Without knowing what a more fulfilling relationship with the natural world could look like, we won’t be able to reach it, writes Richard Louv. It’s time for a new, positive ecological vision
Over the past decade, speaking to and with thousands of people from all walks of life, I’ve come to believe that our culture is trapped in a dystopian trance.
I believe we must have the courage to be idealistic once again.In 2013, a group of environmental studies students at a US university asked me out for coffee. During our discussion, a young woman leaned across the table and said: “I’m 20 years old, and all my life I’ve been told it’s too late.”
The other students nodded. I had heard this before and realised that she was right. For years, our culture has struggled with two addictions: oil and despair. It’s clear by now that we can’t kick one of those habits without kicking the other. Yet, for many people, perhaps most of us, thinking about the future conjures up grim images from Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of nature.
Americans did not fall into this trance overnight. It emerged over several decades, fuelled by entertainment and news media that profited from a negative news bias and fear of the ‘other’. In the US, people’s fear of stranger danger – from terrorists to kidnappers – has skyrocketed along with the 24-hour news cycle.
Care about how media shapes our world?
Martin Luther King Jr taught us that any movement will fail if it cannot paint a picture of a world that people will want to go to.
Our cultural problem isn’t the presence of dystopian images or post-apocalyptic storylines, but the virtual absence of images of a good, decent, beautiful future.I grew up in Missouri and Kansas, and spent many hours in the woods at the edge of our housing development with my dog. I built treehouses, dug underground forts and collected…
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