“Climate-change can make you more compassionate, allow you to make a choice to help the future,” Joseph Dodds says. “What is quite unique about now is, Now is the time. There is a great opportunity here. Now, if we can get through this and have a civilization, we’ll be more imaginative and creative.”

Dodds, 33, a Brit with two young kids, is an eco-psychologist. A new tribe of thinkers that coalesced in the mid-1990s, eco-psychologists bind the brainscape of Homo sapiens with the ecosystem of our planet. In other words, they link the micro of every brain with the macro of earth and sky in much the same way the ancient Greeks and other civilizations did to understand the mysteries of nature and life. And all great mysteries, from death to God to space to time, await a magic key. An insight, a formula, an epiphany, a joke that opens the ineffable, the beyond, the terrible, the eternal. In our time the great mystery is climate change, a mystery before which we continue to flub and flounder.

Now is the time, as Dodds says.

But our brains are a problem. They are both the key to understanding and our primal defense against fear. And changing the mind, Dodds says, is a slow business indeed. “Psychoanalysis has taught us about such a transformation. It takes time, this change of mind. Time is what we don’t have.”

Minds of all ages struggle with climate change, its scale and data. Writing this piece I googled “climate change” and got 700 million results in 0.14 seconds. Different age neurons react differently to all of this.

“It’s likely that older people are less flexible with their thinking than young people,” Dodds says. “They probably have greater levels of guilt.” For other people climate change is simply “too abstract to engage. For those who do engage, it’s often terrifying.” His own experience writing his book, "Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos," is a case in point. “It was very intense,” he says. “I finished the book, I put everything away. If we think about these things all the time, we are really going to be paralyzed.”

Climate change is the mother of all conundrums. It’s too big to fear, too invisible to see, too unpredictable to predict. There’s really nothing psychologically strange about us sticking our heads in the sand when the sky is falling or an extinction event seems just around the corner. After all, we’re mammals. Such defenses have worked for how long—100 million years or so?

Now we have Genesis to lean on, guilt to deflect our logic, technology as a savior. We’ve come a long way from T. Rex chasing our rat-sized forebears through the swamps and shaking him/her rudely out of the trees for dinner. Yet today our brains remain alert for the scary attack. Technology’s promise to solve climate change gets tremendous amounts of brain time because, psychologically, many of us have turned off listening to nature, which is warning us, and tuned into technology, which promises to save us. Our psyches prefer to get in bed with the newcomer rather than wrestle with fear. And, of course, we also like to turn up the music, boot up new games, stream in flicks, socialize with our thumbs, and chug lots of caffeine and alcohol—all enhanced by the very technology that enfolds us and gives us pleasure.

When I asked Dodds if the Millennials, a generation born between the mid-1970s and 1990, had minds that were wired a little differently, he said, “I want to say yes—the Millennials can spark change.” But he wasn’t overly confident they would. Enviro angst may be sharpest in the minds of Millennials honed by information accumulation and data-drenched neurons, but their minds are still similar to the rest of ours.

Dodds does believe that his generation can explore and better accept the complex feelings we harbor about nature, from exploitation to idealization, from “Drill, baby, drill,” to “Oh, what a paradise!” Millennials have demonstrated a willingness to challenge authority, to confront institutional thinking that puts economics first, green washes progress, and pumps more and more carbon skyward. Can the young collectively slow our destructive spiral? Possibly. But the institutional thinking of the Chevrons, Exxons and BofAs of the world will only be changed “by a huge outpouring of dissent,” Dodds says. Presently, there is no sign of such dissent reaching a tipping point.

Instead, our climate change response demonstrates “a fundamental failure of thought,” Dodds says. To alter that, he suggests, and hopes to see, an emergence of mental “meshworks,” swarms of information, data, relationships and theory that all tend towards unity. Not a unity that results in some “master theory,” but in a web of connections that communicates and builds a frame. A frame accessible to billions of minds and strong enough on which to erect action. That might be the magic key.

It won’t be easy to achieve. Present dangers he sees include our eagerness to portray the natural world as “a lifestyle choice” rather than the Earth tit from which we all are nourished. In a macro/micro point counterpoint, he links the planet and Freud who famously said, “the child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it.” Millennials like him know the tit is gone. Not just mom’s. But the Earth’s. The Garden of Eden has closed its doors and Satan is now a CEO commanding the devil’s chariots in service of the rich, from which he sells branded junk built from fossil fuels.

We need to get more personal about climate change, Dodds insists. Awaken the dormant ancient parts of our brains closest to nature. Revive the eco-mind, if you will. And love other species, face our complex feelings about them.

Millennials know this for reasons that are not clear cut. Maybe it’s because they grew up with insidious, widespread pollution and have little experience of what it was like to live before these concerns. Interestingly, they are drawn to a popular spin-off of a world of pollution, the eco-disaster film. Such films are interesting, Dobbs says, “because of their themes, the fact that they are appearing now, and the contradictory responses they have generated.” From "The Day After Tomorrow" through "Avatar" and, more recently, in "Melancholia" and "The Hunger Games," we see “anxieties and hopes explored…a caricature of ecology…a suicide motif…the green apocalypse.”

Dodd’s book mixes all of this together in a kind of tsunami of ideas and a chorus of brainy voices. Alas, it’s not an easy read. I wish he’d had a more forceful editor. The book deserves wide attention, especially from Millennials. All revolutions are fired by the young, their brains sparked by their contemporaries more than by anything else. A couple chapter titles, and subheads, suggest the provocative material within: Complexity theory and ecosystem collapse; The rise of the eco-disaster film; Environmental despair and the techno-god.

Opening the pages on environmental despair you find a quote from a Jungian eco-therapist named Mary Jayne Rust. Speaking with an edge and force Dodds rarely attains, Rust says: “We are completely fucked …. If many people are secretly thinking this, and I suspect they are, their motivation for taking action in the face of climate change is zero. As therapists, we know that when we face our worst fears and feel the effects, we stand a chance of moving through darkness into enormous creativity…. The ‘We’re completely fucked’ response is yet another layer of the defense system, which gives us license to give up thinking.”

Millennials like Joseph Dodds are just beginning to think creatively and to act in alarmingly fresh new says. They occupy a realm of potential change at the time when such potential is most needed. They possess what I call the mind of now. They are earth-centric, acutely aware, community-hunting primates with survival on the brain and inequality gnawing at their souls. If I imagine them to be more than they are, potential heroes and heroines unable to find jobs, up to their necks in debt, ranters at the powers to be, dreamers of a better world for all, transforming their brains under the pressure of fears us older generations cannot really know, so be it. I am guilty.

Joe Sherman’s books include "Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air," "Fast Lane on a Dirt Road: A Contemporary History of Vermont," and "Young Vermonters: Not An Endangered Species." Joseph Dodds's new book is "Psychoanalysis and Ecology at the Edge of Chaos."