Jamie Wheal

Been pondering this dynamic for the last year ever since I read Richard Powers' Pulitzer winning Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson's much heralded Ministry for the Future. Both of these books came out within 12 months of each other and were widely regarded as profound commentaries on our current environmental and political crises––while still offering a measured dose of hope for the road ahead. But I couldn't help but notice that both of these books from fingers-on-the-pulse thinkers, included eco-sabotage as core plot points. [Img: KALI by Android Jones]

The ecological crisis, which has always been a fraught affair, with Tree Huggers to the left and "Drill Baby Drillers" to the right, has now schizo-fractured into a million tiny pieces. At this point, it's impossible to tell who stands for what, let alone get to a consensus on fixing things.

Was just listening to some friends, trained as biologists, who host a podcast of their own. Over the past few years, they've been drawn increasingly out of their specific academic field and into the deeper, weirder waters of vaccines and the New World Order. I hadn't heard any of their stuff in a while, so I was curious where their inquiry had been taking them.

That was the topic of a panel I recently led with National Geographic explorer/Harvard anthropologist Wade Davis, trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté and Dutch-Indonesian activist Indra Adnan. The hope was, in these times of trouble, where cries to #burnitalldown are rising from all sides of the political spectrum, to explore if there's something in this Enlightenment experiment worth saving, or if the whole project has been tainted and doomed from the start.