Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
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.