Environmental Movement of the Mind

Fake news and post-truth yarns are muddling our minds and swaying elections . . . Algorithms, rather than serving as tools of our betterment, are slyly wielded to provoke our basest reactionary instincts . . . Ignorance paraded as wisdom, prejudice as justice, and schizoid fantasy as grounded reality . . . This is midnight in the century, and mental dysfunction is the new norm for just about every one of us.

In a strange twist of fate, it now looks as though our planet’s tipping point will come, not when the heat waves become unbearable and our ecosystems collapse, but when the noise in our heads becomes unbearable and our psycho-systems collapse . . . When mood disorders, anxiety attacks, depression, and psychosis reach such a pitch that clear thought becomes impossible. It is then that we will descend, not into apocalyptic anarchy, as so many have suggested, but into apathy and indifference. We simply will no longer care.

A similar crisis confronted us fifty years ago, when Rachel Carson raised the spectre of air unfit to breathe and water to drink, with birds ceasing to sing in springtime. And soon after the publication of Silent Spring, we saw rise a movement the likes of which the world had never seen. Suddenly, vast numbers of people across the world were proudly calling themselves “environmentalists” — and the rest, for what it’s worth, is history.

Now, as we face the fracture of nations and the mental breakdown of the human race, we are witnessing the birth of another great movement: An Environmental Movement of the Mind.