Alaska’s Ambler Project carves a scar through Native lands in search of copper, while offshore turbines off Rhode Island are strangled in court — proof that America builds for extraction and sues against salvation.
FAIRBANKS, ALASKA — The wind outside cuts like a rusty hacksaw, and the neon “OPEN” sign above this bar flickers like a bad conscience. I am staring down the throat of the Ambler Access Project, 211 miles of frozen promise and diesel lunacy, a road hammered into the bones of Alaska because some bright-eyed bastard in a conference room thinks copper seams will save us all.
They call it “infrastructure.” I call it an artery carved into tundra that never asked for it. The caribou cross here. The rivers run here. The silence sings here. The tribes know it. They shake their heads, knowing the same lie in a new suit: jobs, wealth, opportunity. Always tomorrow, never today. What comes today is chainsaws and trucks, the smell of fuel in the snow, and the sound of the earth groaning like a man with a knife in his gut.
And while the bulldozers rev their engines, the Trump administration storms into court to kill the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island. A thousand miles away, Atlantic turbines wait like skeletal saints, ready to spin electricity out of salt air. But the lawsuit slaps them down. Not here, not now, not in this ocean. Offshore wind is an abomination, they say. Offshore drilling, of course, is holy writ.
The irony loops like a drunk on the Tilt-a-Whirl. Copper is vital for wind turbines, say the road-builders. We must gouge the tundra for the holy metal! But the turbines themselves? To hell with them. Sue them. Sink them. Stall them. The road is a serpent uncoiling across the wilderness, its belly full of hunger. They build. The herds scatter. The land dies.
You can strip the tundra to wire its light into turbines, then sabotage the turbines because they offend your donors. That is the American sickness: we eat our own future with a grin, then wash it down with lobbyist whiskey.
The Ambler Access Project is not just a road. It’s an open wound. Once the trucks roll, they do not stop. Copper today, zinc tomorrow, and God knows what by winter. The permafrost bleeds. The rivers choke. The caribou vanish. And the tribes bury another promise. Meanwhile, out in the Atlantic, the turbines stand idle, tall as myths, shackled not by engineering but by spite.
There is no sense left in this republic. We build roads to extraction and call it salvation, then strangle the wind that might keep us breathing. We gut the land for turbines and smash the turbines before they spin.
The jukebox kicks on. Johnny Cash sings “Ring of Fire.” I laugh like a man watching the end credits of his own country. The fire is here. And it was always ours.
