Nigeria accounts for one-twelfth of American oil imports. As we zoom down the highway and clog urban streets with sports utility vehicles, villagers in Adeje, Nigeria, this week are lifting the charred remains of 250 victims, including many children in school uniforms, away from the site of a petroleum pipeline explosion.

As sales of SUVs stay strong, the villagers see no end in sight for these kinds of deaths. People in southern Nigeria, who live among 3,100 miles of pipelines, are often so poor that it is a fact of life that vandals puncture holes in the pipelines and residents fill buckets with oil to sell in an underground economy. Inevitably, whether through a careless cigarette or careful malice, someone drops a light on the spilled oil.

Small fires are so common that local officials no longer attempt to put them out. The large fires defy any attempt to put them out. Two years ago, an explosion in the nearby town of Jesse killed about 1,000 people.

``It is driven by poverty and greed,'' said Doyin Okupe, spokesman for Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo. ``They know the risks. It's difficult for us to (convince people to stop) when people know the risks.''

Of course, if we thought as globally as we do locally, we might consider how we help the process along, driven by wealth and greed. We have found it difficult to stop producing our gas guzzlers, with a White House that put stunningly little pressure on the greedy petroleum companies to put pressure on the greedy, anti-democratic forces that ruled Nigeria in the 1990s. We find it difficult, even though we already know the risks that begin with pollution in the production fields and end in ozone-depleting exhaust.

Doug Scott, Ford's SUV marketing director, recently boasted, ``We had record SUV sales in May, and sales in June were rockin' and rollin'.'' In Adeje, friends and relatives of the dead were rushing in to sneak bodies away from the disaster to avoid the police. ``This really wasn't a surprise,'' villager Austin Obaseki told the Associated Press. ``Our people know the danger of scooping for petrol. But they have to survive.''

Last month a Chevrolet sales manager bragged to The Columbus Dispatch, ``Tahoes, Suburbans, all of them. We're selling them right and left.'' Even without the puncturing of pipelines by vandals, life is grim enough in southern Nigeria, with many reports of farmland and fishing grounds being devastated by negligent leaks by the petroleum companies. Life here has become a slow-motion Bhopal, with the total death toll from all the pipeline explosions of recent years now over half of the 2,000 casualties of the town devastated by the gas leak by Union Carbide.

The devastation, doubled with the corruption of the Nigerian government (if you thought the United States wimped out on connecting human rights and trade in China, you missed Nigeria's execution of human-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa), has left these villagers with few options except puncturing the pipelines. Ndu Ugahamadu, the spokesman for the state-run Nigeria Petroleum Company, said ``The villagers thought it was manna from heaven and were fetching petroleum products like water.''

Just as our SUVs drink gasoline like water. When people scrounge this desperately for petroleum, we Americans seem insufferable in prizing our Expeditions, Navigators, Land Cruisers, LX470s, Grand Cherokees, Tahoes, Yukons, QX4s, Blazers, Silverados and Land Rovers, all of which get between 13 and 16 miles per gallon, overall.

For most Americans, riding an SUV is less about utilizing a vehicle for sports (not with our exploding epidemic of obesity) than about feeling as if you are riding on top of the world.

But it may be time to consider that in our own scooping for petrol, we are taking somebody out. As we ride high and proud, 9, 10 and 12 inches off the ground, our tires may be rolling over an unseen pedestrian. The deaths in Adeje last week, Jesse two years ago and all the smaller disasters in between offer a chance to consider how we get that tiger in our tank.

Fred Schwab, president of Porsche North America, last month told CBS News, ``This SUV market is for real. It's here. It's here to stay.'' The market might be roaring. Our V-6s and V-8s might be snarling. As long as it does, there will be some villagers in Nigeria, taking their buckets to the pipeline. It is there that the tiger in the tank has a fatal bite.

©2000 The Boston Globe

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