BKDN BKDN Press

Bloom’s project is therefore part of a growing trend in environmental thought that seeks to ground environmental action in a commitment to contemplative practice, a discipline of attention to the natural world, even as we are witnessing its degradation. It is not just a way of thinking about things, but a shift to our way of perceiving that must be consciously and painstakingly cultivated.

Samantha Clark, review of “Petro-Subjectivity” for EcoArtScotland

---

---

---

Stories from the Petroleum Space-Time Continuum: Two Ponds

This publication investigates the degrees to which the use of fossil fuel has fundamentally structured the built environment and how humans experience space and time. Disentangling these conditions takes generations; rewilding is a necessary skill for everyone to develop.

I use the term petro-subjectivity to describe the impacts of fossil fuel use on your sense of self and the world around you. I investigate how petro-subjectivity forms. This helps me think through the long term culture people need to shift from experiencing the world through fossil fuel induced relationships. Petro-subjectivity comes from somewhere and some-process. You can locate and analyze numerous examples in daily situations. Petro-subjectivity emerges from fossil-fuel-induced spatial and temporal relationships that shape the metaphorical structures governing your neural pathways. These conditions often prevent you from having a directly embodied sense of where you are. The term I have been using for this place where petro-subjectivity is produced is the Petroleum Space-Time Continuum (PSTC). It is not an actual place, rather a set of interrelations that filter reality when you are experiencing any given place. They repeat everywhere given the systemic use of fossil fuels. They are so powerful that they are present even when you are not using oil or experiencing conditions directly produced by fossil fuel.

From the introduction

---

Reclaim Your Sh*t! Water. Beyond Value.

Why do we defecate in drinking water? Sarah Poppy Jackson has pondered this question for many years.

Have you ever considered that we use drinking water in our toilets? In these times of climate breakdown, ecological degradation, social stress, and resource scarcity, isn’t it time this changed?

Taking a journey through the history of the flush, to our changing relationship with water, and on to bold suggestions for change, Reclaim Your Sh*t is starting the conversation we need to have, but convention holds us from having.

Jackson is going to have you sitting on the toilet wanting to finish this pipe-blocker of a book.

---

Breakdown Workbook #2:
Sonic Meditations: Investigating Petro-Subjectivity

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO PRACTICE A POST-OIL SENSE OF SELF AND CULTURE?

This publication provides techniques to investigate your petro-subjectivity. Realizing the degree to which your life—your decisions, sense of self, cultural beliefs, the ways your neural pathways work—relies on petroleum is the only way to understand how it is possible to make fundamental shifts away from petroculture. It is impossible to think and dream the future, and ways to deal with climate breakdown, without first confronting, and mitigating this primary way in which you perceive the world and embody responses to it. You will not be able to get rid of petro-subjectivity in your lifetime—it so thoroughly permeates every aspect of who you are—but you can help lay the ground work for future generations to achieve this.

---

HEAL LAND

I do land restoration work. I write about it. Both processes take a long time. The dominant culture’s land use in NE Indiana is destructive. I am convinced that any human land use here degrades the land. It takes us ever further towards ecological breakdown.

---

Sonic Meditations for Immersive Ecological Entanglement

This publication explores human connections to the world. It offers you ways to explore your capacities for empathizing with other-than-human species and landscapes. The booklet presents sonic meditations and forest bathing exercises to help you be immersed in the ecological entanglements that surround you.

---

Breakdown Workbook #3:
Sonic Meditations:
Immersive Ecological Entanglement, Volume 1

The third BKDN BKDN workbook is for facilitating Deep Listening sonic meditations with others to individually and collectively experience immersive ecological entanglement. The publication is a tool for sinking in to relationships you have with the world around you, helping to bypass the ways you have been taught to limit or ignore the subtleties of the more-than-human world you are immersed in. This workbook has been developed over the past decade through many experiments in Deep Listening sessions that I have facilitated. Since first being exposed to Deep Listening, I was interested in how it could create empathy with the environment that I was not capable of before.

---

Deep Mapping

This book develops and encourages you to inhabit — through narratives or spacialized experiences — Deep Maps of places you want to understand in a robust, inclusive, and expansive ways, which is not possible with traditional mapping. Maps tell you more about yourself, the narratives you construct, and the values you explicitly or implicitly hold, than they do about an actual place. To get an understanding of an actual place, one must inhabit its multiple overlapping contradictory stories simultaneously. To this end, we began to construct Deep Maps. We were inspired by the American author, William Least Heat-Moon’s book PrairyErth, and the way that he envisions a written or narrative Deep Map of a place.

*This book was commissioned by Scottish Sculpture Workshop as a part of Frontiers In Retreat.

---

Breakdown Workbook#1: Questions for Evaluating Art that Concerns Itself with Ecology

This is the first in a series of workbooks published by Breakdown Break Down Press. The intention of the series is to help focus discussions and efforts to shift the ways in which we talk about and practice ecological awareness in art and everyday situations.

---

Petro-Subjectivity: De-Industrializing Our Sense of Self

This is the first publication by Breakdown Break Down Press. It is a critical reflection on the ways in which oil shapes your experiences of the world and what you can do to start to build up the cultural responses and practices that will help civilization undo this condition.