*In Kerogenic Relations, Zoe Todd, Ozayr Saloojee and Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon practice refusal, as understood by AM Kanngiesser in To undo nature; on refusal as return , as giving back, restoring, or returning. The writers re-connect to understandings of kerogen - the natural matter from which petroleum and natural gas is formed - as of the earth, as ancient fossilised beings, as kin. Through listening, attunement, and remembrance, chemical relationships are unfolded and criticism is refocused from the matter’s toxicity towards the damaging extractivist logics of fossil fuel economies.*

In January 2021, AM Kanngieser wrote about an alternate understanding of the concept of refusal, drawing upon a forgotten Latin understanding of the term to mean re-pouring: “An understanding of refusal as return – a (re)turning to an (un)known because nothing ever returned to its self-same or absolute – unsettles narratives of resistance that are framed only in opposition.”⁠1

In this piece, we imagine what it means to bring this concept of refusal as return, re-pouring, and re-connecting to past configurations of space, time, and matter – to consider what it means to reshape relations with the fossilised beings who have been weaponised by white supremacist and colonial geologies and energy systems shaping the earth’s lands, waters, and atmospheres today.⁠2 As state delegates from the Global North who recently convened at COP26 struggle with how to address, with integrity, their oversized role in causing and perpetuating various climate crises across different ecosystems, continents, and indeed all of Earth itself, we propose a re-pouring (re-moulding) and re-configuring of the imperial white supremacist understandings of fossil relations that wrought our current climate reckonings. In this work, we expand upon our shared work on weaponised fossil kin and the Kerosphere, and think with AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd’s concept of environmental kin studies, alongside concepts of other thinkers, to imagine a re-pouring and re-organising of the waxy relations that fuel the contemporary fossil economy and fossil political ecologies towards principles of plural reciprocities, reckonings, and re-articulations across diverse homelands.

What does it mean to write about fossil beings, organic matter, and fossil fuel in this moment of planetary re-organisation? And how does one re-pour these relations into configurations that disrupt white supremacist logics of extraction and possession,⁠3 when contemporary geontologies of white supremacy and colonialism sever life from the supposed not-life of rock, stone, oil, and tailings to generate wealth and power for colonial capitalist regimes?⁠4 In our work, we think through the substance of kerogen, an organic matter whose twentieth-century name derives from the Greek words for “wax birth”,⁠5 constituting the largest concentration of organic matter on Earth.⁠6 Kerogen is the substance from which petroleum and natural gas are formed.⁠7 We situate ourselves within the lands, waters, and atmospheres that inform our thinking and our actions in order to imagine how to re-pour our relations with kerogen beyond the current dominant logics of capital, extraction, empire, and white supremacy.⁠8 In so doing, we imagine what is required of us to re-organise and re-pour ourselves in ways that recognise the obligations we hold towards the ancient life transformed through time, heat, and pressure into the kerogenic beings who catalyse today’s fossil fuel economies and ideologies.

Ozayr: I sit in my office, and look out through the slowly drying, reddening leaves of hydrangea, a prairie grass, and the hard, brittle stalks of a stiff sedum; a garden I worked in with my wife and children this past weekend, stripping it down, getting it ready for snow. I am a few kilometres from Ottawa, a settler-colonial capital with its soils of glacial till, silty clay and peat and alluvium and marl.⁠9 There is sea in this earth, fossilised into silicate moulds of stromatolites and orthocones, trace fossils preserved in rippled limestone. They are buried in neighbourhoods, and beneath the Rideau Canal and its 1830s embankments that brought water from the Pasapkedjinawong and Cataraqui Rivers into a channelised line that now links to the St. Lawrence, and to another “I” sitting in Tiohti:áke, in Mooniyang, 200 short kilometres away. I think of the slow earth and languid waters holding and carrying their biofilms and cyanobacterial layers of stromatolites and orthocones in the canal designed by John By. I type these words on a computer that is filled with rare earths, with its lanthanum (57), cerium (58), neodymium (60), samarium (62), europium (63), terbium (65), and dysprosium (66), aluminium (13), copper (29), carbon (6), oxygen (8), nitrogen (7) and hydrogen (1), made with molecules that might once have been sea creatures and algae and kelp. My computer is filled with slow earth and slow beings, and as I type, the words move east.

Émélie: I sit in a room, in Tiohti:áke, in Mooniyang (Montréal), on the long bank of the Kaniatarowanenneh. Its swollen version, the Champlain Sea, is written on the surfaces of the city, with foraminifera, molluscs, and vertebrates aggregate, congealed in the red brick shale of my apartment. As time travellers and shape-shifters, their existence persists and envelops me when I walk the streets. I can see traces of rugose corals in the sandstone of a window casing, a branched trepostome in the limestone of a cathedral, cephalopod and coral fossil remains in the Tyndall limestone of a large apartment building, and sea snail maclurites and rafinesquina alternata in the Trenton limestone walls of a museum.⁠10 I am indebted to those congealed critters that lived above my head 13,000 to 10,000 years ago, and the countless horizons that they shaped and were shaped by. I think of those partly congealed relations that continue to flow – I can still hear them in the podzolic soil and underground rivers. My gaze is liquid and east, too. I think about being accountable to the fleuve Saint-Laurent, whose bed has witnessed my French ancestors go up the river, which still carries the sediments of broken relationships, colonial violence, land theft, and ecocide. I look to my right, and if I could see, like a prophetess, I would look past Odawa and drying sedum and the afternoon fall light. I would skim the top of Gitchee Gumee and its continental divide, and my gaze would land in an ocean precipitate, a salt, the memory of a Western Interior Seaway. Before the “big geological squeeze”, before the Rocky Mountains grew and the sea receded from the now prairies, Alberta was underwater longer than it has been “dry”. ⁠11

Zoe: I sit on the floor of a small, bright cottage on the western edge of Canada, 4,575 kilometres to Ottawa, 47 hours on the Trans-Canada Highway (if I don’t stop), and 4,771 kilometres to Montréal, 49 hours. There is a shelf of green, green plants in a corner of this cottage, and a cat blinks languidly into the morning sun. There is a hummingbird outside the window, and it flits through Douglas firs, red cedars, and Sitka spruces, towards rivers with Chinook, coho, and chum salmon, steelhead and cutthroat trout. I walk in the forest, digging my feet into loamy earth, on wet-river banks that “run over rocks from the basement of time.”⁠12 I travelled across the ancient sea, through the dives and turns of the highway that cuts through First Nations and Métis prairie homelands, vast grasslands, and numerous oil fields, to get here, a year ago. I decided to uproot my entire life in Ottawa and return “home”, to my Métis family, who live as uninvited guests in Snaw-naw-as and Qualicum First Nation’s territories. Here on the other side of that ancient ocean, I dream at night about prairie fish and coastal cedar. And contemplate my obligations to all the storied landscapes that make up the nation state currently known as “Canada”.

From our triangulated vantage points, we glance at the Western Interior Seaway from its ancient shores, sitting on its geological, oceanic ripples. We feel its magnitude; we travel across watersheds, oblivious to boundaries.⁠13 This ancient ocean and its past animal and plant life beget the rich geologies that fuel Alberta’s petro-economies today. We are in orbit around Alberta – around a confluence of earth, time, water, and pressure. We orbit around the dinosaur bones of the County of Newell, of East Coulee coal, McLeod River gold, Athabasca Lake uranium and Fort McMurray oil and tar-sands. We are in Vancouver Island, in Montréal, in Ottawa. We congeal and are subsumed by earths, waters, kerogenic viscosities, time, pressure. We are re-poured, again, into earths, waters, and relations. To do so is to care, to repair, to love.

In order to achieve our reciprocal obligations to the ancient fossil beings collectively known as kerogen, we have theorised a thing, and a practice, and an episteme, called the Kerosphere⁠14 – a new ontology of relations and relations of relations (this is not a typographical error – these relations are infinite) that has its grammar in the lithic and lacustrine, and is indebted to Indigenous worlding and legal orders. The Kerosphere seeks to unsettle and refuse petrocolonial epistemologies and their quick, fast, dirty economies, their broken relations and broken earths, their extractive, greedy labours, and their oh-so-sorry-not-sorry weaponisation of earth, water, time, and kin. AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd’s concept of environmental kin study, and the plural and dynamic scholars they think with to advance this concept, are the binding, loving agents that are re-poured and refused into kerogenic relations. Environmental Kin study emphasises attunement, listening, and the need for “a different sensibility of, and in, scale and place,” of the centring of “Indigenous cosmologies and knowledges of Land and Country,” and of the urgency to cite “place and nonhuman beings as sentient and agential forces that have the capacity to consent to or refuse collaboration with us.”⁠15 This attunement, listening, and honouring of relations from planetary to microbial scales and times necessitates a re-consideration of how we see ourselves (the three “Is” of this piece and the “we” that results) as part of the world – the Kerosphere. When writing that “we are not outside of science, but are of science,”⁠16 Katherine McKittrick reminds us that this reinvention of relations is urgent. How might we re-pour and refuse into a generous, loving, multi-scalar (from the microbe to the galaxy), multi-temporal (deep time to now- and future-)time? What does it mean for us to re-constitute an ethic of care, repair, kin? We seek to enter the Kerosphere, which was born out of our Kerospheric thinking of Alberta, and its oily, watery, earthy pasts, presents, and (im)possible futures.

So how do we attune to the Kerosphere and to the kerogenic relations that shape it? And how do we do so in such a way that enables care-full attention to the specific, plural, and dynamic relations that inform each landscape, each homeland, each river, lake, and coast? In settler life in Canada, oil and gas produced from kerogen flow largely out of sight and out of mind – transported through pipelines; refined in massive facilities on the edges of cities like Edmonton, Burnaby, Moose Jaw, or St. John’s; rattled across the Rockies or along open prairie stretches in tanker trains; and loaded onto tanker ships at ports on the east and west coasts of the country. For those of us not working directly with oil and gas at its sites of capture, extraction, or processing in Canada, we are only reminded of these kerogenic presences when they seep, ooze, flood, and exceed the containment of the maze of infrastructure built to move them across stolen Indigenous homelands across Canada, the USA, Mexico, and other parts of North America. One of the only times that settler colonisers listen to kerogenic relations, frankly, is when Indigenous nations stand up in solidarity with the earth, with water, and with atmospheres to oppose the weaponisation of ancient fossil beings against lands, waters, and atmospheres to enrich colonial capitalist treasuries and shareholders. And this “listening” that states and corporations employ, in such cases, is asserted through injunctions, incarceration, and repudiation of Indigenous sovereignty. ⁠17 We contend that settler colonisers must learn to listen differently to kerogenic relations and the Kerosphere, and to sovereign Indigenous peoples and other communities displaced and dispossessed by white supremacy and empire. These new registers of listening, informed by AM Kanngieser’s work on climates of listening and geographies of listening,⁠18 invite us to re-pour new, more integral and ethical reciprocal obligations with the orders of existence that are currently mined, fracked, cracked, refined, and burned in the name of white supremacist imperial capital.

To attune to kerogenic relations and the Kerosphere in ways that affirm rather than deny their complex agencies, to listen in new registers to what these weaponised ancient beings are communicating to us as they escape and exceed the infrastructure designed to expedite them across Indigenous homelands, we must stop and consider their presence around us at any point in time.⁠19 And to consider how kerogenic beings got from their resting places deep below our feet, beneath ancient oceans in so-called Alberta or within the delicate layers of shale that rest amidst the Fundy Basin,⁠20 to trains, lines, ships that criss-cross unceded lands across the continent. For some in Canada, oil is itself cast as harmful, as waste, as aggressor – the harm it causes to landscapes, ecologies, and homelands may be framed as intentional on the part of the oil or gas itself. In fact, the pre-eminent environmental defence organisation Honor the Earth urges us to “love water, not oil”.⁠21 While it is important not to reify or normalise the colonial capture and weaponisation of kerogenic beings, it is important to remember that oil and gas, as kerogenic relations, are themselves of the earth. It is not the oil or gas themselves who are innately harmful, but the systems of colonial capital, white supremacy, extraction, and violation of Indigenous sovereignties that remove these ancient beings from the earth and turn them against lands, waters, atmospheres, and all relations today that are the cause of harm. We contend that oil and gas, formed from kerogenic beings deposited and transformed over great stretches of time, are themselves weaponised ancient kin co-opted into the colonial capitalist relations of pipes, lines, canals, trains, ships, and refineries today. We could think, instead, about the “alterlives” of kerogenic relations, after Michelle Murphy.⁠22 And we could think, too, in the registers of “restorative kinships” that Rebecca Carter mobilises in her work on community-making in the aftermaths of environmental and white supremacist colonial catastrophe in post-Katrina New Orleans.⁠23 How will we want to be treated by future ancestors, by the future beings on the planet who work with our remains, however transformed by heat, pressure, and time, in the planet’s long-future configurations? If we cannot consent to our mining or removal from the earth in that future world, then we hope that future existences will listen and attune to our pasts to “ask what scientific formula we discovered”, as Leroy Little Bear urges us to do with other ancient beings, like fish.⁠24

We contend, then, that we must listen and attune to oil and gas in order to refuse (re-pour, re-configure) the weaponisation of our ancient relatives against life today. In Canada, colonial society works hard to obscure and erase the presence of these weaponised ancient fossil kin from the consciousness of settlers in the architectures of colonial imperial extractive nation states. Siting their extraction, refinement, transportation, and waste sites largely in Indigenous and Black communities and lands, the state counts on white settler Canada ignoring the presence and operations of systems that mobilise ancient fossil kin across the country. These architectures are designed to obscure the fact that the very economies and politics of Canada are built on the constant movement of kerogenic beings (oil and gas) in and through buried pipelines, ageing transfer stations, and corroding underwater pipes. In order to shift the logics through which these beings are weaponised against lands, waters, atmospheres, and peoples, we attempt several modes of listening and attunement in the next section.

Heavy crude oil is a thick, viscous liquid with a high molecular weight and whose hydrocarbon composition resists flow. Western science indicates that oil would have been “degraded” by bacteria, erosion, and water,⁠25 while the “upgrade” of oil through steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) reduces the tar sands’ viscosity by injecting high-pressure steam into the ground. This breaking down of the viscosity, as a technique of acceleration, of translation into settler-colonial time, is both symbolically and materially a testimony of petrocolonial violence. The stubborn viscosity of kerogenic relations refuses the politics of acceleration, but it also refuses a world of stillness and fixation, inertness,⁠26 stagnation – rejecting the settling that severs relations. When considering the “we” of “being planetary”, Achille Mbembe calls for an ethics of disappropriation​​ to embrace that which is unexpected. He calls it a paradoxical figure of disappropriation where forging “links necessitates the renunciation, the suspension of violence, for violence is a form of inert production that dooms the being to exhaustion, whereas disappropriation opens the way to regeneration.”⁠27 Kerogenic relations require us to step on unstable, oozy grounds, slowly, carefully, anchoring oneself. Kerogenic relations, as slimy matter-ing, embrace the uncertain, the imprecise, the unmeasurable, and remind us of what cannot be known, translated, and held.

To attune to such relations in so-called Canada requires the capacity to pause and consider where they rest within the geographies we occupy. To familiarise oneself, if not already familiar, with the sites of kerogenic extraction, mining, fracking, processing, transportation, and transfer, cutting across Indigenous homelands throughout Canada. To insistently bring these kerogenic relations into a firm, visceral presence in conversations in sites of colonial power, like Parliament, like the financial centre of Bay Street, like the corporate towers that rise high above Montréal, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, or Halifax. To challenge the white colonial settler nation state’s reliance on trying to downplay the dangers of ageing oil and gas infrastructure, the normalisation of train cars hurtling across sensitive river valleys or along the edges of prairie lakes. To study the histories of countless spills and accidents that criss-cross numerous fish-bearing streams, wetlands, and lakes. ⁠28 To think with and through the chemical properties of crude, natural gas, sour gas, and proprietary fracking solutions. To pore over maps of geological formations, over the corporate structures of the companies that control the extraction and export of oil and gas. To think with scholars who invite us to attune to the extraction of other resources, like bauxite, and their entanglements with environmental racism exacted against African diasporic communities in the Caribbean and First Nations in British Columbia, as Nadine King Chambers does.⁠29

Zoe: My first remembered engagement with kerogenic relations was, paradoxically, at an Earth Day convention in Edmonton in the early 1990s. Edmonton is, historically, the blue-collar home to many of the folks who worked in previous iterations of the oil and gas booms that shaped Alberta from the late 1940s onwards. Alberta is the major producer of oil and gas in Canada: prairie oil sands hold 97 percent of the proven oil reserves in Canada, and 98 percent of Canada’s oil exports go to the USA.⁠30 My mom, working as the first environment reporter for CBC Edmonton, brought my sister and me along to an Earth Day convention in the massive Northlands AgriCom in north Edmonton. Among the myriad posters and dioramas set up around the convention hall, there was a table with poster-board information about oil and a small clear jar labelled “oil”. I held this jar in my hands, and it was the first time I saw the viscous black substance that Alberta was pulling out of the earth with pump jacks and derricks. But kerogenic relations have shaped me for much longer than I can even remember. A few years later, my mom revealed that she had spent much of the last trimester of her pregnancy with me riddled with migraines, as a sour gas well blowout in Lodgepole, Alberta, spewed toxic hydrogen sulphide sour gas into the atmosphere.⁠31 I was shaped by these kerogenic relations in utero, and I carry obligations to help mitigate their weaponisation against all orders of existence here on the planet by colonial capitalist imperial white supremacist political-economic relations. When I attune to these relations, I feel back into my childhood and consider how every cell in my body is shaped by Alberta’s extraction, refinement, and transportation of kerogenic beings from ancient deposits beneath our feet. And this guides me.

Ozayr: My first memory of oil is the smell of it in the shop floor of my father’s garage in Eldorado Park, in-between Lenasia – where we lived – and Soweto, to the north, close to the R553 that would bring us into Johannesburg when visiting family in Fordsburg, or driving through to Nelspruit or White River. Those names are all different now – Mpumalanga, Mbombela, Mhloppemanzi – but still, I carry me with them. My first memories of oil are tied to the red and yellow earth of Johannesburg and the then Transvaal, now Gauteng. Oil is the smell in my uncle’s warehouse, filled with bric-a-brac, that I would wander through on Sundays when my father’s family would get together – all the cousins and aunts and uncles, in the low orange South African light. Oil conjures up my uncle and his tinkerer’s hands, my grandmother and her two braids, my aunts and their enormous hearts, my cousin’s shop, running through the old, rusty cars in the yard. It is the smell of gasoline, as we stop to fill up at a petrol station on our way through Johannesburg, a city then mostly off-limits to Black and Brown people – except for particular spaces and places: Solly’s Corner, the Oriental Plaza, Bree Street, Constitution Hill, my family, my family, my family. Oil on the floor of my father’s shop raises ghosts of a home I miss every day. Oil was the long drive to the Lowveld, where my mother’s family lived near the Crocodile and White Rivers, the transition from the gold reef of Johannesburg’s scarp, with its dry, dusty air and burst of jacaranda spring purple, to the humid, green hills and valleys of mangos and lychees. The red and yellow earth of eGoli gives way to the green compounds where some of my family settled, after long diesel boats from India and then Bombay/Mumbai, belching black smoke over the Arabian Sea, before the Durban Port and the trek upcountry. These kerogenic relations are complex, layered, and fraught – it is oil and labour, extraction and pass-books, exclusion and apartheid, and it is also family, and possibility, plural geographies, places and times, and a desire for the red and yellow earth of a home that is always with me,⁠32 even in the garden I prepare for the coming Canadian snow.

Émélie: My first recollection of kerosene is of my grandfather filling the gas tank of the boat before going fishing in the Laurentians. My grandfather was a bush pilot. He had buried a tank by the lake in which he stored kerosene, a fuel more “suitable” for his floatplane. I remember the pungent smell​ of kerosene filling my nostrils (memories are so odorous); I recall the oil patches floating on the surface of the water – drops that fell from the messy fuel pouring process; the shimmering colours of the oil, a phosphorescent rainbow of green, yellow, orange, pink, purple and red, contrasted against the lake’s dark blue. The liquid would slowly drift away from the boat, swirling and expanding with the gentle ripples of the water’s smooth surface. As a child, I wondered about the contradictory act of contaminating the lake while fishing, swimming, and drinking in its waters. I still wonder about those contradictions and how they form our material relations to waters and lands. I wonder about the contradictions of how the access and enjoyment of so-called nature and wilderness in Canada often mean combusting oil, operating loud machines whose resonance is made through thousands of internal explosions. In this colonial cacophony,⁠33 I think about how I have benefitted from the illegitimate occupation of Indigenous lands. I think about how histories of suffering and hardship of French Canadians and the erasure of Indigenous presence in those same narratives that I grew up with blinded me from my complicity in settler colonialism and white supremacy. Thinking about my grandparents is reckoning with home-making and ocean-deep love, but also with settler fictions of property, extraction, entitlement, land theft, erasure, and environmental destruction. My inheritance is this entanglement among settler-colonial relations. I sit in those contradictions; they drive so many questions. Beyond the water’s surface, I attend to the rainbow trout’s colourful glimmering scales.⁠34

Kerogenic relations are overwhelming. They are a deluge. They flood and overtop the banks of canals, watercourses, dikes, and embankments. Kerogenic relations are the Mississippi without the Army Corps of Engineers, without Old River Control and the Morganza Spillway; they are the Tiber without Giuseppe Garibaldi’s embankments, without the drizzagni (“straightenings”) of the Fiume Tevere. Kerogenic relations are the Athabasca and Peace River watersheds without the threats from regional tailings ponds, more than ​​458,000 provincial drilling wells, ​​draglines, bucket-wheel excavators that extend into a grid of pipelines, processing plants, refineries, bitumen upgraders, oil-tanker routes, and headquarters. Kerogenic relations are dizzyingly entangled, curved, thick and thin, but above all, Kerogenic relations are a loop of AM Kanngieser’s pouring⁠35 – they are a re-pouring, over and over and over and over (this is also not a typographical error).

The Kerosphere suspends an idea of closure and refuses the notion of a petrocolonial infrastructure. The infrastructure of the Kerosphere is how we carry care – and not its neoliberal, settler-colonial platitudes of repair, of well-being seminars and workshops, of equity, diversity and inclusivity training, of care-gentrification – as a reparative act, a constant act, a slow act that seeps, “non-perfectly” and “non-ideally”, into a sludgy, thick, oozing holding-together – a no-choice-but-to-be-togetherness. It rolls out like an Argentia, Newfoundland or Point Reyes, California fog⁠36 – 100 percent humidity, air mixed with water, heat with cold, atmosphere with elevation. The fog slows you down. You can’t see perfectly, or ideally. You wait. You listen. Your senses tune in different ways, in different measures, in different rhythms, and are immersed into “the difficult intersections of this numerous family” of sense and feelings⁠37 – into intersections that must always be constructed. The Kerosphere and its sticky, viscous relations in Indigenous homelands across Alberta can be deeply informed by Tiffany Lethabo King’s concept of the Black Shoals, as colonial capitalist kerogenic extraction is weaponised against Black and Indigenous communities through genocide and enslavement across vast geographies in the name of white supremacist colonial capitalism and empire.⁠38 King reminds us: “Black thought, Black study, Black aesthetics, and Black expression function as a shoal that interrupts the course and momentum of the flow of critical theories about genocide, slavery, and humanity in the Western Hemisphere.”⁠39 Through our work in Indigenous homelands across Canada, we are interested in affirming plural forms of worlding and being that interrupt white supremacist colonial capitalism and in building reciprocal, respectful collective relations that refuse imperialism, extraction, and death.

Kēros comes from Greek and means wax or paraffin, and we are reminded of Man and of Daedalic hubris, of Icarus and all the execs that flew too close to the sun. Kerogenic relations are waxy, lithic and lacustrine, “formed through protocols of attention, listening, and noticing, at many interconnected scales.”⁠40 They are multi-temporal, deep, heterogenous, oozy times. They seep, coming up and out of solution. Kerosene’s flashpoint is 38 degrees Celsius versus gasoline, which has a flashpoint as low as -40 degrees Celsius. Kerogenic relations are slow and less volatile than the “upgraded” logics of petrocolonial, white supremacist and capitalist structure. As loving attunement, they infiltrate and work between bonds to strengthen and hold. Not centred on Man, waxy, oily kerogenic relations work towards plural lifeworlds and sovereignties. They are binding, flexible, liberating, and also precarious. And we attune to our dynamic obligations to them in an effort to imagine a different way to organise politics, economies, societies in the lands Canada claims in this late stage of colonial capitalist white supremacist climate catastrophe.

The Kerosphere and its relations are viscous, slow, oozing. Kerogenic relations are tender. They are plural and shaped by each distinct geography, homeland, and watershed they occupy. They are soft, and they give (from the French tendre) but don’t take (from the French prendre); they exchange but don’t steal. Kerogenic relations are structures of form and relationality that rewrite the ontologies of western science, chemistry, politics, and their relations that grift and hustle, that centre the human (always the human). Kerogenic relations are a constant re-pouring of relations into each other, an efflorescence of loving relations, mercy, tenderness, softness. Kerogenic relation resists deformation. They are high friction relations and need more force to get them moving. They are not inviscid fluids, which western science calls “perfect” and “ideal”, and that petrocolonial and capitalist imaginations are analogues of: “matter”. These imaginations are oblivious to resistance and refusal, boundaries, times, geographies, earths and waters. Kerogenic relations love the shit out of the world.