For all the talk about feng shui enabling people to be in harmony with the planet, the world has gotten far worse since the 1980’s when people started reading books and hanging up crystals and mirrors.

“Energy” and other feng shui buzzwords have become a commodity that advocates obsession with more self-obsession: more money, more romance, more career, more-more-more about me-me-me. Feng shui is harmonizing the “environment” of a client’s navel.

The focus on gratifying self-obsession makes feng shui nothing more than pseudo-spiritual strip-mining.

The growing sense of unease we feel is because we will not face the truth.

No matter how many crystals we hang or lucky frogs we buy, constantly buying more stuff is not going to put us in harmony with the planet. We cannot use “intention” to counteract the effects of driving an SUV and living in an oversized, energy-inefficient house.

It is no coincidence that McFengshui does not acknowledge climate change or have a response — it’s still stuck in the 19th century, talking about life force and auras and reeking of colonialism.

Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.
—Wendell Berry

What children need to succeed in life

Howard Gardner in Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century says they are

• linguistic intelligence
• logical-mathematical intelligence
• spatial intelligence
• body-kinesthetic intelligence
• musical intelligence
• interpersonal intelligence
• intrapersonal intelligence
• naturalist intelligence (“nature smart”)

It is naturalist intelligence that children need to help them acquire their other intelligences.

According to reams of evidence, involvement with real nature — not suburbs, not the manicured monotony of “planned communities,” not the nature-deficit environment of a city — is what helps us reach our full potential.

The human brain responds differently to images with different emotional significance. Because many psychiatric disorders are associated with poor processing of signals, the way the brain processes emotional pictures could have a deep-seated effect on a developing brain. And when the pictures do not satisfy what our brains instinctively seek, we apparently try to find some other way to wire ourselves to meet the need.

Without nature we descend into madness and ill health. Trying to rewire humans to a life without nature is failing at an increasing rate.

This is now. This is the future if we keep doing what we’re doing now.

If you are expecting feng shui to harmonize you with the planet and you think rearranging your future is all you need to do, you are deluding yourself. You are also condemning your children to a future they do not want.

As we pave over nature for car parks and mega-malls, the natural world quietly disappears. When there is nothing but steel and concrete and the constant noise and filth from cars and trucks, what becomes of our mental health, and that of our children?

Anyone who is 10 years old right now is going to be facing a very different and frightening world by the time that they are 50 or 60.
— Douglas Futuyma, professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York in Stony Brook

The oceans are turning into vinegar — the increase in acidity has potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth’s breathable oxygen.

Emperor penguins have dropped from 300 breeding pairs to just nine in the western Antarctic Peninsula. Polar bears are dropping in numbers and weight in the Arctic, and are expected to be extinct in Alaska and most of the Arctic within 40 years. Many have drowned because there is no longer ice thick enough to hold them. Walruses are also affected. The First Peoples are also fading away.

Species that live on mountains in the cold have nowhere to go, which is why two-thirds of certain frog species have already gone extinct.

Most bird species are endangered, if not teetering on the brink of extinction. What will the world be like without bird song, without birds’ beauty and intelligence?

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “By 2020, Major Depressive illness will be the leading cause of disability in the world for women and children.”

The number of American children (especially boys from families with health care) on antipsychotic drugs increased 500 percent between 1993 and 2002, as doctors diagnosed more adult mental illnesses in children.

Young Americans are increasingly turning to self-mutilation — cutting themselves, burning their skin, biting themselves, and ripping out hair — to cope with the stress of their lives.

Seventeen percent of Cornell and Princeton University students in a survey said they had mutilated themselves. According to a variety of experts, the self-harm numbers are consistent with similar results obtained in other studies. Approximately 1 percent of Americans resorts to self-abuse as a coping mechanism.

Are the kids outside playing or in front of the Nintendo? And what could that possibly have to do with mental illness such as self-mutilation?

British geographer Jay Appleton noted in The Experience of Landscape (1975) that landscape elements popular with people would have been exactly the ones to help our ancestors to survive. With People in Mind (1998) contained information on elements of landscape design that helped people gain and retain mental health. These same elements were also those likely to help our ancestors to survive.

Other researchers have noted that people in a variety of cultures and locations around the world have similar preferences in landscapes. This shows a common origin in humanity’s past.

People prefer landscapes that have

• Groups of trees with horizontal canopies
• Water
• Elevation changes
• Distant views
• Flowers
• Indications of other people, or inhabited structures
• A variety of animals (especially wild ones)

Look around you. Does your environment include the scenes that humans need for mental health?

Are you constantly feeling a sense of unease? Go somewhere the land has the criteria listed above, and see how you feel. If the unease goes away, then you need to reconnect with basic needs of humanity. Your children need it most of all.

And you need to do what is necessary to ensure those environments are still there for your children and their children to enjoy.

We aren’t consciously replacing children with self-multilating, drugged, robotic “consumers” with stunted brains. But the unconscious choices we are making are taking us there. What you buy influences the future you want for yourself and your children.

Perhaps we unconsciously realize we don’t have much time left. So we drive our SUVs and consume until we consume the inheritance of our children, our children’s children and their children.

It is time to invent moral reasoning of a new and more powerful kind, to look to the very roots of motivation and understand why, in what circumstances and on which occasions we cherish and protect life. … We are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. … they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought.
—E.O. Wilson: Biophilia