You choose:

KAZIMIR MALEVICH KAREL APPEL

CY TWOMBLY MATISSE
 Hey all you worried
souls out there,

welcome to our
ECO issue!
In this issue we sink our
teeth into the problem
of climate change and
shake loose one mighty
idea — the mother of all
metamemes — that’ll show
the world a way out of the
existential fix we’re in.
Don ’t believe us?

Read on!

— eds

?????
SHAUN HEDICAN
(Can’t control my urges . . .)

LEE BUENO
(Finally letting myself look
the way I feel)
ALEX DA CORTE, “ACTIVITY #9”, 2006, ARCHIVAL PIGMENT PRINT
Millennials will be the first generation
since the Great Depression to be worse
off than their parents. Yet, frequently
characterized in the media as fickle
and lazy, they have internalized their
precarity as a personal failure, rather than
recognizing that the problem is capitalism.
PHIL AICKEN VIA UNSPLASH
 When I was growing up, my brother
Michael took me to see old movies at the
American Film Institute.
“An American in Paris.” “Shane.” “Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington.” “Casablanca.”
The films shaped my image of America.
We were Gene Kelly, the exuberant hoofer
who could dance and romance better than
the French. We were Shane, the laconic
gunfighter who never used his gun unless he
had to. We were Jimmy Stewart, the idealistic
senator who fought the corrupt forces in our
government. We were Humphrey Bogart, who
pretended to be cynical when he was really a
lovesick patriot. And there was the wonderful
Jean Arthur in two of those movies, showing
what a strong, saucy woman could do.
The nuns took us to new movies, like “Lilies
of the Field,” where I learned that we were
Sidney Poitier, the jack-of-all-trades who
helped immigrant nuns in the Arizona desert
build their dream chapel.
We were the winners, the good guys. We
had swagger and vitality and an endless
sense of possibility.
— Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

CLAY SINCLAIR
Great artists can feel the future coming. Their whole body
is an early warning system, a vibrating instrument, and
they transmit the signals to paper or canvas or stone. Pissarro’s ‘The Oise on the Outskirts of Pontoise’ (1873)

Look at this painting by the French painter Camille Pissarro.

He’s one of the fathers of Impressionism (along with equally
big-bearded Monet). Impressionism: that gentle art that made
generations of bourgeois folk feel cultured and peaceful when
they put it on the wall. Inoffensive. Maybe a little boring.
But if you really dig into it, you might feel differently.
Pissarro was an anarchist. His sympathies lay with the French
peasants he painted with such obvious dignity when he came
into the city in his final years (because an eye problem made
it impossible for him to stay outdoors). Those anarchist roots
are there in the landscapes, too.

Pissarro’s ‘Louveciennes’ (1871)

The way many early anarchists felt about

nature could be summarized in a sentence:
This place looked a lot better before we put
our bootprints on it. Or maybe just: There
goes the neighborhood.
Pissarro was working in late 19th century
France. Nature in its original anarchist state
was by now long gone – at least gone from
anywhere near where people lived. The age
of Industrialization had arrived. On the
horizon was the real shit: the subjugation
of humans and the land under the yoke of
progress. The full dehumanizing force of
consumer capitalism – still 150 years away –
See? A lovely peaceful walk in the wild. Except it’s not was on the wind. And Pissarro felt it.
wild. We’ve cut a clearing in the wild. And this guy
walking through it: does something about him chime
off the barren tree in the foreground?
Pissarro may have sensed the future coming. His lament for the
nature that was disappearing in front of him was subtly there
in the work.
But Thomas Cole, man. He was in-your-face political.
Cole was an American midcentury romantic painter, pretty famous,
who celebrated America’s wilderness as its great treasure.
If Pissarro was a sensitive early-detection system, Cole was a blast of
cautionary fire and brimstone.
The message is hard to miss in his five-painting progression
The Course of Empire.
It traces the arc of man’s appetites and hubris if left ungoverned. A
cautionary tale. Don’t eat anything bigger than your head, don’t kill
anyone who has backup.

First: [the “savage state”] Second: [the arcadian, or pastoral state]

Savage meaning wild, right? Couldn’t be the guy in the We’ve tamed nature. What, you want a pat
loincloth. The healthy world still largely untarnished by on the back? The despoiling is coming.
human hands. But the stirrings of civilization are there
on the far shore. Strap in.
Third: [consummation of empire]
Romans gone wild. Empire in full-cry decadence,
just before the fall. Wealth, power, knowledge, and
taste have worked together to create … what?

Fourth: [Destruction]
Carnage and destruction. “The decline of nations is
generally more rapid than their rise,” as Cole himself
put it, clinically.

Fifth: [desolation]
The aftermath. All over now but the mop-up in
Aisle Nine. All humans have been exterminated.
The land beginning to reclaim the cracked remnants
of human overreach. “The roar of battle has ceased,”
said Cole. “The gorgeous pageant has passed. The
multitude has sunk into the dust.”

The empire is extinct. Who’s the hunter now?

These are the wages of the progress of empire
– on the natural world, and on us.
The moral? Be careful, amigos.
Feel this.
Would you hang
this on your wall?
Be honest.
This is everything Americans say they’d want in a piece of art –
on average. (And yes that’s George Washington standing there
– looking ill-dressed for camping but whatever.)
It’s the work of Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid. The
avant-garde Russian-American artists painted it after asking
1001 Americans what they really really like, and then taking the
top answers and shoving them all onto the stage together.
This is prankster art — a barbed commentary on taste and
class and kitsch. Yet if that’s all it was it would never resonate
like it does. Komar and Melamid thought the average of what
people want is actually really important. Because wrapped
in that sometimes ugly compromise is the beautiful idea of
democracy — “the idea that simple people, innocent people,
have some higher truth, so they should get to decide.”*
But there’s another reason this project will endure as a classic
and be studied for decades. And it’s a totally different reason.
In asking what we want, Komar and Melamid accidentally
stumbled on what we need. A signal from the depths of the
human psyche.
“This is more serious than we first believed,” Melamid said.*
* quotes from Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to
Art By Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, University of California Press, 1999
You’re looking at the American escape image, the place
folks say they want to be transported to when they look
up from the newspaper or from doing the dishes: Soft,
flowing, organic, bountiful nature, brightly sunlit under a
clear blue sky.
“People have this landscape in their head,” Melamid
said. “It sits there, and it’s not a joke. They can see it,
down to the smallest detail. So I’m wondering, Maybe
this landscape is genetically imprinted in us. That it’s
paradise within.”
When Komar and Melamid expanded their project,
interviewing tens of thousands of people in a dozen
more cultures, from China to Kenya to Iceland, their
suspicions were confirmed. Turned out everyone
described the same thing. Everyone — regardless of
class, race or gender — wanted that same sunight-
blasted blue landscape: the trees and the water and the
wild animals and the sky.
“Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland — what can be
more different in the whole fucking world? – and they
both want this landscape,” Komar said. “So we think we
hit on something here. People believed that the public
square was what could unite people, that it is truly
universal. But they are wrong. This landscape is what is
truly universal — maybe to all of humankind.”
Anthropologists and evolutionary
psychologists have weighed in on this. And
they’ve concluded that Komar and Melamid
are basically right. This is our genes talking.
This is what we respond to as a species.
A vista: so we can get our bearings and
scout for invaders. A tree we can climb to
escape predators. Something to drink and
something to kill for food. In a landscape like
that, we feel safe.
This explains a lot. Could be it’s why we feel
uneasy, at a pretty primitive level, when we
we’re whisked out of nature and plunked
down in an Aeron chair in some office
building. Or when we push nature away –
irretrievably — by paving it over.
To Melamid, there’s something else in that
landscape of the mind that’s lighting us up.
That’s kindling an impulse even deeper than
our need for safety.
“Open space, air, no barriers.”
In other words: Freedom.
— Harry Flood
 CASSIDY PHILLIPS VIA UNSPLASH
POLLY APFELBAUM

I think I hit emotional bottom while cruising
through the Dalmatian Straits, observing
rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky, and
colors as bright as a desert.
Leaning on the deck rail, it struck me that
there was a film between me and all of that.
I could “see” the spectacular views. I knew
they were spectacular. But the experience
stopped at my eyes. I couldn’t let it inside me.
I felt nothing. Something had gone wrong
with me. I remembered childhood moments
when the mere sight of the sky or grass or
trees would send waves of physical pleasure
through me. Yet now on this deck, I felt dead.
NICHOLAS HAGGARD
I had the impulse to repeat a phrase that was
popular among friends of mine, “Nature is
boring.” What was terrifying even then was
that I knew the problem was me, not nature.
It wasn’t that nature was boring. It was that
ARTS
nature had become irrelevant to me, absent
from my life. Through mere lack of exposure CREATIVE DIRECTOR Pedro Inoue
and practice, I’d lost the ability to feel it, tune ART DIRECTOR James Callaghan
into it, or care about it. Life moved too fast WEB ART Hei Lam Ng
for that now.
— Jerry Mander
 It’s out there, moving faster than the
human mind, in volumes we can no longer
comprehend . . . $3 trillion sloshing around the
internet every day . . . billions hidden in crypto-
currencies . . . a quadrillion dollars a year trade
the reckoning in derivatives, worth ten times the total worth
of every product manufactured worldwide
during the last century.

MAT HENNEK
 This is the global
watering hole. Money
is where we live now.

CLAUDIO SCHWARZ | @PURZLBAUM

 tion of
The evolu
t e r n a e s thetics
Wes
creeping
is one of
abstraction, a
from
turning away
orld.
the natural w

WALTER KNABE
CHRIS JORDAN

JACKSON POLLACK
 One in three Japanese
children has never seen a
sunrise or a sunset. One
in five has never seen
wildflowers blooming in
a field. 50% have never
eaten snow.

ANDRE BENZ VIA UNSPLASH

 KLAUS BO
Illustration to the Bhagavata Purana,
Kangra School (1780)

As a young man, Krishna was loved

by the village girls. He teased them,
stealing their clothes when they bathed
in the river and hanging them on a tree
out of reach. He danced with them in
the moonlight, slipping away when
each girl thought he loved her alone.
Ma Yuan’s “On a Mountain Path in Spring”. 1190-1225 CE.

U/JOHNSTONANTHONY
Next time you try to squash a cockroach or
spray it to death with a repellent of sorts, you
may have to try a little harder than that!
That’s because cockroaches are getting a lot
tougher and are developing cross-resistance to a
number of insecticides, according to a new study

to the
published in the Scientific Reports journal.

future!

SEAN TWIDDY
MERIÇ DAĞLI
paradise lost
 NAME THESE PLANTS
NAME THESE BRANDS

hope springs eternal

 my heart soars with mad joy at the
sight of a patch of wild flowers

VINCENT VAN GOGH, TREE TRUNKS IN THE GRASS, 1890

 Without nature to nourish us
we will die spiritually.

JOHN GOTO
 WEB
WEB MAGICIAN Ederson Martins
WEB WIZ Hei Lam Ng
DATA DADDY Joey Malbon
KEYBOARD WARRIOR Majeed Malh
as
PAUL ELLEDGE
 While few of us look up and notice the moon any longer, this natural satellite —
carved from the Earth 4.5 billion years ago — still has an incredibly strong pull on
our planet, our lives, and our cultures. Just take language to start. Both Monday
and month are derived from moon. And the month roughly follows the moon cycle
(29.5 days). Of course, the moon shapes the tides, and the lifecycles of certain
species — such as corals — and some evidence suggests it even has physiological
and psychological effects on us.

Cultures throughout history have not only revered the moon but relied on it
to survive. They’ve used the moon to hunt, to navigate, and to track seasons
(including when to plant and harvest). Some farmers — like biodynamic farmers —
still plant according to the moon cycle. On the other extreme, most modern people
(a.k.a consumers) — with all our gadgets and bathed in the perpetual nighttime
glow of city lights — have forgotten how awesome this ball of rock that orbits the
Earth and reflects the sun’s light really is.

But that’s over. It’s time to recognize the moon’s majesty. Twelve times a year, and
sometimes, you know, once in a blue moon, a thirteenth time, we should drop our
daily habits and expectations and do something wild. But what? And how?

Is there one day a month we could

devote to rewilding ourselves?
Adbusters has been encouraging wild living for decades: having sparked both
Buy Nothing Day and TV-Turnoff Week (now Screen-Free Week). But these
actions come and go but once a year, swallowed up by the post-Thanksgiving
haze or the daily requirements of being plugged into a screen for work and for
post-work couch-numbing time that makes keeping our devices off for a whole
week nearly impossible.

On the other extreme, there are efforts now — like 24/6: The Power of Unplugging
One Day a Week — to encourage people to make one day each week screen-free.
A liberating goal, yet few of us can imagine unplugging 52 times a year.

Imagine instead, one day — marked not by a calendar or a weekly obligation but by
a bright orb in the sky — telling you in no unclear terms that you should be totally
alive today. That you should leave your phone on your dresser; your laptop closed;
your TV off; and go do something wild!

But wild isn’t just putting down your devices — it’s what you do with your sudden
freedom. Do you spend an extra hour jogging nowhere in the gym or do you walk
out in a bit of wilderness you’ve never explored? Or read another dystopian cli-fi
novel or go down to your town hall and join in your local climate strike?

Many Native American nations had specific names for moons — harvest moon,
snow moon, strawberry moon — to mark certain times of the year. But few of us
are farmers or living on the land any longer. So come up with your own names and
wilding agenda.

Every month when the moon is full, you wake up, look skyward, and rewild yourself.

— Erik Assadourian is a sustainability researcher and director of The Gaian Guild.

Does Gaia . . .
live?
h half a billion
We burned throug
fossil sunlight
years’ worth of
nturies
in a few short ce
 Or are we
systematically
relentlessly
mercilessly...
Emmy, the influencer at the center of Ellery Lloyd’s thriller
People Like Her, is accused by a formerly loyal friend of having
become “2D” like her photos. Not a person anymore, “just a
phony caption and a posed photo. A fucking invention.” Emmy
has crafted a persona, or personal brand, that is the “perfectly
imperfect” Instagram mother “Mamabare”, aiming for relatability
rather than reality. It’s a Faustian pact she has made, selling her
own soul as well as those of her friends and family, so that when
an Instagram “role player” begins to steal photos of her daughter
d our
If we disconnecte and use them to craft their own fantasy life online, Emmy has
ould
feeds, how long w little in the way of a moral high ground, or recourse. Even
ved?
it be till we star
Emmy’s furious husband admits this is a trap of his wife’s own
making, and that the role-player presents “a pretty convincing
pastiche of the way that all Instamums, my wife included, write.
The mangled metaphors, the breathless over enthusiasm. The
ingenuous clunkiness. The alliteration.” Emmy has become so
successful at influencing people to be like her, they have literally
started to usurp her.
— Olivia Sudjic
 killing
raping
annihilating...
For many of us, the near-term horizon is crowded by
the ongoing pandemic, student debt, precarious work
and the stressful circus of never-ending elections,
while the long-term horizon is hazy with warnings
about the collapse of global food systems, interminable
war and the loss of a stable climate. Already, the water
is rising, fires are burning, forests are dying, coral is
bleaching, glaciers are calving, and living creatures
are winking out of existence at mind-numbing rates.
As Bill McKibben recently told the New Yorker, ‘we’re
not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing
maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where
it doesn’t make civilisations impossible.’
— Meehan Crist
her?
Mass extinctions are extremely rare.
They’re monumental setbacks, not
normal events. It takes 5 to 10 million
years for life to recover from one.

— Eileen Crist
Before economics can progress, it
must abandon its suicidal formalism.
— Robert Heilbroner
 The Savior Meme
I remember the energy in our office as we whipped up the first issue
of Adbusters back in 1989. On the back cover, a stern-looking Planet
Earth pointing an accusing finger: I WANT YOU TO CURB YOUR
CONSUMPTION.

The world was in a phase change. The Berlin Wall was about to fall.
Solidarity was in the air, and the environmental movement was
driving it. We’d seen the whole Earth from space and by God it looked
vulnerable, hanging out there in the darkness. Like: Holy hell we barely
register in the cosmic accounting. Environmentalism wasn’t some
kind of consensus we all arrived at: it was an existential reaction that
prompted a million gut-level responses — from Greenpeace activists
racing toward Alaska on the (doomed) Rainbow Warrior, to hippies
huddling up in communes on the city fringes. It was a moment of
sacred reckoning. The Earth was alive. She was Gaia: the rivers her
veins, the forests her hair, the oceans her lungs. And we humans an
organic part of her. It felt like we were embarking on a spiritual journey
that would take all of humanity to a new level of consciousness.
Sure, there was a lot of damage: poisoned rivers, vanishing forests, acid
rain. Corporations behaving badly. Network television hijacking our
attention with a barrage of pro-consumption messages every hour. But
it was nothing we couldn’t fix.
Then something unexpected happened.
We kind of knew about global warming, but it was buried on our list
of concerns, somewhere below pollution and the ozone hole. Now,
suddenly, it was the whole show.
What we had on our hands, it became clear, was a terrestrial-suffocation
event. The oceans slowly starved of oxygen – an I can’t breathe dirge for
the planet itself. The Great Barrier Reef dying slowly and then quickly.
Methane bubbling up from arctic permafrost. Whole species winking out
at mind-blowing rates. The whole ecological structure that evolution had
built up over billions of years was crashing down upon us.
This wasn’t a cleanup job any more. It was about survival.
Throughout our history, through wars, genocides, pandemics and long
dark ages, we humans have always bounced back. Our story has always
kept moving along. But all our previous escapes meant nothing now.
This could genuinely be the end. Our 10,000-year-old civilizational
experiment was now riding on one last throw.
on geo-engineering: cloud-seeding, mirrors in space. And we all bite
the bullet and decide to live more lightly on the planet. A new fair, just,
sustainable and secure global system will emerge if we all just pitch in.
Right?
To me that’s exactly what’s not going to work.
These interventions aren’t nothing — of course we should pursue a lot
of them. But let’s face it: fifty years of environmental activism has added
up to little more than a rounding error on the climate emergency. “Cap
and Trade” has been a bust. Carbon credits are the papal indulgences of
the 21st century.
We can’t simply continue the strategy of playing the same game
differently. We’ll never get to net-zero that way.
The late Stanford philosopher and therapist Paul Watzlawick had
a good way of explaining how to get out of impossible jams. When
change is required, there are different ways to think about the level of
creativity that’s needed.
A “first-order” change is to stamp on the gas pedal. A second-order
change is to shift gears. A third-order change is to get out of the car and
find another way to get there.

The environmental movement mobilized. They tossed every idea they That’s where we are now.
had onto the table.

You double down on carbon sequestration. You grow wheat as a

perennial, not an annual crop — and use biotech to increase the yield. You
start massive kelp farms, harness streams in run-of-river hydroelectric
projects, capture tidal energy at headland pinch points. You build wind
farms and solar arrays all over the world. You transition to electric cars.
You dangle weights heavier than the Eiffel Tower over abandoned mine
shafts as gravity batteries, backup power to the grid. You champion
localized capitalism and Modern Monetary Theory. You pull the trigger
In our brainstorming sessions at Adbusters, one idea kept popping up: The Road To True Cost
If you burrow deep into the innards of the capitalist algorithm, you find
We start with the little things: plastic bags, coffee cups, paper napkins.
a major flaw. It’s that the vast majority of humankind’s carbon emissions
Economists sleuth out the eco-costs — say it’s five cents per plastic bag,
are unpriced. Out of the trillions of transactions made every day in our
ten cents per cup and a fraction of a cent per paper napkin — and those
global marketplace, only a tiny fraction reflect their true cost. From the
we tack on. We’re already doing that with the various eco-fees and eco-
tires on our cars to the phones in our hands, right down to the napkins
taxes included in the price of tires, cans of paint and other products.
that McDonald’s hands out with their Big Mac & fries . . . every purchase
But now we abandon the concept of ancillary fees and taxes and start
we make is essentially a mistake. And each one drives us a little closer to
implementing true-cost pricing right across the board.
global system collapse.

With every bogus transaction, another drop of meltwater slides off an
iceberg, another puff of CO2 rises to the sky, another bubble of methane
wafts up from the tundra. If we keep repeating that mistake, trillions of
times a day, week after week, month after month, year after year, what
do you think will happen?
To date, only a handful of economists have bothered to think about the
true cost of what we buy and do. They speak the language of efficiency,
and have taught the whole world to do the same. Why are so many of
our leading economists silent, then, on these, the greatest inefficiencies
of all? Why are we selling off our natural capital and calling it income?
Why is the profession of economics committing such a monumental
system error?
Let’s figure this out. What is the real cost of shipping a container load
of toys from Chongqing to Los Angeles? Or a case of apples grown in
New Zealand to markets in North America? And what is the true cost
of that fridge humming 24/7 in your kitchen . . . that steak sizzling on
your grill . . . that car sitting in your garage? What are the byproducts
of our way of living actually costing us? Grab a calculator and let’s get
at this. Instead of watching economists pontificate endlessly about
interest rates, stock-market swings and GDP growth, let’s put them to
productive big-picture use crunching the real cost of things.
True-Cost Plastic
How much plastic is coming out of the industrial bunghole annually?
Economists spitball a number. Say it’s a trillion tons. Then they come up
with their best estimate of the environmental price we pay for our clogged
garbage dumps, polluted oceans and the shitspray of plastic microbeads
through the food chain – say it’s $500 per ton. Every manufacturer,
corporation and retailer that uses plastic in their business will be required
to account for that. Maybe it’s a surcharge of a quarter on every bottle of
Coke. Coca Cola can’t take a hit like that on their margin. They’ll have to
change their business model. Likewise, the automobile industry will have
to redesign their cars. Food producers will have to adapt.
The cost of living will go up, and that’ll hurt. But plastic packaging will
gradually disappear from our lives. We’ll buy our milk in glass bottles
and bring them in for recycling like we used to. We’ll wash our plates,
knives and forks and use them year after year, some for a lifetime. The
garbage gyres in the oceans will shrink and finally disappear. Blight will
vanish from beaches and ravines. Microplastics will stop plugging the
tissues of every mammal including us. And the horror of bringing our
children up in a world awash in plastic will be over.
True-Cost Driving
Once we add on the environmental cost of carbon emissions, the cost
of building and maintaining roads, the medical costs of accidents,
the noise and the aesthetic degradation of urban sprawl, your private
automobile will cost you around $100,000, and a tank of gas $150.
You’ll still be free to drive all you want, but instead of passing the costs
on to future generations, you’ll pay up front.
Plenty of people will call bullshit on the concept – at least in
the beginning. But once it’s in place, we’ll see a fundamental
transformation in how we get around. Car use will plunge and bicycle
use soar. Ride sharing will spike. People will live closer to work.
Demand for monorails, bullet trains, subways and streetcars will
surge. A paradigm shift in urban planning will calm the pace of urban
living. Cities will be built for people, not cars. City skies will be clearer.
Breathing easier. Catastrophic weather events like hurricanes, floods
and superfires will subside. The spectre of global heating won’t feel so
ominous anymore.
True-Cost Eating
We estimate and add in the hidden costs of our industrial farming and
food processing systems. We raise the price of groceries to reflect the
true cost of shipping them long distances. An avocado from Mexico
will cost you $15. You won’t be able to indulge so often. And that
shrimp from Indonesia? Once the eco-devastation of mega farming and
container shipping are added on, it will run you about $35 a pound.
A Big Mac will cost quite a bit more. So will most meats, produce and
processed foods. You can still eat whatever you want, but you’ll have
to pay the real price. Inevitably, your palate will submit to your wallet.
It will be tough, especially on lower income families. But the cost of
organic and locally produced food will go down and provide a good
alternative. Local farmers will be celebrated. We will grow tomatoes on
our verandas, eat at home more and maybe lose some weight and be
a little healthier. Bit by bit, purchase by purchase, lifestyle change by
lifestyle change, our global food system will heave toward sustainability.
True-Cost Shipping
For years it’s been ridiculously cheap to use mega tankers to ship
container loads of stuff across the ocean. Much of that will stop. Our
current way of exporting and importing goods, the one economists
have been touting as a way to spur growth, but which depends on
a mightily subsidized transportation system, will no longer fly.
Globalization — capitalism’s bred-in-the-bone burden — will cease
to be the dominant economic paradigm. Just about everything at the
multinational megamarts will cost more. The whole tenor of world
trade will be transformed. Exports and imports will stabilize at a
reduced level. Trillions of purchases every day will come back to your
neighborhood.
Next-level Accounting: The Social and Psychic Costs
You’re cruising along an eight-lane highway and suddenly everything
lurches to a halt. There’s a lot more going on here than a hefty blast of
carbon emissions. A traffic jam is a huge collective stress event. There
are health costs to being pinned in your car, on a dammed river of steel,
fingers tightening on the wheel, blood pressure rising. Mental health
costs too. A recent Swedish study found that a daily commute of forty-
five minutes or longer increases your chance of divorce by 40 percent.
What is the psychic cost of advertising, that daily broadside of pro-
consumption messages? Or the mental toll of continually checking your
phone — basically tugging on the leg-hold trap of Big Tech’s surveillance
algorithms, over and over and over? Or the social and psychological
cost of losing the indie shops in your neighborhood as Starbucks, Home
Depot and Walmart muscle their way in. All this is part of the True Cost
story — and so must eventually be part of the final accounting — of the
epidemic of mental illness now sweeping the planet.

For conventional economists, True Cost is a frightening, heretical
concept. A True-Cost marketplace would slow growth, reduce the flow
of world trade and curb consumption. It would force economists to
rethink just about every axiom they’ve taken for granted since the dawn
of the industrial age.
The efficiency of size would be challenged. The hidden cost of Walmart
coming to town, revealed.
The logic of never-ending growth on a finite planet would be thrown
back in economists’ faces.
“Progress” itself would be redefined.
There will even be angels-on-a-pin debates about the psychological and
social costs of individualism.
True Cost could turn out to be one of the most traumatic and painful
economic / social / cultural projects we have ever undertaken.
But it would also be strangely transformative.
In a True-Cost world, there’d be no need for pleading and hectoring,
no need to wallow in conflicting consumerist emotions. No one would
be badgering you to eat less meat. No one would make you feel guilty
about owning a car, or for going on that holiday to the Bahamas. None
of that. All you’re being asked to do is become a consumer in a new
kind of marketplace.
Instead of “lowest price wins, and don’t ask too many questions,” Adam
Smith’s invisible hand would start working its magic in surprising new
ways. We’d become part of a worldwide process in which every one of
the trillions of transactions made every day are working for rather than
against us.
In the current language of economics, the costs you don’t see, the ones
that don’t show up in the models, are dismissed as “externalities” — just
the trims and ends left over when you run the growth numbers. Only a
handful of economists have bothered to think of these costs as anything
other than marginalia — a few paragraphs in Gregory Mankiw’s
Principles of Economics textbook.
True Cost will put a shine on ‘the dismal science.’ Economists would
suddenly have a fresh mandate: to work out and fold in all the costs of our
way of doing business. This would ground them, give them something
real to do. It would create a virtuous, progressive occupation out of a
retrograde one. The profession would become a highly desirable place
to be — something a young grad would be proud to devote their whole
life to. Environmentally minded students would be streaming into Econ
101 because now economics is the Queen of the Sciences, incorporating
sociology, anthropology and psychology. It would be the essential
discipline for working our way out of the existential crisis we’re in.
The Savior Mechanism
Implementing a True-Cost global marketplace would actually be quite
simple. It could be made to work through the UPC code that’s already
on just about every product sold around the world. When you swipe it,
a True-Cost price adjustment automatically kicks in. All the ecological
costs of making and marketing and shipping and distributing that
thing you’re buying are baked in to the price. One swipe, one truth.
Sticker shock: take it or leave it.

True Cost will generate a vast amount of money — probably in the
trillions of dollars a year. Agreeing on how to spend it will no doubt
be a messy, angry, contentious affair. It may well torpedo the whole
project. But it could also turn into a beautiful collective brainstorm.
Humanity’s joint endeavor. The birth of a global mind, with the stakes
as high as they go: our very survival.
The True-Cost bounty would amount to a kind of global superfund.
Money would flow to each nation, based on its population, to spend as
it sees fit.
Many countries might choose to plow it into priority projects to help
them reach their carbon-reduction goals. Others might decide to
bounce some, or even all of it, directly back to the taxpayers. A hefty
check would arrive periodically in the mail, as compensation. People
agree to take the pain up front, knowing relief will come.
The nations of the world may agree to pool some of the money into
a global-emergency relief fund, to be spent by the United Nations
and NGOs when calamities occur. For the always cash-strapped UN
and relief organizations, and for people anywhere in the world who
suddenly cannot cope, that would be a godsend.
Is True Cost a Pipedream?
True Cost? Great idea! But it’s never gonna work.
That’s what they all say.
I get it. Nothing of this scope, on this scale, has ever been tried. It feels
like Plan D — after all the more ‘sensible,’ green-energy and techno
options have been kicked around.
And our record of working together is pretty dismal. Look at how we
handled Covid. We couldn’t come up with a coherent global thrust to
beat it back. Or to distribute the vaccines. Hell, some of us couldn’t even
agree to wear masks.
But the global mood will change as our planet overheats. Ecological
collapse is a slow-motion catastrophe. You don’t feel it yet, You can’t
apprehend the urgency of it. Because your hair isn’t on fire. Yet.
But once we pass a tipping-point — and we’ll absolutely know it when
it happens — when resource skirmishes erupt into full-scale wars, and
slow violence turns into fast violence, and suddenly it’s your children
who are hungry and your house that’s being swept away and your
country that’s at war . . . that’s when you’ll forget “never gonna work”
and reach for the ax on the wall.
The Planetary Endgame
Up from the grassroots will come the three
kinds of people who make every revolution go.

First, a few free spirits start breaking their

old patterns, embracing what they love (and
in the process discovering what they hate),
daydreaming, questioning, rebelling.

And their energy is so damn infectious that

a second group is naturally drawn in. And
this bigger group, the champions, doubles
down on what’s happening, and they add
new gestures, shaping this new narrative,
unencumbered by history.

And now the third group jumps in. They are

the superspreaders. And the meme goes viral.

We already have all the tools we need.

It won’t take millions of us to drive this

metameme home. All we need is five thousand
passionate, fuck-it-all fire-starters.

If we do it right, the rest of

the world will follow.

Join us at abillionpeople.org
 In 2019, in a determined show of
disciplinary unity, 3,500 US economists,
including 27 Nobel laureates, the four
living former chairs of the Federal
Reserve and all but one of the former
heads of the President’s Council of
Economic Advisors — Republicans and
Democrats alike — signed a proposal
asking for an escalating tax on carbon to
help fix the climate crisis.

As True Cost gains legitimacy as an

idea, we up the ante. We get economists,
activists and politicians together. We
have them lock horns. Can we reform
the global marketplace? Can we use the
UPC code to do it? Let them argue.
Get a buzz going.
 World leaders,

wake up!

Our global system is so broken that it has become a

doomsday machine. Money is flowing to the wrong
places, rewarding the wrong things, and driving the
wrong behaviors — a colossal systemic clusterfuck
that’s taking us all down with it.

The underlying problem is that every one of the

trillions of purchases made in the global marketplace
The True Cost Manifesto is our creed.
We push it relentlessly. We create
controversy: Send it to think tanks and
government policy-makers worldwide,
keep pumping it into cyberspace. Every
Moonday we invade the IMF, WTO and
World Bank and post it on their walls.
We get in the faces of the current flock of
economists running our global system.
We dangle our manifesto in front of
them and demand to know why they
can’t implement it.
every day is a lie. Each transaction drives us a little
closer to the brink.
We the people of the world demand you get your shit
together and fix this. Reform capitalism!
Create a new system that ties the global economy to
the health of the environment. Have the price of every
product tell the ecological truth.
Get the best minds on the planet crunching the
numbers. Have them calculate the real cost of
things. Then use the UPC code to adjust the price of
everything we buy.
One swipe, one truth.

The Third Force

 As the screws tighten on working
people everywhere, and a viable future
forecloses on everyone below the top
1 percent, we put True Cost on the
platforms of all the Green Parties of the
world. With this uplifting, non-violent
vision of a future to lead with, they start
winning elections.

PEDRO INOUE
 Europe could do it (maybe) but it’s too
exhausted. China’s on it’s own bus. Only the US
has the wild dynamism to lead the charge and
launch a new global political dynasty.

The
True Cost Party
of
America
O U R P L AT F O R M

• Immediate implementation of a 1% Robin Hood Tax on

all stock-market transactions and currency trades

• Radical curbs on derivatives and credit default swaps

• A 24-hour rule on flash trading — you buy it you keep it

for 24 hours

• No corporation is allowed to hold more that 25% of the

market in any industry

• A three-strikes-and-you’re-out law for

repeat corporate offenders

• A move towards a True-Cost global market in which the

price of every product tells the ecological truth

G O T O abillionpeople.org

A N D H E L P K I C K S TA R T T H I S PA R T Y
 As the world reels under the stacked
tragedies of social and economic
upheaval we go all in— maybe even this
summer. With the most revolutionary
tool ever invented in the palms of our
hands, we pull off a monumental protest,
a sustained blast of revolutionary fervor
so fucking awe-inspiring it tips the
balance of world power in our favor.

?????
 Over the last couple of generations, we in the so-called “developed” world
Where You Fit In have eased into a very cushy way of living. We love our dish washers,
spin dryers and microwave ovens. We love our throw away diapers, pre-
washed veggies and ready-to-eat dinners delivered right to our door. And
we love cruising in our cars with our favorite music playing. The idea of
living more austere lives is anathema. We’re hooked on all of this stuff
now. Whatever it takes, we gotta have our Doritos.

That’s just the way it is.

Or is it?

Look at it this way: If we’re pliable enough to have allowed ourselves

be moulded into ferocious consuming machines, to have our minds be
re-wired like that, then we’re pliable enough to self-correct in the other
direction. A lifestyle is really nothing less than a collection of habits.
And habits can absolutely be overridden.

Convincing people that an experiment like this is even worth a try, that
will be the biggest hurdle. We’re talking about curbing the personal
freedoms we’ve taken for granted for centuries. “Dammit, my right
to indulge myself is constitutionally protected!” Americans will say.
Anything less is heresy. We can’t do this. We won’t do it. Go to hell!

Except we have done it. Recently.

We did it during Covid.

For a year and a half we were forced to social distance – something that
seemed alien to our genetic makeup. If we can learn to live like that — a
hockey stick away from one another at all times — surely we can learn
to curb other private pleasures for the sake of our collective survival.
And do that until it becomes a reflex. Just as a tiny alarm went off in
your head when you came too close to a stranger, a tiny alarm will go
off if you’re taking more than your pound of flesh from the Earth. You
True Cost is a long shot. A moonshot. People
start reaching for the hamburger and some flash of conscience says:
will resist it with righteous indignation.
Nope. Not going there today. You’re about to hop in your car to drive to
work but you stop in the driveway. Today I won’t. It’s not raining, I’ll
take my bike. And tonight, while throwing your clothes into the dryer,
you have another of those double-clutch moments. You recall just how
much energy an appliance with a heat element uses. There’s already a
heat element in the sky, and it’s free. This weekend you’ll set up a system
for drying your clothes in the sun.
Dozens of little strategic “social saving” behaviors like this will slide
into place, until the friction goes out of each one of them. Now they’re
simply part of how you live and who you are. Now it’s just your own
conscience plus what-the-fuck-else-have-we-got? Those two together
are a powerful pincer. Powerful enough, maybe, to make hundreds of
millions of us take the personal plunge and vow to live True-Cost lives.
For a few of us, True Cost will amount to a lifestyle tweak — a
little extra attentiveness to consumption patterns already mostly
under control. But for many let-’er-rip first-world consumers it’ll
be a revolutionary change. Or what the University of New Mexico
psychologist William Miller calls a “quantum change.” That is, a
radical course correction some people make after a kind of sudden
apprehension of where they fit in the big human story.
True Cost shouldn’t feel like a punishment. It should be deeply
satisfying to know that our purchases are helping to correct inequities
and distortions. Helping to lift someone out of poverty on the other
side of the world. Helping to save many living things – trees, cows,
rhinos — because they’re now worth more alive than dead. It should
give us joy that we are somehow balancing the books.
That’s why there might actually not be the almighty pushback you’d
expect — even from ardent anti-socialists — to the True-Cost shift in
human consciousness that has to happen.
A New Myth
The man who proposed the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, is hopeful
at age 100 that what’s going to save Gaia is the very species that drove
her to the brink: us. Or rather, a technologically enhanced us. Cyborgs,
programmed to save themselves, will save Earth, he reckons.
I have my doubts. I think it’s going to take something way more
personal and emotional. Because until you can feel what needs to be
done, you won’t do it. If it seems like a hellacious sacrifice to do what
needs doing, we won’t do it. It has to instead take the form of — let’s
just say it — a spiritual leap.
I think it’s time to write a new chapter in the human story, one that circles
back to the original mythologies many indigenous people never lost.
These myths are not Great-Man stories. They don’t put us humans at
the center of the spinning world. They’re about systems, networks,
generational heaves. In these cultures, Gaia was never a “hypothesis”
that dropped intellectually into the zeitgeist and then gradually lost
heat. It’s a truth that always was.
In Bolivia the goddess Pachamama (literally “cosmic mother”) hovers
over the land. Everyone from the indigenous people to practicing
Catholics are swept into her unifying ethic of gratitude and grace.
Scientists don’t try to re-educate this “magical” belief out of folks. The
religiously faithful don’t dismiss Pachamama for failing to speak for their
particular denomination. Individual belief systems come and go like the
clouds over the Andes. But values like kindness, solidarity and humility,
these are permanent. And universal. And maybe the only way out.
Lately, Masako and I have been getting into the serial “Kirin ga Kuru”
on Saturday afternoon television. It’s about a Samurai warrior in 16th-
century Japan. A century of warring tribes has plunged the world into
chaos. Blood runs in the valleys. The kirin is a mythic creature that
shows up when a culture is in transition. Kirin ga Kuru means “waiting
for the kirin.” If the kirin comes, it means the carnage is over and peace
has descended upon the land.

In real-life Japan, this actually happened. The warring tribes stopped

warring. The kirin came.

Japan’s war with itself resolved only after the country found itself facing
a bigger menace, from outside, when the “black ships” arrived with guns
more powerful than swords. Only then did the country pull together.

That’s what has to happen now on a global scale.

There’s a theory that humans simply cannot co-exist peacefully. We’re

just too bellicose and self-absorbed. We’ll fight and raid each other’s
resources till there’s nothing left but smoking ash. Only one thing can
change that pattern: if all the nations of Earth suddenly find themselves
aligned against a common threat. Like an alien invasion.

The climate emergency is our alien invasion. It’s an existential threat

to every earthling all at once. Only a giant recalibration now can save
us — an audacious plan that everyone has the stones to commit to and
implement together.

We pull off a major reshuffling of priorities within the science of

economics. We overhaul our economic system. We put something like a
True-Cost marketplace in place. We endure the pain of price hikes and
disciplined living, because the only thing worse than this pain is the
pain of not doing it.

We tweak as needed. We stay the course.

That’s what the Third Force is all about. This is what we’re fighting for.

EDS
— from Adbusters’ forthcoming book, The Third Force: A Field Guide to a New World IEF Kalle Lasn
EDITOR IN CH
R
Order WRITER/ ED ITO

Trevor Clarke
G EDITORS
CONTRIBUTIN
bell
Deborah Camp
Clive Hamilton
n
James MacKinno
Andy Merrif ield
 live suddenly without thinking.
— e.e. cummings

JOEY CHAOS
WIKI USER RILSLUIOA
 my lady of 30+ years
Here is a 74 year old fuck, reader of Adbusters. Some time ago
so I quit eating food.
kicked the bucket and left me all alone here. I decided to join her
Turns out I could go 40
Good experiment to take on, could I fast for 40 days and nights?
down to the size
days and nights with not ONE bite of food, of course my stomach shrank
to exist and function
of a walnut and I lost a lot of weight, but guess what? I now am able
in a while a few fresh Oysters.
just fine when only eating 1 cup of soup a day, and once
no hot water heater,
I am almost down to using NOTHING at all! No T.V., no microwave,
, so simple, I shit in a
no driving except once a month round trip 36 miles.....Life is GREAT
year outhou se. The best thing is I
bucket which I have to empty once a week into my 10
,I have to power this
owe nothing to anybody, well there is the electric bill $50. a month
also. So I prove it
computer and have a few lights on, but I could live without those things
you guys should get
can be done, I mean by this never a Consumer shall I be.......Maybe
P. S. I turn my poop
back to me, we buy Adbusters in our local bookstore to support them.
George
into Humanure with sawdust, no flies in there, no smell either....By

The typical contemporary Labour MP is almost

certain to be a university-educated Europhile
who is more comfortable in the leafy enclaves
of fashionable north London than the party’s
historic heartlands. As a result, many feel that
Labour has become radically out of step with
the culture and values of working-class Britain.
Drawing on his background as a firefighter and trade
unionist from Dagenham, Paul Embery argues that this
disconnect has been inevitable since the majority of the
Left political establishment swallowed a poisonous brew
of economic and social liberalism. They have come to
despise traditional working-class values of patriotism,
family and faith and instead embrace globalization, rapid
demographic change and a toxic brand of identity politics
that divides and dehumanises us. Embery contends that
the Left can only revive if it changes course and speaks
once again to the priorities of working-class people by
combining socialist economics with the cultural politics
of belonging, place, and community.

No-one who wants to really understand why our politics

has become so bitter.
LIVE WITHOUT

DEAD TIME

ADBUSTERS.ORG
 COVER DESIGN
PEDRO INOUE

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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in of
PHOTO: JOEY CHAOS
necessarily reflect the views held by all ACTIVIST: ELLINA RABBAT
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mind!
Let's crack the global
LEE Bueno (Insta:
@murcielagonaranja) is
a painter who loves to
provoke the human eye.
They mainly work with
art dealing with eating
disorders and also art
that stimulates change.
 d
An unnamed man (alias “Caesar”) ha
been a photographer for the Syrian
military for 13 years when, in 2011,
he was dispatched to the morgue.
His new job was to document the
dozens of corpses then arriving from
President Bashar al-Assad’s secret
militar y prisons.
 What he saw broke his loyalty to the Assad
regime. Over more than two years, at great
personal risk, he secretly siphoned off tens
of thousands of photographs — evidence of
gross atrocities amounting to war crimes.

“It was very clear that they were tortured,”

Caesar told 60 Minutes. “Not tortured for a
day or two — tortured for many, many long
months.” They were flogged, they were
electrocuted, they were burned, they were
starved. Some of them were children. “I
heard a child between 12 and 13 years old
screaming, ‘Mama, please help me out from
[this] hell,’” said a former prisoner. The child
was reportedly doused with boiling water and
then beaten.

The Assad regime’s program of torture was

calculated, clinical, bureaucratic. On each body was
scrawled three numbers in Arabic numerals. The
first was the victim’s detainee number. The second
corresponded to the military-intelligence branch
responsible for the person’s lurid death. The third
represented the person’s place in the death count.
Each murder was assiduously recorded and tabulated.

Most of the victims, according to Caesar, had their

eyes gouged out — a gruesome symbol of Assad’s
brutality in suppressing the uprising that began ten
years ago, in the streets of Damascus. Since then, a
quarter of a million civilians have been killed, and 11
million have been forced to flee their homes. In 2013,
some 1,400 were gassed. With Russia’s abetting,
bombs have been dropped on hospitals and schools.
And Russia, joined by China, blocked an attempt by
the UN to refer these and other war crimes to the
International Criminal Court.

Justice is yet a long way off for war-torn and tortured Syria. Meantime,
may the sightless show the world to see the crimes of Bashar al-Assad.
In Xinjiang, the northwesternmost province of the
People’s Republic of China, over one million people
belonging to ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities
— most of whom are Muslim Uyghurs — have
been interned in so-called “re-education camps.”
Countless reports allege that the camps are hotbeds
for ideological brainwashing, slave labor, torture,
rape, and attempts to curb minorities’ birth-rates —
including forced sterilizations and abortions.
Increasingly, these atrocities are being recognized
for what they are: attempts to exterminate all non-Han Satellite image of a "re-education camp."
people in China and eradicate all evidence of their
various languages, religions, cultures, and ways of life.
In other words, Beijing is committing genocide.

“When the Nazis were exterminating Jews, the world did not
believe until [it saw] the liberated camps,” said Kayum Masimov,
a former teacher and resident of Xinjiang. “Today the Chinese
Communist Party are holding Uyghurs in concentration camps
and killing them. Yesterday’s Jews are today’s Uyghurs.”

The CCP is not unaided in its subjugation of noncomforming

citizens. Some of the world’s largest corporations profit from
slave labor exported from Xinjiang. Apple, BMW, Samsung,
Sony, and Volkswagen represent just a handful of the 80-plus
companies whose supply chains rely on factories wherein
tens of thousands of Uyghurs removed from their homes are
subjected to indoctrination, surveilled incessantly, and forced
to work in conditions resembling slavery.
Xinjiang is also the source of some 20%, or one fifth, of the
world’s cotton. In an eerie echo of American slavery, at least
half of a million ethnic-minority people are currently beign
coerced into picking cotton there by hand. According to a
coalition of human-rights groups, “[v]irtually the entire apparel
industry is tainted by forced Uyghur and Turkic Muslim labour.”
This includes the likes of Adidas, Calvin Klein, Gap, H&M,
Tommy Hilfiger, Patagonia, and — you guessed it — Nike.
Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army training in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
 The supply chain of O-Film Technology, which uses forced Uyghur labor.

There is no place in this world for genocide

or slavery. The only humane thing to do is
to boycott every brand, make, and company
complicit in these unconscionable crimes.

Here is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s

list of all 82 slave-driving companies:
Abercrombie & Fitch. Acer. Adidas. Alstom. Amazon. Apple. ASUS. BAIC Motor.
Bestway. BMW. Bombardier. Bosch. BYD. Calvin Klein. Candy. Carter’s. Cerruti
1881. Changan Automobile. Cisco. CRRC. Dell. Electrolux. Fila. Founder Group.
GAC Group. Gap. Geely Auto. General Motors. Google. Goertek. H&M. Haier. Hart
Schaffner Marx. Hisense. Hitachi. HP. HTC. Huawei. iFlyTek. Jack & Jones. Jaguar.
Japan Display Inc. L.L.Bean. Lacoste. Land Rover. Lenovo. LG. Li-Ning. Marks &
Spencer. Mayor. Meizu. Mercedes-Benz. MG. Microsoft. Mitsubishi. Mitsumi. Nike.
Nintendo. Nokia. Oculus. Oppo. Panasonic. Polo Ralph Lauren. Puma. SAIC Motor.
Samsung. SGMW. Sharp. Siemens. Skechers. Sony. TDK. Tommy Hilfiger. Toshiba.
Tsinghua Tongfang. Uniqlo. Victoria’s Secret. Vivo. Volkswagen. Xiaomi. Zara.
Zegna. ZTE.
 ies
Alternate Realit
At AIPAC’s annual
conference in 2018,
Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer said
that “[i]t’s sure not the
settlements that are the
blockage to peace” in
Palestine. (Keep in mind
that these are the same
settlements whose state-
sponsored expansion, for
seventy years, has placed
“members of one ethnic
group under military
government while it
confiscated their land,”
as Nathan Thrall puts
it.) Rather, “the fact of
the matter,” according
to Schumer, “is that too
many Palestinians and too
many Arabs do not want
any Jewish state in the
Middle East.” Could it not
be the case, Chuck, that
many Palestinians do not
want an apartheid state in
the Middle East?

Solid dude
 At the Israeli American Council’s
2018 summit, Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi said that,
“if this Capitol crumbles to the
ground, the one thing that would
remain is our commitment to
... our cooperation with Israel.”
Before she and a delegation of
House Democrats left for Israel
that March, Pelosi wrote in a press
release that “[t]here is no
greater political accomplishment
in the 20th Century than the
establishment of the State of
Israel,” which goes to show
how much she admires
justice and democracy. As for
annexation, last year she said
that it “undermines U.S. national
security interests.” Never mind
the U.S., Speaker Pelosi — what
about Palestinians’ interests,
security, and nationhood?

boss lady
 Last June, Antony Blinken,
now secretary of state,
said that then candidate
Joe Biden “would not tie
military assistance to Israel
to things like annexation
or other decisions by the
Israeli government with
which we might disagree.”
In other words, the Biden
administration will turn a
blind eye as it arms and
abets the oppressive military
government occupying the
West Bank. To date, according
to Thrall, the U.S. “has
granted more than $110
billion to the occupying
military force and spent
hundreds of millions on
upgrading the infrastructure
of apartheid.” Blinken
reaffirmed that thoroughly
amoral position in early
March, declaring that the
U.S. “firmly opposes and is
logic freak deeply disappointed” by the
International Criminal Court’s
opening an investigation
into war crimes in occupied
Palestine.
I let a saudi
murderer
walk

m y s av io r
 Honestly, a lot of us are done with SHAUN HEDICAN

virtue signaling faux lefties, and all

their bullshit. — Karen Lindquist
MIR ALI VIA UNSPLASH
 I’m dressed for it, black and no underwear. I can see you rolling
your eyes. Irreverent of me but I am thinking of the little things on
this big day. The way you used to pat my dog. Your mouth when you
ate ice cream. That double caramel smile. That look on your face
when we saw the same thing at the same time, and we just knew.
I want to trip you over, send you arse over tit with this knowing.

I want a deep mind read. Remember those? The gates are still
open, run wild, speed, break the law. Drive through the red light of
my subconscious. I will pull you over, frisk you and give you a ticket
you won’t forget. I’ll make you pay in desert flowers. Not these
fucking lilies. You’re a cactus guy.

I want to be the memory that kicks and bucks. Your last rodeo. And
you will be my 3-am wake-up. Come join me. Get your ghost on. All
the world’s asleep, no one will see you pass through the walls.

How do I get to you? I’ll leave the house barefoot, no wallet, no keys.
Just the past in my pocket.

Let’s load up and go hunting, see who gets the bullet — anger, guilt,
depression. Which stage of grief is going to come out of the bushes
first? I’m ready to kill. And I’ll get you while I am at it. Shoot you a
centimeter above the heart, so I can revive you. Flash before your
eyes. Be the first thing you see when you come back, everyone else

SAMUEL R. J. GILLILAN
can get in line.

What about time travel? I think it’s worth a crack. Let’s go through
all your ages. We can meet you at the one that included me. I am
feeling sentimental. Don’t want to be impolite, but I would really,
really like to fuck your brains out. Right here, right now, in this
church. Clock you in the eyes and love you. Dive into your iris, travel
to that far away planet, discover all your aliens. Or we can go local.
Just one more trip to the coast would sort us out. A caravan park
would do. I am not fussy, you know me.
Don’t be shy, let’s get all our skeletons out of the closet. I know
how to de-bone. When the job is done, I’ll make you a cup of tea. I’ll
make you 100 cups of tea, 1,000 cups of tea, however many it takes
to settle this, to let it all out

Please do it, sit up and roll your eyes at me. So we can skip this
joint, run against the traffic lights on our way to the sea. To that
place where the sun clipped you and the tide schooled you in how
to return. We could swim out deep to the place where rules and
safety disappear. We could hold hands as the water fills our lungs.

It was described in Latin but I could read between the lines. You lay
in a landlocked hospital bed and drowned as your lungs filled with
fluid. None of us were allowed to be there to remind you that the
tide returns and we will never forget you.

Only ten people allowed, but we got quality over quantity. All of
us on our knees wishing love didn’t have a flip side. All holding it
together. All winks in eyes and tears in hearts.

Ignore it. They’re wrong. Don’t rest in peace, not your style. Riot.
Nick an angel’s chariot and crash it. Sharpen your wings, get busy,
find lightning, wind, fire. Don’t tap me on the shoulder, rain down
on me. Get in the boxing ring with the Gods and make me some
thunder. Ambush the seven stages of grief, kill them one by one in
front of each other. Make them watch. No turning away. Raise the
hair on my arms you beautiful fucking derelict. Let us know we are
alive. That’s your job now.

They are saying the Lord’s Prayer. I am wearing no underwear, did I

tell you that? I will miss you for ever dear one.

— Mary Rachel Brown

 “Humanity’s past has been relatively brief:
some 300,000 years as a species, a few
thousand years of civilization. Its potential
future, by contrast, could extend for millions or
billions of years, encompassing many trillions
of sentient, rational beings yet to be born.”

This future — the adulthood of humanity

— is now in jeopardy.

“If our species does destroy itself,” wrote

Orville Schell, “it will be a death in the
cradle — a case of infant mortality.”

– Jim Holt
VIJA CELMINS
In 1919, Martin Heidegger delivered a
lecture at the University of Freiburg to a
scattered crowd of mostly defeated men . . .
who now had to pretend that they saw
themselves having a future. This crowd
of returning soldiers was downtrodden
and vulnerable, which is to say highly
susceptible to influence. These men had
no future — no money, no job, no pride, no
hope — but, according to Heidegger, they
maintained the most basic, but also most
vital philosophical choice. He implored his
soldiers-turned-students to exercise it: to
“learn thinking anew” and, in so doing, to
“leap” into “another world.”
— John Kaag, reviewing Wolfram Eilenberger’s
Time of the Magicians, in The New York Times
 GASPARD GLANZ / TARANIS.NEWS

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THE CULTIVATION OF INNER FORTITUDE