Oil People: You are what you eat

This is a set I'm calling "Oil People: You Are What You Eat." It's made from a lovely matte metallic glass, and expresses the fact that most of us are actually made of oil.

No, really - we are. You see, there used to be a whole lot fewer of us on the Earth. Then along came the discovery of cheap and relatively abundant energy in the form of fossil fuels, mainly oil. The unearned largess left to us by the captured solar energy of the past enabled us to create huge and complicated machines to do a lot of the work of survival for us, and mandated huge and complicated social and economic systems to support those machines. On top of that, we use oil and natural gas to mine phosphates and to create nitrogen for fertilizers that enabled us to artificially sustain much-heavier-than-natural growth of the plants we and our food animals eat, so another consequence of all this cheap energy was a suddenly much greater supply of agricultural products (especially food) which has enabled our human populations to literally explode.

Now there are a whole lot more humans alive than there has ever been in all of our planet's history. However, most of us wouldn't even be here without the cheap energy oil has provided - this is why I chose a glass for this set that has a lot of the visual characteristics of an oil slick. But the problem is, oil is a finite resource. Some day soon we will have to fully face that fact, and our population will once again drop back to sustainable levels that reflect what our planet is able to carry without "cheating" by using up fossil energy from the way far back past.


Unfortunately, our species has shown a lot of signs that we will likely choose to fight and to kill for the last energy effective drops of this limited resource. And that is the reason why the all of the focals in this set are skulls. If we had only listened to what the earth was trying to tell us about limits before we reached this point, we could have avoided the wars and death that are likely to follow. But, we didn't. People are just not very good at planning ahead, especially when it involves sacrifice. And what is to come will be all the more tragic for our species because of that.