Screens for Dark Enchantment

“The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade… it is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.”

– Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian

Is your television using you, or are you using it? Your computer? Your phone? Here’s a quick test: go device-free for a month and see what your sevenfold body can do without them. Try to see when, where, why, who, and how you want to be in the body of life in time. Don’t buy anything that’s advertised or programmed into you; do try and recognize yourself as a miraculously evolved human worth more than all the devices in the world. Appreciate your nested bodies: your habitat, your bioregion, your disappearing body of life that is set to take your dependents and your species with it into oblivion.

If your screens have rewired your brain, you may find it exceedingly difficult to learn from my experience. To develop and hone skills. To create a biodetector, to solve your problems, to develop ethics. To do the right thing by anyone.

The UN Decade on Biodiversity failed utterly. Which human addiction is at fault? Land abuse and unimprovement? Oil? Ideology? Screens? Gullibility? Expecting and relying on more things? Fantasy? Escapism? Poor behavioral conditioning? Sugar and fat overconsumption? Analysis doesn’t help. Modernity—and your lack of sense, perhaps—are at fault. If you watch sports-paradigm media that give you a ready-made “other team” to scapegoat for everything you don’t like, you will spend the living future on the void. You have already devolved, and are primed for extinction. You’re darkly enchanted.

The South and West are doomed—unless you stand up, turn off all your devices, and rediscover who you were meant to be. The 2020 Living Planet Report from WWF can bring you up to date. What will you, yourself, do for life from where and who you are?