Adbusters #154, 2021

On the back cover of the first issue of Adbusters, published back in 1989, was 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.; Environmentalism wasn’t some kind of consensus we all arrived at: it was an existential reaction that prompted a million gut-level responses.; But let’s face it: fifty years of environmental activism has added up to little more than a rounding error on the climate emergency.; Now we need to go deep-down, system-wide, third-order.; So, 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.