Environmental activism’s birth offers a template for building an attention movement

Evidence

What’s relevant for us, here, is examining the birth of “environmental activism” for lessons as we work to bring forth this new and urgently needed movement of ATTENTION ACTIVISM. Just as early conservationists, sportsmen, naturalists, and urban reformers, working for decades in different parts of the world, had to give shape and immediacy and even a kind of charisma to the notion of the “environment” (linking Romantic ideas of the wilderness to medical ideas about health and well-being, to scientific ideas about chemical and biological interconnectedness), so, too, it falls to those of us fighting the attention frackers to work together—and, when necessary, apart—to raise a thick, true, and instantly compelling conception of attention to collective consciousness. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Applies the manifesto’s organizational logic: a category (‘environment’ or ‘attention’) must be made charismatic and collectively compelling before a protective movement forms. — connects to: Environmental activism identity took decades of work to construct — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 235; Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 236; The environmental activist identity is a recent invention requiring long cultural work — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 235
• SEED: Essay angle: the parallel genealogies of ‘environmentalist’ and the hoped-for ‘attention activist’ — how new moral categories get socially constructed and what that construction requires.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Environmental activism identity took decades of work to construct — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 235; Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 236; The environmental activist identity is a recent invention requiring long cultural work — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 235

Broader Connections

• Environmental activism identity took decades of work to construct #expands (0.92) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 235