As we face the challenges of our Earth Century, Adrian Glamorgan urges a spirit of conscious enquiry

Ever bought something you desired instead of just needed? The art and science that capitalises on our instinctual and unconscious desires as unsustainable mass consumers emerged with an American, Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995), Sigmund Freud's nephew no less. Bernays took the psychoanalytic theories of his famous Viennese uncle and applied them to politics and advertising, simultaneously inventing the shadowy occupation of public relations.

If you've ever wondered why we keep on buying things we don't really need, or expect satisfaction from each purchase yet immediately hanker for the next thing, look to Bernays for some ready answers.

Eddie Bernays' "engineering of consent," involved all kinds of ventures that delved deep into our unconscious. In 1928, the American Tobacco Company wanted to expand the profitable cigarette market to include women, but there was a cultural barrier against women smoking in public. So they turned to Bernays. He organised a group of 10 young women to march in the New York parade and, at the right moment in front of photographers he hired, the women produced and lit their Lucky Strike cigarettes according to a careful script, claiming they were lighting "torches of freedom". Breaking the tobacco taboo was a symbolic Freudian way of challenging male power. It also started selling a lot of cigarettes to women.

Bernays' particular talent in shaping consumption was to bring in third party "independent" research, to help persuade consumers they needed something. Through his tireless efforts, Americans came to believe that fluoridation would be wonderful for dental health, just when the aluminium companies wanted somewhere to put their waste product; that heavy breakfasts were healthy, just when bacon producers needed more pork to be sold; that cars needed better ventilation just at the time General Motors produced an innovation in its windows. Bernays would commission a survey that would find white unperfumed soap was preferred, just when only one such product existed - his client's. These days, the wine industry produces reports about how good red wine is (for men, in a narrow age bracket), the nuclear industry reports on how safe Chernobyl fallout was, and medical authorities and pharmaceutical companies fund studies critical of alternative medicine. The toxic sludge industry is quite possibly commissioning an independent report on the advantages of chemical waste on our skin pores, even as we speak. Fair go. Whenever you read a survey popping out of nowhere in the newspapers, ask who commissioned it?

Bernays openly declared what he was doing: "it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it," he maintained. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

This manipulation of democracy and free market by the "intelligent few" to protect us all from chaos, and sell lots of products, backfired tragically. In 1933, Bernays discovered his Crystallizing Public Opinion- was being used by Goebbels to orchestrate the Nazi persecution of the Jews. But he was not beyond using these same propaganda methods closer to home. On behalf of the United Fruit Company, Bernays advised how best to undermine Guatemala's democratically elected President Guzman. The CIA did the rest.

People had to be persuaded to throw away possessions to create rubbish. During the Great Depression, Bernays set up the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink, which found disposable cups, produced by his client, Dixie Cups, were more "sanitary". For Mack trucks, Bernays created fronts such as the Better Living through Increased Highway Transportation. Waste and more greenhouse gases, unsustainability, all just an independent survey away.

Now we are living in a century when a response to the ecological crisis is urgent. In February, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, the oldest association of Earth scientists, determined that the old Holocene Epoch, the geological time cradling our species into existence, has come to an abrupt halt, with the Earth entering "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years". As well as greenhouse gases building up, human monoculture and cities have transformed the natural sediments, acidified the oceans, and overseen species extinction, "producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal". It means the work of the last 200 years is being written into the rocks. Through our actions, Earth has entered into the Anthropocene Epoch, an entirely new geological age, in our lifetime. That is how profound the change effected by humans is.

Garnaut's draft report confirms this - the most ambitious emission reduction plans only give us a 50-50 chance to save the Great Barrier Reef. Sobering indeed. I'm not sure that those in corporate and governmental power actually properly grasp the enormity of what's happening across our country. Expect "independent" studies commissioned by the coal industry. Expect to hear arguments that we "can't afford" to do something about climate change. Prepare for people who are brought forward who do not "believe" in greenhouse gases - as if it was something you decided to barrack for or not. It is not a time for the "intelligent few" to decide we can wait a little longer till the world joins in action. Fear, doubt and xenophobia may be persuasive instincts, but they are not a measure to help save an ecosystem.

No point blaming Bernays or greenwashing industry, soft-pedalling the environmental crisis; no point in decrying the advertising agencies re-employed to launch us into faraway wars; no point decrying the modern day Goebbels or United Fruit Companies. Expect smoke and mirrors. Blow away the smokescreen and see clearly - it is entirely up to us. We wish for truth, understanding and action. We will need, not self defeating cynicism, but conscious enquiry. We need to question, but not destroy our trust in each other through our questions. Such a delicate balance!

The Earth Century calls for a revived ecological sensibility, one on a global scale as well as an interior measure, that connects with others and the other inside the self. It will acknowledge our vulnerability to fear, doubt and hate. It will dare to respond with courage, openness and compassion. It will acknowledge the persuasiveness of our strange desires, without giving ultimate power to them; attempt to rise from the half-dream called consumerism to face the glare of the newest, ecological century, with a new kind of humility and wonder. A new geological age has begun: perhaps, too, a new human consciousness is emerging with it.