A reflection and essay

Written by: Olivia Smith

Shortened for length

The other day I was talking to an old friend, and made a comment about how detached we are from the things we buy, especially in New York, where sometimes I get the feeling the whole city is a store. He nodded, laughed a bit, and agreed by saying, “Yeah, things just tend to appear!” I think the most important traces of oil and fossil fuels lie in our ability not to think about how the things we need and want get to us, where it all comes from, and what it took to shape its commodity form. 

Scholars of energy transitions have been keen to point out the impossibility of such transitions without wider political and cultural influence. The transition from water mill dominant industry to widespread, coal-powered steam engines, ushered in new possibilities for organized labor but also new forms of disenfranchisement in the “free market” for labor and expanded frontiers of peripheralized, imperial domination. Similarly, the mid-20th century transition to an oil-dominated energy regime ignited a narrative of “the American Way” (Huber, 29) and the linkage of success with increasing rates of material consumption. Together, these phenomena led to the proliferation of highly individualized lifestyles and political ideologies while bolstering the emerging American project to establish “soft” hegemonic world power. Considering the prevailing importance of oil in a contemporary American context — in addition to the significance that personal narratives hold in the development of social movements — it’s worthwhile to consider oil’s imprints on my own, everyday life and personal history. 

As mundane as it may be, I think the most pronounced relationship I have to oil is through a distinctly American affinity for hyper consumption, and it’s easy to point to cultural values around financial stability and individualism to make this claim. These values have fostered a certain interpretation of freedom that is fixated on ownership; we operate under the implicit right to consume and the explicit right to own property, liberal ideals cemented into the very framework of the United States (Buck-Morss, 832). Contemporary American consumerism is a reflection of this, with the infrastructure of commodity buying lubricated by oil and fossil fuels, from point of extraction through production and distribution. We can express our freedom through choice of what to buy, which I think should be emphasized as distinct from a choice whether to buy or not.

After all, consumption would be a misnomer if we were not using up or otherwise exhausting use of what we purchase. (Commodity, unsurprisingly, has etymological origins in the Latin commoditās meaning convenience or advantage, but interestingly it has a secondary definition referring to timeliness.) If anything, New Yorkers in particular are more aware of what the back end of consumption looks like. The infamous mountains of hot garbage outside of residential buildings are a physical representation of fast consumerism, where the easier commodities are to acquire, the easier they become to throw away. In this sense, American consumer culture is also built on a desire for newness — a remarkable manifestation of idealized social advancement. We want to consume progress.

Ultimately, fossil fuels have managed to reinforce a particular sort of ease, which has generated an infrastructure of expectation in turn. The aspirations of a specific American success may no longer look universally like owning a family home and a car (or several) in the suburbs, but the desire to signal individualized success remains stifling. Fossil fuel’s ubiquity — not even within our cultural expression, but within the means by which we survive in the midst of imposed, zero-sum competition — makes me feel trapped under the simple and obvious fact that to live is to consume. At the level of an individual, this sensation is paralyzing. The popularized, market-based solutions are to price people out of polluting or to simply tell those who listen that they must consume less (read: live less). All of this tension points to collective action, which is not a new-fangled phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but a dynamic and dispersed set of semi-cohesive networks in their own cycles of momentum, success, burnout and systematic state and corporate sabotage. In the face of all of this, I wonder, what makes someone a powerful agent of change when struggles are reduced to the individual, and how can imaginaries be built to transcend the live less narrative?