Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, The Age of Missing Information and is the pioneer behind the 350.org movement. His latest book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

If you haven’t read any of Mr. McKibben’s work, I urge you to start.  His style and thoughts are original, and are a welcome and refreshing perspective on an ailing world that isn’t learning from it’s past mistakes and careening like a locomotive heading for a broken bridge.

Thank you Bill for a truly remarkable essay.

The Mental Environment

Where our fate as humans will be decided.

by Bill McKibben

Your mind, a clear mountain stream running burbling through the rocks. Until Pepsi stands up, unzips its billion-dollar ad budget, and takes a leak, staining it forever brown. Your brain, a verdant old-growth forest, until it dies the death of a thousand swooshes. Your soul, filled with the crystal fresh air of early morning, until Philip Morris blows in a cloud of its seductive smoke.

No. Mental environmentalism may be the most important notion of this new century, but the only way to start this discussion is by admitting the analogy is not exact. Whatever the mental environment is, it’s not a pristine wilderness untrammeled by people. It’s not the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Antarctic biosphere. No, the mental environment has been shaped by culture as long as we’ve been, well, human.

The mind is, among other things, a tool for collecting, storing, weighing images and ideas. Perhaps earlier in our primate evolution our brains worked differently, but for millions of years we have been shaping our own minds and the minds of those around us. Our mental environment is not the Yosemite of John Muir or Ansel Adams. It has always been more like Central Park, a landscaped reflection of human notions. Every generation, every community, has had a mental environment. The culture. The zeitgeist. It is that almost invisible fog of assumptions in which we live our lives, the set of images and ideas we barely notice because they are so common as to be both banal and overwhelming.

What’s more, this is not the first moment that our mental environment has been polluted. We’ve seen all kinds of toxins poured into the infostream. Check out a Leni Riefenstahl movie if you want to see what I mean. Try to imagine life during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The state, the church have time and again become mentally oppressive until eventually a resistance emerged — a resistance that, from Martin Luther to Vaclav Havel, said at least in part: “We want our minds back.” Not all the way back: We’ve never owned our minds entirely. But more of our minds, in better shape.

Which brings us to the present moment, the moment that we have to deal with, the moment out of which we have to stage our singular resistance. The mental environment is under siege from a particularly difficult variety of pollution. To understand it, consider an analogy from the physical world, where carbon dioxide is threatening to warm the planet disastrously. Taken in small doses, carbon dioxide is not dangerous, just as the occasional commercial or billboard is hardly a problem. In fact, CO2 in small quantities isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as most chemicals, just as Ronald McDonald couldn’t do the same kind of damage as, say, Joseph Goebbels. But every act of a modern life releases carbon into the atmosphere. Spewed from the rear ends of a billion cars and factories and furnaces, this constant pollution now seems likely to raise global temperatures five degrees in this century, altering everything from rainfall to ice-melt to wind speed. Similarly, the modern consumer economy sends up an almost infinite blitz of information and enticement, till the air is so thick with it that every feature of our society is changed. In neither case is it pollution in the usual sense, easily cleaned with a smokestack filter or combated with a more wholesome image. Instead, it’s a volume problem. In the case of the so-called information society, it may be the largest psychological experiment in history.

Here’s another way of saying it: We are the first few generations to receive most of our sense of the world mediated rather than direct, to have it arrive through one screen or another instead of from contact with other human beings or with nature.

If the mental environment we live in has a single distinctive feature, the way that oxygen defines our atmosphere, it is self-absorption. That’s what a mental environment gone awry has produced; that is the toxic outcome of our era’s unique pollution. Some years ago, working on a book, I watched every word and image that came across the largest cable system in the world in a 24-hour period — more than 2,000 hours of ads and infomercials, music videos and sitcoms. If you boiled this stew down to its basic ingredient, this is what you found, repeated ad infinitum: You are the most important thing on Earth, the heaviest object in the universe. From the fawning flattery of the programming to the mind-messing nastiness of the commercials, it continually posited a world of extreme individualism. Even more than, say, violence, that’s the message that flows out the coaxial cable. Characters on television may turn violent to get what they want now, but it’s the what-they-want-now that lies nearer the heart of the problem.

This hyperindividualism is a relatively new phenomenon in our lives. For most of human history, people have put something else near the center — the tribe, the gods, the natural world. But a consumer society can’t tolerate that, because having something else at the center complicates consumption.

This appeal to us as individual fragments grows ever more powerful and precise. Most of the new technologies premise their appeal (especially to advertisers) on their ability to target with frightening accuracy our locations and our psyches.

So far, the assaults on our mental environment have been mainly from the outside, but we are seeing sorties on the inside too. Already we see psychopharmacology rampant, the ranks of people who need such medicine swelled by a creeping malaise: a gradual redefinition of our foibles, of our tiny personal tragedies. There are pills for the camera-shy, for “shopper’s remorse,” for the stresses of personal bankruptcy — it’s getting crowded in the collective bummer tent. Before long, genetic engineers may well be able to literally tweak the brains of our children, offering them “extra intelligence” or perhaps docility, upgraded memory at the price of downgraded meaning. Improved individuals, at the price of whatever individuality should mean in its sweetest sense.

But. The human mind and heart are not dead yet; indeed there are signs that we’ve reached the moment of resistance, that a million Vaclav Havels, albeit often tongue-tied and unsure precisely of their mission, are rising from different corners to challenge this assault. If you ask me what I remember from the WTO battle in Seattle, it is not the sting of rubber bullets or the choke of gas; it is a jaunty balloon rising above the melee with this message painted on its side: “Wake Up Muggles.” If you’ve read Harry Potter, then you know: Muggles are all of us, living in a world of magic but unable to see it, focused as we are on television and mall. But we are waking, in sufficient numbers to ensure there will be the same kind of fight for the mental environment as there has been for the physical one. And, of course, the fights will overlap.

Mental environmentalists may well lose, just like their colleagues working in the physical world. Global warming may be too much to overcome, and so may genetic engineering or push media or the simple warm-bath skill of those designers and marketers who would sap our lives for their own advancement. But the fight itself holds tremendous possibility. The liberation from self-absorption comes most of all in the battle to help others and in the vision of a world that makes sense to our minds, a world where no single idea (“buy”) holds sway.

Forget monoculture, in our fields or in our heads; imagine instead a thousand different communities, adapted to the physical places they inhabit, sharing insight and difference, appreciating small scale and large heart. Where no musician sells 10 million copies, but 10 million musicians sing each night. Where we are freed from consumer identity and idolatry to be much more ourselves. Where we have our heads back.

I wanted to thank you for showing me the Ultimate Spaceship site. I am finding it to be extremely informative (I didn’t even know about codex Alimentarius) without trying to push a religious or political agenda.

I have also found that I agree with your views and points that have been written. These are issues that I used to talk about and read about and try to educate myself on. I found though that trying to talk to people about them usually fell on deaf ears or someone coming back at me with a greener than thou argument.

I also found that the more I thought about these things the more helpless and scared I felt. I  started living in the denial that Le Monde talks about in his article ( yes I read the entire thing) I stopped searching and talking about these issues of humanity. I couldn’t think about how insidious and pervasive our government had become. I didn’t want to think that the President of the United States did not have our best interest in mind. I didn’t want to think about how many living beings were suffering so I can life my comfortable life. I thought “how can I do anything about it when I cant even get my own family consisting of two other people to stop eating meat?” It was just overwhelming and upsetting. This is what I was trying to tell you yesterday but I was too hopped up on my double latte that I hadn’t had in months to articulate my thoughts at the moment.

So for the last several years I have been in the fear and consume cycle, spending most of my time thinking about all the crap that I didn’t really need that I was going to buy with that paycheck. It would make me feel better or look better (can’t forget about that trillion dollar “beauty” industry) and ease the fears. Its also my duty as an American to buy things or the economy will collapse, right?

Over the last few months there have been events that have happened that have really made me look at myself and think “look what you have become” I have so much more to offer than what I’m going to cook for dinner, or which curtains go with my bedspread, or chomping at the bit for the new season of Dexter to start. I find myself spending so much time thinking about the most trivial shit it amazes me.

I am looking forward to reading more of the Ultimate Spaceship site, to further educating myself on these issues and to contributing where I can.

Enjoy the ride…

Ultimate Spaceship 1.0

This second generation of Earth… The Ultimate Spaceship is stronger, more controversial and more in your face.  Time is running out, and bad little children have been commenting in the past, trying to bully the next species of homo sapien into submission.  So the site has been put through a major revamp.  Now, malfunctioning versions of homo sapien won’t be able to stand in the way of the awakening of the next generation.

You are that next generation.  I believe in you.  You made me believe in you.  You wrote emails asking me to keep writing, and to keep fighting this battle.  I love this country, I love this planet, and you are right, I cannot and should not stop.

So I have decided to hijack the very medium that is destroying the brains of millions of Americans and human beings around the world, video.

Video will be the weapon of choice.  This is why Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion dollars.  The current version of homo sapien has been dumbed down and turned into an idiocracy with mass media and idiot media like Desperate Housewives, Reality TV, American Idol and Mass Market Radio. Reading is becoming an ancient skill.

So We will take the very medium that they’ve been conditioned with, and decondition them with it.  Most of the videos will be showcased for other visionaries, but expect to see many of my own productions.

I hope you enjoy your ride on the 2nd generation of the Ultimate Spaceship.