Politics & Power
Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
Essay and Articles
The Monsanto Act, Reality Sandwich, March 2013
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.
Essay and Articles
Eros Unredeemed, Reality Sandwich, May 2012
Appearing on Reality Sandwich in May 2012, this rereading of Dieter Duhm’s Eros Unredeemed argues that no political revolution will succeed without a prior revolution in love and sexuality. Pinchbeck connects Duhm’s case against exclusive fidelity to Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex, and Time, and notes his visit to Tamera, the community Duhm founded in Portugal.
Essay and Articles
Answer to Henry Baum, Reality Sandwich, March 2012
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.
Magazine Columns
Dazed Digital, Daniel Pinchbeck: 2, 2012
Written for Dazed & Confused in 2012, the year completing the Maya Long Count. The column reads Occupy Wall Street, alongside the Arab Spring and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, as an immune response by a collective human organism to ecological and financial crisis, citing James Lovelock’s forecast of population collapse, the BP spill in the Gulf and Fukushima.
Essay and Articles
Global Revolution Underway, Reality Sandwich, Oct 2011
Reporting on the October 2011 global day of action in more than 600 cities for Reality Sandwich, Pinchbeck defends Occupy Wall Street against the charge that it lacks specific demands, arguing that no reform of the present system is possible. He urges the consciousness movement to join the encampments and links the moment to Mayan and Hopi prophecy.
Magazine Columns
Dazed Digital, Daniel Pinchbeck: 8, 2011
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.
Essay and Articles
My Personal Journey into the Evolver Social Movement, Reality Sandwich, Sep 2010
A September 2010 Reality Sandwich memoir tracing the origins of Evolver: a failed first company in Venice, California, Ken Jordan’s Augmented Social Network paper for PlaNetwork, and the 2007 founding of Reality Sandwich. Pinchbeck also recounts his magazine years at Open City with Thomas Beller and Rob Bingham, whose heroin overdose pushed him away from literary culture.
Essay and Articles
Building a Scaffold for Social Change, Conscious Choice, April 2009
A Conscious Choice column from April 2009, written as Thomas Friedman conceded that the postwar growth model was finished. Pinchbeck reads the crash as a permanent paradigm shift rather than a fixable interruption, and describes building Evolver as something closer to a social utility than a business.
Essay and Articles
Transition Town, Conscious Choice, October 2008
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.