Opportunities.

To respond effectively to climate disruption, Re:Mind is an adaptation strategy based on reciprocal transmutation. Think of a dry, ancient riverbed. A shard of obsidian rests among the stones. An ancestor sees it and reconceives the object toward a new purpose, reinterpreting a stone as a scraper, a carving device, a tool. That imaginative leap bundles craft, skill, application, technique, and method to the rock piece. The idea restructures time. With this perceptual reformation a different future is portended and our capacity altered. For the attentive designer, and all who similarly acknowledge and adopt the device, a new context is invented. The stone, replicated and refined to better adjust to its new purposes, generally retains its original state—it stays a stone—but catalyzes a different cognizance of the world. It has been appropriated by the human gaze, transfigured by intelligence while transmuting intelligence.

Re:Mind acknowledges the unprecedented paradox that shapes its goals. Earth has been terraformed by our vision, formulations, and ideas, by our values and aspirations. The now roiling planet is our singular achievement, an exhibit of the human mind made manifest. We have thought this world into being and fashioned an interlocking cascade of phenomena that have coalesced to displace, scorch, and drown us. We now have to rethink our way out of this predicament.

Essential to this rethinking are stories: narratives offering different ways of perceiving and knowing that can guide us to a more livable, responsible, and sustainable future. Recognizing that climate disruption is already underway, in some regions with a fiercely unsparing surety, capturing and integrating the threatened cultural record, with its trove of customs, values, symbols, and beliefs essential to our self-knowledge, is imperative.

Inviting others, across disciplines, professions, and perspectives is similarly essential. New narratives, new visualizations, new forms of expression can inspire an anthrocentric counter to the anthropocene. Our working alliance with Orion Magazine is an instance of this opportunity; other publications will offer elegantly designed and articulated stories that animate the principles and mission of Re:Mind, through words, facts, formulas, statistical data, and other means of information capture made accessible, bringing life to knowledge.