This image was the front of a mailing I received yesterday from the Sierra Club. It caught my eye, as it was obviously intended to do, with the "zombie" reference. What continues to interest me is the SC's doubled-meaning with "zombie." Most obviously, the pipeline was dead (in the political sense) and is now again "alive" or undead. But, as we've discussed before, the zombie is a particularly pliable metaphor. Here, it's really just being used to invoke disgust or disquiet.
What do you think?
I think the photo creates an interesting parallel between the pipeline as seen, and possible movie screen shots of zombie hordes. Because the pipelines are rendered in segments trailing off in size from left to right, iy create a linear understanding of direction of the focus images (the pipelines). If the pipes were replaced with walkers, the picture would still work in the same way, and we would understand it as a moving horde.
I think there is definitely a kind of perversely zombie-ish element to fossil fuels, especially the really dirty types like the tar sands oil KXL would transport. We are quite literally pulling the dead out of the ground when we extract these fuels. Like in any zombie story, once the dead have risen, their sheer numbers become a massive threat to the living.
Even if you don't buy my environmentalist metaphor, there is something fundamentally odd about the fact that we 'animate' our society by consuming the dead.
It also works with the metaphor of a project that has been "killed" and "reincarnated" again and again, and the number of people who are being affected by it.
When thinking about why the Sierra Club used this metaphor, I go back to our discussion about why zombies seem to scare us so much. Maybe it was used because a zombies can be used in contrast to explore what makes us human. The reason zombies are so terrifying to me us because everything about them that was human is gone, it has no empathy or affect. The pipeline to many people could be our deepest fears becoming a reality, it goes not feel for its own affects on the rest of living.