Climate action in the age of Trump
Daniel Pinchbeck, author of “How Soon is Now” shares his thoughts on climate change, the era of Trump and the role of individual action.
Q: When did you realize you wanted to speak and write about sustainability?
A: Actually, I prefer the idea of resilient or regenerative systems to sustainability. Nature does more than sustain herself; she flourishes and thrives. I first started thinking about ecological subjects when I was a journalist in my mid-twenties. I wrote a story for Esquire on the decline of the sperm count by 50 percent in the last half-century. They thought it was funny. I discovered it was quite a significant subject. Pesticides and plastics concentrating were impacting our endocrine system. I realized people couldn’t focus on the ecological threats we were facing as a species. They were too distracted and also cynical.
I began to realize there was a huge hole culturally. We are facing an extinction-level event, potentially, yet we can’t face it. Our relationship to the Earth’s ecology should be the most important and the first thing we care about, as indigenous cultures tell us. Newspapers like The New York Times should have a daily ecology section instead of a sports section, reporting on the quality of the water, the local species, the health of the soil and so on. The whole prioritization of our culture is very wrong.
Can you tell me about the journey from journalism to writing about psychedelics and shamanism to your new book, “How Soon is Now,” which is about climate change and human ecology?
I consider my work to be a very coherent and rational undertaking, which may sound funny to some people who might say, “He’s writing about psychedelic drugs. He’s so fringe.” But as I said, I had this experience with ecology and why people couldn’t focus on it, so I began to poll myself and my friends. I realized we were functioning under a nihilistic worldview, where we believed in scientific materialism and no possibility of any form of consciousness outside of this body and this experience.
That led us to not really care about the future. Because if you think that this is it, then why would you care about seven generations from now, as indigenous people do? I began to ask the question, “How do I know that scientific materialism is correct?” which led me to write a book about Shamanism and to visit tribal people. I had so many experiences that confirmed their spiritual understanding, like Carl Jung’s understanding that there is a collective psyche and that there are other dimensions of consciousness and space-time. So, when I wrote the first book, I was answering, “What is really going on?” and I learned that our modern society had missed the big picture.
My second book, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl,” was a logical follow-up. If our worldview and value system is deeply mistaken, and these other cultures know a lot that we don’t know, then we have to take their way of understanding the world a lot more seriously. Indigenous people view this era as very prophetic, as a time of transformation or change. I was really trying to grasp their knowledge systems and how they relate to our understanding of reality. I tried to find the junctures between our beliefs and their knowledge, by studying philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, as well as visionaries like Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung.
The media kind of glommed onto that title and framed it as a doomsday book. I saw how distorted the media can be when they receive new kinds of information and go on the attack instead of trying to receive. It’s almost like an immune system response. So, after all of this, I stopped to ask myself, “If I agree with these indigenous peoples that this is a time of transformation, then what is on the other side of this?”
All of these books have been journalism in a sense, or scholarly, but in my own way. The new book tries to answer the questions: What’s the situation we’re in, what’s the crisis we’re facing and what’s the solution set?
The subtitle of the book is, “From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation,” can you speak to what you mean by that?
I feel like over the last 40 years, many people have gone through a spiritual journey through yoga or meditation or a shamanic experience. But because these things are still on the margins, they can still become just another self-serving thing. This guy Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan lama, refers to this as “spiritual materialism.” People create a great yoga practice, they’ve gotten themselves in shape and they’ve found this great calm and inner peace. Meanwhile, as we can now see, the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we have the worst possible people owning and running everything. Those people who have gone through that voyage of self discovery and healing initiation now need to figure out how to engage with the planetary crisis.
Does the book’s title have any connection to the Smiths album of the same name?
No, it has no connection at all. I wrote a lot of the book here in the East Village. In front of the cafe I worked at, there was a white van that had “How Soon is Now” spray-painted on it. I never even knew about the Smiths album — just some van wisdom.
Have you always felt a responsibility to contribute to something bigger than yourself? You mentioned you’ve gone through phases of nihilism and scientific materialism.
What I wanted to be as a younger person was a novelist or a poet — some sort of creative artist. Both of my parents were artists. My father was a painter. My mother was a writer. I felt that creative self-expression was at the core of what I wanted to do and be. Over time, going through the process of writing these books, it became more about recognizing that I was able to undergo certain intellectual explorations. For whatever reason, other people weren’t able to go as deep on their own, so that was my way of serving society creatively.
“As we launch a regenerative society, we will pursue art, joy and spiritual communion, instead of profit and power.”
Apart from the matrix and simulation we’re living in now, how are you feeling about the era of politics we’re about to step into and the role of individual action?
This guy Jonathan Zapper argued that Trump’s victory is so absurd that we might actually be living in a videogame or a simulation — a lot of people have approached this idea from different angles. I do like his way of thinking about it. If it is a simulation, or some sort of spectacle that other dimensional beings are enjoying, then the way to succeed is to be a story-intensifying character. So, Trump has intensified all the plot lines to a tremendous degree.
Obviously, there are things that individuals can and should do, but ultimately these actions need to be organized and orchestrated into a collective movement. My hope is that social technologies or social networks can somehow facilitate that.
As someone who is described as a futurist, what are some global trends you’re seeing?
I’m definitely seeing a trend to create alternative communities and networks — in some cases physical communities in urban areas or in countries like Costa Rica — and try to model a post-capitalist utopia.
I also feel like Trump’s victory created an electric shock in a lot of people, and I see a lot of people creating activism groups being far more proactive. People who weren’t even thinking about social issues now seem to be deeply engaged. I think there’s a greater awareness that the system is broken, really really broken.
On the negative side, however, I don’t think anyone was aware of the rise of this extreme white, right-wing ideology, which bears a lot of resemblance to neo-nazism. Through Facebook, I’ve been communicating with young men who believe there is a Jewish conspiracy and that we should have concentration camps again. These ideas, which were so incredibly marginal you couldn’t even speak about them, are now finding currency. In a way, America has entered into a collective psychosis, which we’ve done before (think back to the Salem Witch Trials or McCarthyism).
Or Japanese concentration camps.
Exactly. We don’t know how deep it’s going to go. Trump is probably not going to create progressive social policies that are going to tangibly benefit his followers. So, then it’s going to be bread and circuses — how do we divert the public with war or by demonizing groups within this country. It’s a very predictable playbook.
The alternative on the left-wing side doesn’t feel cohesive right now either. Everyone just feels broken and confused.
As we move closer to really understanding the importance of human ecology, can you speak about some of the things you believe need to happen to foster a more symbiotic relationship with the planet?
In the new book I try to look at how we could move back into balance. We can see how fast things are changing now, and some of them won’t be reversible unless there’s some sort of miraculous technology. For instance, we’re probably going to see significant sea-level rise within a century, which could wipe out coastal cities. In order to survive, people are going to have to create new urban environments that are hopefully more like eco-cities.
The three main buckets that I talk about are technology (the technical infrastructure), economics and social structures, and consciousness, which is determined by culture and media, beliefs and ideologies. Those three areas can all evolve to deal with this menace we’ve created.
We need to shift to a renewable energy system. We could do that through global mobilization in a decade or two. We could shift from monoculture farming to regenerative agriculture, which would replenish topsoil. We could also have a global reduction or moratorium on meat eating, so we can return 30 percent of the earth’s surface to forest and reduce the CO2 and methane emissions caused by factory farming.
In terms of industry, there’s this idea that William McDonough put forward that all our industries could positively feed back into one another, like Earth’s ecosystems. Biodegradable and compostable plastics could, for example, have seeds in them. So, instead of them causing environmental damage, a fruit tree blossoms. We should be focusing on shifting our systems to be reusing, recycling and getting companies to build products that way.
Our cellphones, for example, are massive contributors to ecological harm. Some 3 million people have died in West Africa mining virgin conflict minerals. We should be treating these devices as precious.
We’re running low on a lot of precious minerals and metals. Instead of planned obsolescence built into our consumer model, where we’re just junking stuff, we should be building products and systems where all the components can be reused or replaced. That really requires a different economic and political-economic model — ways of exchanging value that support sharing behavior, ecologically responsible behavior. Unfortunately, the money system we have now is based off debt, which basically forces unsustainable growth, because everyone’s trying to make back that debt or that interest on the debt.
Hypothetically, we could have a currency with negative interest, so there’s no value in holding it and people want to share with their community when they have an excess of something. There are a lot of redesign possibilities in the political-economic system that we could implement.
Who have been some of your biggest influences?
One is José Argüelles, who I wrote about in the 2012 book. He died in 2011, and I actually published his last book, “Manifesto for the Noosphere.” He was a big thinker on the Mayan Calendar, and he created this thing called “The Dreamspell,” which was a postmodern version of the Mayan Calendar where everyone has a galactic signature. He was a very big thinker and a lot of his early work is just brilliant. I love the idea of making an art piece out of time.
Another big influence is Buckminster Fuller. He was a design scientist who foresaw the ’60s, and that humanity had a choice between utopia or oblivion. He knew we either had to come together as the human community as a whole, or we wouldn’t survive as a species. A lot of his ideas are part of my new book and thinking.
“Just as a caterpillar in the chrysalis can’t imagine flight, we can’t envision our own future unfolding.”
Do you ever feel like you’re not doing enough, and when that happens what do you do?
Sometimes you have to just not do anything. You have to allow yourself to know that those times are also necessary. My biggest regret, well not really regret, but it does bring me sadness … I started this company Evolver with an old friend. I found that we were bumping heads a lot, so I left and he found another partner.
It’s still going, and the for-profit side has an event space here on 1st Street. They’re still publishing the blog, Reality Sandwich, as well. On the nonprofit side we had 40 or 50 groups, mostly in the U.S., but also globally, which peaked in 2010. By 2012, the organization had reached an exhausted level, and we couldn’t find financial donations to keep it going. So, I walked away. I was just so exhausted. I gave it to someone who wasn’t that great at handling the project, so it sort of fell apart. But the model of having these groups as local nodes of alternative culture was really amazing. The idea of constructing a template for local groups to form feels to me like a good one.
I think one reason people are falling into this alt-right psychosis is because they’re in these isolated towns, and there’s nothing interesting happening. They’re gravitating toward really negative ideologies, because that’s their reaction to the bombardment of the media, which is so destructive.
What’s your biggest motivator to keep working on these issues?
At this point, it’s who I am. I don’t know what else I would do. I’m fascinated to see what’s possible. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to have a significant influence. In fact, a friend of mine just moved to Louisiana, and he’s been working with a Shaman who has a community of over 100 people. The Shaman was excited to see on Facebook that this friend of mine and I were connected, because apparently he was inspired by my first book to pursue the work of shamanism. Through him, I’ve influenced those hundred people, and who knows how many more thousands he’ll influence (or already has).
Russell Brand was also inspired by my work and wrote about me in his book, “Revolution.” The worldview that he’s put forward in his YouTube videos, The Trews, which have reached millions of people — I’ve helped to inform that. You can have a multiplier effect. There’s no reason not to try.
What advice do you have for others?
At this point, I would say to look for those higher leverage points. I would say that everyone intuitively knows their own skills, talents and capacities. Well, not everyone knows, to be honest. But the more you can figure that out … maybe your best skill is that you’re great with plants, so you’ll do rooftop gardening. Maybe you’re an organizer, or maybe you’re a lawyer and can use that skill for better causes. So, you look at yourself with almost a permaculture-like approach. Who are you, what skills have you got and what can you offer? And have a lot of forgiveness for yourself and others, because nobody is perfect.
Is there anything personal you do to reduce your impact?
I reduce my meat consumption. I toggle back and forth between vegetarian and mostly vegetarian. I don’t have a car. I don’t drive. I don’t consume excessively.
What’s your favorite thing to bring with you everywhere you go?
My phone and my laptop. That’s pretty much it.
This is an interview featured in the first issue of The Regeneration Magazine.
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