is perhaps our most terrifying prospect. The prospect that the catastrophe will not be an Event—on the other side of which we will continue to live post-Event—but that it is already here, as we are propelled blindly into a future we cannot see by the very force of the accumulation of the past.