Boycott Civilization ~ Part 2 Transforming Petroleum Parenting
Cara Judea Alhadeff
December 2022
Zazu with Ari and with Scarlet, 2012. Click the image to enlarge.
I conclude my essay series for Mother Pelican 2022 with a confession. I have reached an impasse, a seemingly untraversable territory bordered by child-rearing landmines—a misstep may suck me into parental-failure quicksand.
I thought I “did the right thing:”
Conscious conception. I was pregnant while I taught prenatal Iyengar yoga—working intimately with my body in conjunction with my pregnant yoga students. Defying the medical establishment at every turn:[1] despite my “advanced” age, (I gave birth to Zazu unassisted at home on my 40th birthday), I chose no prenatal medical interventions (ultrasounds, cervical examines, blood-tests, injections) and no pharmaceuticals in my body, or his—ever. I have raised my uncircumcised[2] son on EcoVillages living communally among other children deeply attuned to their bodies in relation to their local flora and fauna. I chose to sleep and bathe together, practice elimination communication (diaper-free as much as possible), never used disposable-diapers or menstruation products, a pacifier or stroller, but wore Zazu on my body. I have never owned a smart-phone, credit card or a car (we bike, walk, or carpool everywhere).
2014: Zazu at the massive bronze installation in Oakland commemorating 9-11:
Mario Chiodo’s “Remember Them: Champions of Humanity” depicts 25 humanitarians.
For details, see Zazu Dreams, Endnotes 288, 139. Click the image to enlarge.
As I weaned Zazu at four years old, I taught him, and continue now to teach him how to creatively interact with “resources”[3] rather than seeing the world around us through a utilitarian lens. By integrating corporeal, local, and global interrelationships, every almost aspect of our family life transgresses ecocidal, industrialized standard-of-living normalizing infrastructures.
Parenting in the 21st century represents perhaps one of the most contradictory positions of contemporary citizen-subjects: both the possibility for emancipation from and adaptation to convenience culture. As a minority within a minority raising my eleven year-old son, I have intimately experienced intra-cultural impacts of our market-driven mediaocracy’s denial of corporeal, societal, Xandrea and I breastfeeding Ari and Zazu
and global interconnectedness (Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization). Every day I make the conscious choice to deflect how this plutocrat-driven democracy, characterized by conformist laws of conduct implicit in our Electronic Age,[4] may impact Zazu.
Xandrea and I breastfeeding Ari and Zazu. Click the image to enlarge.
Four years have passed since we first built and moved into our performance-based tiny home. More than ever, it is clear that environmental ethics' education leading to action begins at home. It is not about pitting the individual against an infrastructure. By confronting mainstream patterns of consumption, ecological-justice lifestyle practices can become educational models. “Lifestyle activism” (Laura Portwood-Stacer, Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism) is not “50 Things You Can Do To Save The Planet,” it is about integrating profound, sustainable mutually beneficial changes in individual behavior, community action, infrastructural design, corporate accountability, and policy reform. This interdependency shifts our propensity to regard objects and people as disposable. It also shifts our relationship to the everyday violence inherent in consumer industrial-waste culture, which is sustained by infrastructures that use people and non-human nature as “resources.” Veronica Kyle from Faith in Place reframes Audre Lorde's infamous declaration: “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” Kyle claims, “Our new tools must be courage to build relationships.”
I am frequently asked, "How can we sustainably and practically make these changes?" Or, as Alnoor Ladha asks, "How do we create political economies that bring out the best of humanity?"[5]
In answering this question of "How?" we must first be cautious of the precariousness of "solutionism," the modernist tendency to seek one-dimensional, reductive answers to imbricated, messy entanglements. In our urgency to find a "solution" to the meta-crisis (interlocking systemic oppressions), we too often end up replacing one hegemony with another.[6] As the characters in Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate justice book, ask: “What happens when the very solution causes more problems than the original problem it was supposed to fix?”[7]
Whether we live in a repurposed school bus or are wholly committed to S.O.U.L. or living our ecological ethics through supply-chain awareness-in-action or never buying new electronics or growing all of our own food or parenting in a way that refuses to participate in racist and ecologically destructive infrastructures, we must inhabit our constitutive relationality. Radical paradigm shifts that embody ecological civilization (in contrast with industrial civilization) can only take root if we embrace our individual vulnerability and support one another collectively. The individual must function as collective change. These ontological shifts[8] do not mean we lose our autonomy; they do mean our sovereignty is firmly grounded in a rhizomatic tenacity reminiscent of natural-world symbiosis.
Derek Jensen writes, “personal change does not equal social change.” However, Leah Peniman (Soul Fire Farm) reminds us that “every change begins with personal action.” In No Future Without Forgiveness Archbishop Desmond Tutu[9] wrote: “The gift hidden in the challenge of ubuntu is that we don't need to walk the corridors of power to build peace. Each of us can create a more peaceful world. Equitable social transformation requires a deeply intimate connection to eco-social justice.” In 2020, when I received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award (Archbishop Desmond Tutu had been the first recipient, followed by Vandana Shiva), I highlighted the exquisite potential of parents to collaboratively shift our evolutionary trajectory.
When our interdependencies shape both our individual behavior and our infrastructures, we can begin to embody and employ our epigenetic potential.[10] Behavioral epigenetics focus on environmental stimuli that regulate gene activities while “fostering social connections [that] can enable your cells to thrive.” Counter to gene myopia (the dominant scientific dogma that claims our health/well-being is controlled only by genes), engaging “life-enhancing epigenetic plasticity of human development”[11] guides us to take collective action rooted in epigenetic mechanisms that can radically alter our individual bodies, social bodies, and the body of our planet. Epigeneticist, Dr. Bruce Lipton describes a biological foundation for conscious parenting: “The sum of our genetically programmed instincts and the beliefs we learned from our parents collectively form the fundamental programs in the subconscious mind.”[12]
“It takes a whole village to raise a child” is an Igbo and Yoruba (Nigerian) proverb. Although the phrase: “It takes a village...” has become a cliché,[13] I argue that the only way we truly step outside of the norm is to normalize our own radical choices, so they are no longer perceived as marginal and extreme. This normalization requires support infrastructures so we can make the necessary intellectual, spiritual, and logistical risks to create environments that are not complicit with, dependent on, and integral to extractive capitalism.
Parenting is a case-in-point.
Petroleum parenting, what I identify as market-driven choices 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 convenience-culture and accumulationist individualism. Petroleum parenting includes how we gestate (prenatal care), give birth, how we negotiate all medical and pharmaceutical interventions (ranging from circumcision to how or whether or not we vaccinate our babies and children), breastfeeding, transportation, sleeping, bathing, screen-technology-as-surrogate-parent, and how we choose to feed, diaper, entertain, and educate our infants, toddlers, children, and teenagers.
Click the image to enlarge.
These perhaps seemingly benign behaviors, in fact, maintain and inscribe the borders of our totalizing, reductive, designer-birth, industrialized convenience culture. We relinquish our autonomy and deny our interdependency when intricate systems of metropolitan capital dominance colonize both the human body and our earth body; both our individual bodies and our social bodies. The concept of normal becomes violently distorted in the service of capitalist accretions—a direct reflection of how it rejects difference, the unknown, civic responsibility, and care for more-than-human ecosystems. One result of petroleum parenting is that, as individuals and as a society, we are becoming increasingly ill. In his new Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation, Paul Hawken tells us: “In 1965, 4 percent of the U.S. population had a chronic disease; it is now two-thirds. Today, 46 percent of our children have a chronic disease”[14]
My investigation of these normalcies is based on my deeply personal challenges as a parent.
Living my parental environmental ethics as an antidote to petroleum parenting involves not only my practice of decolonizing economies (as described above), it is at the core of the private-public, personal-political interface. And, I must highlight the ever-looming question: What are the costs of committing to this practice alone? I live my environmental-justice values, sometimes at the expense of my intimate relationships and frequently at the expense of self-care. The cost of living in perpetual conflict with dominant societal norms can be devastating to one's own psyche, let alone one's relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. The isolating mother/teacher-child/student dynamic amplifies those tensions even more.
Anyone who has attempted to live against the grain of societal norms, to live as much as possible in a practice of deep inquiry, knows how that can put you at odds with the same people and communities you are trying to encourage to evaluate their role in habituated infrastructures. In 1981 Toni Morrison declared, “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers’ movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.” Biologist Scott Gilbert asserts the criticality of teamwork, the radical impact of symbiotic relationships. Tibetan Shambhala Buddhism asserts that in order to experience the depths of one’s spiritual potentials, one cannot go on a journey alone; one must practice within a community (even if that community consists of simply one other person—reminiscent of Chavruta meaning “fellowship” in Hebrew).
My individual body reflects multiple social bodies with which I daily come in contact (directly/locally and indirectly/globally). In the midst of these aching ethical struggles, I have had to face that none of these commitments will have any lasting validity unless other parents and community members practice an embodiment of their ecological ethics. Additionally, the strain on parent-child relationships that results from not having supporting peers who are raising their children with similar values can be devastating. Teaching and learning alone not only potentially destroys outlier families, but contributes to the destruction of planet earth. In contrast, collective eco-practices, reminiscent of Bayo Akomolafé and his wife, Ije's, “transparenting,” urges deep inquiry and creative-risk taking. This “radical hospitality” (Akomolafé) could be the foundation for new-ancient (Ladha) psycho-social infrastructures. This is what “It takes a village...” could look like; this is what an epigenetic shift could look like.
[3] See Vandana Shiva's description of the concept of resources as a colonialist endeavor, in Wolfgang Sachs, ed. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed, 1991.
[9]Earth House Center (Paloma Pavel, ed. Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009 and Carl Anthony, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. NY: New Village Press, 2017) initiated the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership award as a way to focus attention on "embodied solutions for the most pressing issues of our time."
[10] Epigenetics meaning “on the gene,” was originally defined within the context of stress within various environments that can negatively “impact an individual's physiology so deeply that those biological scars are actually inherited by the next several generations” The Ultimate History of Inheritance: Epigenetics by Richard Francis cited in SEED + SPARK: Using Nature as a Model to Reimagine How we Learn and Live (209). Like Lipton, I use the term to refer to extraordinarily positive transformations that can lead to intergenerational, interspecies, and transcultural emancipation.
[11] “Conscious Parenting: Parents as Genetic Engineers,” The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles, NY: Hay House, 2005: 138.
[13] In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton published It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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