Feedback on “Fossil Fragility”

Yogi Hendlin

The One Thing

This essay is missing a main idea, which makes it hard to understand what you’re arguing for and against.

• Narrow the scope of this essay. Here are the topics that came up for me as I read:
• Cultural view on fossil fuels
• Differences in ecological policy between California and the Netherlands
• Self-reflection about how you relate to people who support fossil fuels
• Empathizing with the sentiments of fossil-fuel supporters
• White fragility and racism
• An anti-violence/anti-oppression message with a reference to Schindler’s List
• The influence of media and advertising
• This whole essay could be about fossil-fuel-industry apologists. Who are they? What do they care about? Why are they wrong? How do you communicate with or oppose them? How can you collaborate with them.
• This is the idea that recurs throughout the essay, but I don’t understand what you mean by “fossil fuel apologists” by the end. Instead, you could make this whole essay about defining that term and exploring the implications of this phenomenon.
• Reverse outline:
• Introduce your work and the idea of the fossil fuel apologist
• Define that person — the people you oppose
• Relate to those people, explaining how they are protecting their families and economies and their way of life
• Question the very basis of their perspective, with the claim that fossil fuels just fund our vices (the “glorious excess”: fast cars, fast food, and the delights of Las Vegas).

Feedback

• Right from the jump there are many concepts, terms, and metaphors being thrown at me all at once. It makes it hard to follow and hard to understand your meaning.

For some years now, the principle job I’ve had at my university, aside from the teaching and research, has been triaging the attachments of fossil fuels apologists.

Of course, many scholars have proposed a shift from industrial civilization to ecological civilization, but often because the pre-framing of apologists hinges upon the industrial civilization-barbarism dichotomy, any alternative is perceived as an identity threat. Because of this trauma response, I have spent the last half decade as a hospice priest for the fossil fuel industry.

1. Everything in red above is an unfamiliar term. It’s not a bad thing to introduce new terms or clever phrases, but you need to define them and relate them to one another. Reading this, I’m completely lost, or, at the very best, I’m left guessing at what you mean to say.
• This is interesting, but it reads like a tangent. If you want to leave it in, make this self-reflection move of a through-line throughout your essay:

The process I’ve had to undergo in the midst of working with soft climate-change denialists is a spiritual battle of looking at my own shit – my own frustrations, resentments, angers, and fears. It has really challenged my own behavioral patterns so that I become less reactive, in order to not trigger the reactiveness of armed-to-the-teeth defense and trigger mechanisms of others. It has been a spiritual practice to not react to the snowflake fossil fuel defenders.

• This is a very interesting and clear point, and it helps me understand your perspective. Bring this up in the essay, and use it to frame your entire piece:

I’ve come to believe that those defending fossil fuels are defending their families, friends, acquaintances who have worked in and benefited from fossil fuels, and most of all their lifestyles of comfort.

1. To accomplish this, you can compress and cut a lot of your intro (the first 5 or 6 paragraphs). It is meandering and doesn’t establish the one main idea for you’re going to explore in your essay. This paragraph is the first time I understand the claim you’re making, and I’m interested to read on to hear you support it.
• This is my favorite part of the entire essay. It’s clever, authoritative, spiky, and playful. It serves your argument, because it gets your reader to question why we need cheap energy in the first place. To fuel our vices? This feels like the meat of your argument. I’d love to see you focus on this and expand on it.

After all, if you enjoy fast cars, fast food, and the delights of Las Vegas, how could you not also admire the corporations that made all of this glorious excess possible?! There’s a strong loyalty to fossil fuel interests because they have fed us the supernormal stimuli we crave and depend on. Take away oil, coal, and gas, and that might mean that we would be confronted with the loss of our own vices, now turned into virtues through a manicured commercial culture.