Petroleum parenting, what I identify as the decisions parents make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices, reifies the status-quo and our myopic capacity to engage beyond our shame-based, accumulationist individualism. In our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-world, our collusion with corporate forms of domination is infinite. Interlocking mechanisms among such infrastructures enable both complicity (perpetuating apathy and its concomitant loss of agency) and emancipation (allowing creativity and connectivity to flourish). Krishnamurti’s warning, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” characterizes both our global crisis and our potential as parents to intervene in convenience-culture.
I am proposing a collective eco-action model: S.O.U.L. Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local Animating our embodied energy through S.O.U.L. consciousness and action allows us to shift our relationship to industrial-capitalism, consumer-waste culture’s everyday violence—addictive overconsumption/ entitlement and waste. S.O.U.L. holds each of us accountable to how we define and fulfill our “needs.” When we recognize each object and the space we create by combining them as sacred, we deliberately commit to local and global nonviolence. Finishing off our gathering with what it means to live and teach embodied energy (transparent supply chains, true cost, etc.): We must challenge consumer complicity that sustains the status quo through environmental racism in the United States and green colonialism throughout the Global South. Only then are we prepared to disentangle the interrelational roots of geopolitical, ecological, spiritual, and health crises. “We”/“our” refers to those who (perhaps unwittingly) participate in dominator civilizations characterized by a consumption-based middle-class standard of living that depends on toxic systems and the exploited labor of others. This radical awareness accounts for embodied energy—defined as local and global industrial and digital production (extractive mining, agribusiness, industrial dams, physical and economic wage slavery, data mining), consumption (advertising and the construction of desire), and disposal (greenhouse gases, toxicity in our water and soil, and electronic-waste).
