Pinchbeck interviews David Sauvage, co-founder of Occupy.com, for Dazed & Confused. Sauvage argues that Occupy is only a temporary name for a global awakening that began with a Tunisian self-immolation, and that alternative media have a moral obligation to abandon superficiality. He says leading Exxon Mobil or Bank of America should carry public shame.
An interview for Dazed & Confused with Richard Hoagland, the former CBS News consultant who claims the Cydonia formation on Mars is an artificial face and whose book Dark Mission alleges NASA was founded by Freemasons and Operation Paperclip scientists. Hoagland predicts the ruling elite will use 2012 to disclose microbial life on Mars, and reads crop circles as a decades-long education program.
Dazed & Confused interview with futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, author of Birth 2012 and Beyond and subject of Neale Donald Walsch’s The Mother of Invention. Hubbard draws on Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, describes a coming species mutation and a shift from procreation to co-creation she calls supra-sex, and outlines Day One, her global activation set for December 22, 2012.
Written for the Transformer column in Dazed & Confused. An interview with John Allen, co-founder of Biosphere 2 and founder of the Institute of Ecotechnics, who recounts buying Synergia Ranch in New Mexico in 1972 and the closed-system experiment of 1991 to 1993. Allen defines the technosphere, cybersphere and ethnosphere, arguing a rising ethnosphere can end the megamachine’s war on the biosphere.
From the Transformer column in Dazed & Confused. Profiles the raw and living foods movement through David Wolfe, the self-described renegade nutritionist behind Naked Chocolate, Superfoods and Eating for Beauty, who argues that cooking destroys enzymes and vitamins. Wolfe promotes raw cacao, maca, chlorella, goji berries and spirulina as routes to vitality and connection to source.
An introduction to Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology, written in the early 1960s about LSD and psilocybin. Pinchbeck argues that Watts’s real claim is that the Western ego does not exist, and that the psychedelic revolution has barely begun. He cites Thomas B. Roberts’s view of entheogens as a second Reformation.
A March 2013 Reality Sandwich piece attacking the rider Congress attached to an emergency spending bill, which shields genetically modified seeds from litigation. Pinchbeck draws on Fritjof Capra’s The Hidden Connections, geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, and biologist David Ehrenfeld to argue that GE crops mainly serve chemical sales, and proposes global training in organic and permaculture farming instead.
Published on Reality Sandwich in February 2013, this account covers Bill McKibben’s Cooper Union talk on 350.org’s university divestment campaign, modeled on 1980s anti-apartheid divestment. Pinchbeck accepts McKibben’s climate data but argues that the hunkering-down vision of Eaarth cannot compete with Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, and calls for regenerative design and a new planetary culture.
Written for Reality Sandwich as the Mayan Long Count ended in December 2012, the essay concedes that predictions by Graham Hancock, Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna and David Wilcock did not materialize, while maintaining the date marks a hinge in planetary consciousness. Pinchbeck cites climate tipping-point research from Fred Pearce and Mark Lynas and quotes Donella Meadows on nonmaterial needs.
Notes from a TEDx talk delivered at the La Calaca Festival in San Miguel de Allende in November 2012, published on Reality Sandwich. Opening with Hurricane Sandy flooding his New York block, Pinchbeck frames the ecological crisis as a species-wide initiation, drawing on Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman’s Spontaneous Evolution, James Lovelock, and Bernard Lietaer’s currency proposals.