Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column asks what freedom means as climate change and species extinction accelerate. It argues that inner freedom pursued through yoga, meditation or ayahuasca shamanism is hollow unless matched by external action, and reads the Egyptian revolution against the end of the Maya great cycle on December 21, 2012 as the first note of a wider liberation.
Published in RSF Quarterly in summer 2011, the essay argues that capitalism is a transitional system and that ecological crisis amounts to an initiatory crisis for the species. Pinchbeck draws on Lewis Mumford, Rudolf Steiner, Bernard Lietaer’s Terra currency and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, and cites Dean Radin and Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project on psychic phenomena.
Reading the Deepwater Horizon disaster as the unfolding of indigenous prophecy, this June 2010 Reality Sandwich piece relays D. K. Matai’s scenario in which a methane bubble beneath the Gulf ruptures the seabed. Pinchbeck attacks BP’s use of the dispersant Corexit and CEO Tony Hayward’s conduct, quoting Chris Hedges’s essay BP and the Little Eichmanns.
A Conscious Choice column from November 2008. Pinchbeck admits to contradictory feelings as the financial system unravelled — an urge to hoard tinned food, and something close to celebration — and links the meltdown to peak oil and to Naomi Klein’s account of disaster capitalism.
A Conscious Choice column from October 2008 that begins with Jefferson’s late regret that the American Revolution built no mechanism to keep insurrection alive, and moves to Rob Hopkins’s Transition Town movement and Alexis Zeigler’s Culture Change as models for rebuilding local resilience against peak oil.
A Conscious Choice column from July 2008. Pinchbeck recalls channelling a prophetic voice in the Brazilian Amazon and admits he now feels less like a prophet than like Chicken Little, then takes Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse seriously enough to ask what an American version of the Soviet unravelling would look like.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2007 on the exhaustion of the future as an idea. Reading Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as avoidance mechanisms, Pinchbeck argues that the interlocking crises may not be solvable by rational means, but might dissolve if approached from a different level of consciousness.
A Conscious Choice column from May 2007. Pinchbeck sets the projections on species extinction, tropical forest loss and fishery collapse against a culture that seeks its drama at the cinema, and argues that the real thriller is whether humanity wakes from its trance of material progress in time.
The first of Pinchbeck’s monthly columns for Conscious Choice, from February 2007. Writing from a New York where spring flowers bloomed before Christmas, he argues that the ecological and psychic disturbances of the moment are one disturbance, and that defining the zeitgeist has become harder precisely as it has become more urgent.
On the intentional communities movement, centred on Twin Oaks — the commune in Louisa County, Virginia, founded in 1967 on the model of B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Written for The New York Times Magazine, August 1997.