Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Written in support of the Worldwide Wave of Action. Citing IPCC projections, a 30 percent rise in ocean acidity, and James Lovelock’s forecast of a human population reduced to a few hundred thousand, Pinchbeck argues that no adequate response is possible under neoliberal capitalism, and that ownership must give way to stewardship using new social technologies.
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.
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.
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.
A March 2012 Reality Sandwich response to a reader, Henry Baum, who charged that Pinchbeck’s ideas lacked practical application. In answer he sets out a program: redesigning corporations away from shareholder-value maximization, replacing debt-based money with Bernard Lietaer’s Terra and Charles Eisenstein’s commons-linked currency, and applying Buckminster Fuller’s design science and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle to industry.