I am writing my senior thesis on humanity’s ecological and emotional relationship with the Earth, each other, and progress, using speculative fiction to get there. Think: science fiction about sustainability. In the process, I have developed a hunch about the environmental state of our world and why we struggle so much to fix it.

When we try to tackle the world’s environmental crisis, there is one challenger that will always rear its head in protest: nostalgia, that feeling of intense longing for the past, triggered usually by memorabilia. Nostalgia is our favorite human emotion. Just look around at all the stuff we collect, the structures we have built to remember the past, the souvenirs we set on our desks, the old t-shirts we keep in our drawers, the photos we take to “document” special occasions.

We are attached to our things in a real psychological-Attachment-Theory kind of way. We need objects for comfort, protection, and support in adulthood, much like we needed our mother-figures for such things as infants. There’s emotion involved, and nostalgia is a big one. Tokens of our past fill the emotional gaps in our present realities, providing the comfort we cannot seem to find elsewhere.

So what is the problem? Well, we are so obsessed with our stuff and our past and our stuff from the past that we simply cannot go that extra step to live in harmony with the environment. Some of us can, but as a whole we are struggling. Our materialism, fueled by nostalgia, always gets in the way of going all-in minimal and waste-free and off-grid and “green.”

Going all-in will require a significant shift in how we fulfill our attachment needs, a re-definition of our relationship with our stuff. If we could transfer our attachment to material objects to the world around us instead, then maybe we could fix the environment after all.

In my thesis, humans decide that the only way to truly fix the world is to start over from scratch. They bulldoze everything, all relics to the past, all architecture, all tokens of human progress, and then burn it all. Just like a forest needs an occasional forest fire to stay healthy, so too does human civilization. Only then can humans make a fresh, ecologically-sustainable reality, cultivated from the ashes of their past. This is the idea, anyway.

I am not saying that we should burn everything down and start over, like they do in my thesis. The new reality swings to the opposite end of the spectrum, condemning all forms of materialism, and everyone eventually starves emotionally from having no outlet for their nostalgia. Somewhere in between there exists a balance, and that is what we need to find.

As creatures of attachment, we need a relationship with something tangible. We need to attach to something that evokes our nostalgia — why not make it the Earth? What would the world look like if we all looked to the Earth for the comfort and support we crave, instead of turning to our cluttered souvenirs of the past? Could we “fix” it then? I am not sure what that future reality will look like, but it sounds better than the alternatives.

Until we can find that balance, fixing the environment might just remain a dream of science fiction, an idea written down but never realized.