It’s a mid-September afternoon in Loving, a village of 1,400 in far southeastern New Mexico. The firm wind blowing out of Texas brings a light grit that settles in the hair and eyes. The wind carries the faint perfume of hydrocarbons — hints of plastic, hints of glue, hints of gasoline — picked up as it crosses the most productive portion of the most productive oilfield in the country, the Permian Basin. As the wind blows north, the dust and chemicals turn the morning sky from a light blue to a hazy white. In a couple of hours the air will carry the sizzling tang of ozone, eyes will burn, lungs will ache, and distant landmarks will lose their detail and filter into shades of light gray.
And it’s not even a bad pollution day.
