Finding the Swamp with David Huebert

A question I’ve been struggling with for a few years is how to write fiction about oil. Like most environmental issues, petroculture is too polarizing to make for good stories. Oil is good, or it’s evil. Oil is inexcusable—Amitav Ghosh says that it is “an embarrassment verging on the unspeakable”—or economically necessary. But for some reason I’m drawn to it, sensing that it’s not that simple after all.  

Eventually, I found the swamp: the vegetal theory of oil origin. Oil, after all, is life, is animals, plants, characters. This realization helped me find Sapphire, a girl profoundly influenced by Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics. More oil-adjacent than about oil, “Swamp Things” is the story of a swamp that has been brewing for hundreds of millions of years. It’s the story of a teenage girl trying to navigate the climate crisis while also trying to wade through the sewage of what it means to be a teenage girl today. People exploit her, manipulate her, intoxicate her. She watches flares rise from the stacks, SUVs burning on the 401, a brown fountain spuming out of a gas station—and she’s as implicated in it as the rest of us. There is only one, very simple, story about oil. Yet every story told today is tangential to that tale. Towards the end of “Swamp Things,” there is a moment of hopefully not-too-transparent ars poetica: “we can’t purge or clean up all this filth but maybe we can bend it into beauty.” If you’ve never done so, I recommend doing an online search of “Bitumen.” You will be astonished by how beautiful it is.