Inner attention damage blocks the political work needed to fix outer environmental damage.

Evidence

In the case of the entrepreneurial frackers, we are inheriting parallel wreckage: Petroleum fracking is doing irreversible damage to our external environment (our woods and fields, our water and sky) while the human frackers are verifiably destroying our interior environment (our minds and hearts, our ability to be and to sit with ourselves and the people we love). These inner and outer environments depend upon each other. Without caring for the former, we cannot do the hard political work of caring for the latter. Nothing less than the future of the world (and our future as non-inhuman beings) is at stake. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 100

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This closes the loop on the reader’s prior noise/silence material: degraded attention undermines the collective action all those chapters call for.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that interior and exterior environments are causally coupled, with attention as the binding resource, is the book’s load-bearing bet and worth sitting with.

Related

• Inner and outer environmental damage are causally linked and inseparable (similarity 0.94)
• Protecting outer environment depends on protecting inner psycho-sensory environment (similarity 0.81)
• Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning (similarity 0.80)
• The dispute over attention is ultimately an argument about what constitutes our humanity (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is the substrate of care for self, community, and planet. (similarity 0.78)
• Human fracking reduces persons and relationships to quantifiable commodities. (similarity 0.78)