Attunement, Behaviour and Sustainability: the debate grows

In anticipation of TED's Summer Debate on July 16th 2010.

The End of the World,

1851-3, oil painting on canvas by the English painter John Martin.

According to Frances Carey, Deputy Keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, the painting shows the destruction of Babylon and the material world by natural cataclysm.

A provocation relating to some psychological roots of environmental angst:

"The cultural tragedy is reflected in the personal tragedy of the infant with failed maternal support; the tragedy of the infant is reflected in a cultural wasteland of devastation and despair.

In this way, the deepest internal and widest external forms of disintegration interpenetrate at the point of environmental failure.

At the dark heart of the anti-group is the dread of insufficiency and, beyond that, of extinction."

Morris Nitsun, 1966.