Against moral purity, toward right relationship

The concept of purity, or moral perfection, upholds and maintains white supremacy. Other writers have laid out the genealogy of this bad idea, but suffice it to say here that "post-petroleum" is intended as a value-neutral descriptor of the cataclysmic reshuffling of the global political-economic order that we'd have to be stupid not to see coming. Already, supply chain disruptions and ping-ponging prices make even insulated American life chaotic.

The point of making art without petroleum products is not to rehearse the dumbest forms of witch-hunting Puritanism by imagining that goodness and safety are obtainable if all the Bad (ie, plastics) can be cast out. This is the worst kind of magical thinking and it leads otherwise reasonable, well-intentioned people into dramatic displays of moral narcissism and other strategically useless, time-wasting ego projects.

Far more necessary is an approach to the challenges ahead with emotional sobriety and clear-thinking creativity. The fact is, I still have 20+ years of interesting and useful materials. Sequins! Glues! Paints! I am choosing to use what I already have with gratitude and grief that we will not have such astonishingly useful things so easily and cheaply again. What we collectively produced in ignorance is no cause for shame, but now we have to live, create, and consume differently.

This is to say: my pieces are not magical amulets whose purity from petroleum transforms either you or me into some higher caste of human who is free of moral anxiety and impervious to any imaginable criticism. My pieces are meant to be talismans of a clear-eyed spirituality and emotional litheness that are capable of holding both grief and hope. See the difference? The pursuit of moral purity is about fear. Soulful art is about courage.

If an item is, in its composition, 100% petroleum free, I will say so in its description, because it probably took a ridiculous amount of time and experimentation to find a way to do that. This research is a worthy investment from a strategic standpoint into re-localizing the sourcing of common, useful materials. But transport and shipping, unless you are buying a piece at a local store that I happened to deliver to by bicycle, is still petroleum-based. Even in that case, bike tires are still made of petroleum, and then of course I'm still pedaling on asphalt roads. You see how navel-gazing and time-sucking the obsession with purity becomes, and how quickly? I'm not interested in purity. I am interested in developing processes and products that will never be interesting to investors, won't scale, and therefore won't get commercially researched or funded. They will be the methods you ask me for help with when the internet finally goes down and no drone is delivering polyurethane to your porch. And they are methods that by their nature have to work with this bioregion and what is sustainably harvestable, processable, and usable here. This dynamic localism is what I mean by "right relationship."