THE WELL WATCHERS

THERE ARE MILLIONS OF ABANDONED OIL WELLS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES. AN UNLIKELY GROUP OF ACTIVISTS IN TEXAS IS MAKING SURE NO ONE FORGETS THEY NEED TO BE CLEANED UP.

- Molly Taft

HAWK DUNLAP ISN'T USED TO BEING COLD.

On a gray day last January when I visited him in West Texas to tour abandoned oil wells, Dunlap—in his mid-50s with a James Brolin vibe—was bundled up, a sweatshirt pulled over his signature red coveralls.

As we drove, Dunlap told me, with a note of sorrow in his deep Texas drawl, that he used to live in Bali, where he went days without wearing a shirt or shoes and swam in a pool he'd installed with the shape of Texas tiled on its bottom. Outside the windshield of his white pickup was an endless expanse of desert scrub and red dirt. Sweeping his arm toward the flat land and looming sky, he laughed and asked, “You see any blue water out here?”

For me, a climate journalist interested in the wreckage of oil and gas drilling, Dunlap is a microcelebrity. For a few years, I have watched videos from him and his partner, lawyer Sarah Stogner, on TikTok. They have gained an avid following by documenting the environmental disasters caused by abandoned wells here in the Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil and gas fields in the world. The two make the blight charming—even funny. One of the first posts that I recall seeing showed Dunlap visiting a sea of wellhead wastewater in the middle of scrubland, wearing that same red boiler suit he donned in January, set over the 2002 hip-hop anthem “Ooh Ahh (My Life Be Like).”