As a general rule, my parents won’t buy a magazine unless it contains an article about meditation, the environment, or how meditation could save the environment. Issues of Yoga Journal and Ode: For Intelligent Optimists litter the couch and fill the recycling bin.

Recently, my dad took it to the extreme when he brought home the September/October issue of Adbusters, a publication most likely owned by an English-speaking, global warming-obsessed version of Che Guevara. Adbusters costs $8.95. It’s thicker than a composition notebook. On the back cover, the words “Your Economy Needs YOU to Keep Consuming” are superimposed over a creepy green clown. This particular issue was a collection of charts and essays that relate to the current economic system and its impact on the environment. It reads more like a coffee-table book than a magazine; it has no table of contents, and the drawings and photographs take up full pages.

I started reading the magazine while camping, so I was able to ponder the material without feeling too guilty about my own eco-footprint. But I still felt like Julia Roberts trying to stop Dermot Mulroney from marrying Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding — frantic, vaguely hopeless, and aware that the wedding is in less than 48 hours.

We have more than 48 hours to figure out how to solve the environmental crisis and prevent global catastrophe. However, Adbusters warned me that finding a solution will be more difficult than the world wants to admit.

In an untitled essay on an unnumbered page, a University of Texas professor named Robert Jensen told me that making slight changes to our current systems won’t save the planet. Cutting back on fuel consumption won’t bring carbon dioxide levels down to a safe level. Taking shorter showers won’t save enough clean water for future use. Humans must come up with entirely different systems, and fast.

Jensen compared our current way of life to a ride “on a sleek train.” The train tracks end abruptly in the distance, and the train will derail if it continues. Some think we should stop the train and continue our journey on foot. Most of us, however, say that we like the train, and that getting off the train “is not realistic.”

On the contrary, getting off the train is the only realistic plan. If we stay on the train, we will die. Even if we slow it down, it will eventually derail, and we will die.

Conserving resources, like reducing the train’s speed, buys us time without solving our problems. We need to find the equivalent of walking. We need a completely different idea of how to live.

Unfortunately, humans fail at thinking of completely different ideas. I know this. I watch alien movies.

Aliens in movies always look like something that we’ve seen before. E.T. looks like a withered human, and the aliens in “War of the Worlds” have heads like Triceratops. The aliens in “Zathura” resemble lizards, the aliens in “Alien” look like arthropods, and the aliens in “District 9” are called “prawns,” because they look like prawns.

Even in Hollywood, a place that relies on imagination to make a profit, nobody can think of a new idea.

After reading Jensen’s article and thinking about alien movies, the future didn’t seem so bright. But just before I succumbed to hopelessness and drove two blocks to the grocery store, Adbusters gave me some hope. The essays in it suggested a couple of ways to change.

One essay pointed out that humans sell natural resources to make money. Selling oil and dead trees is like selling pieces of one’s house; the practice helps in the short run, but later we’ll be left with no clean air. We could stop doing this.

The other essay suggested that we pay the “true cost” of whatever we buy. We could price items according to the damage their production inflicts on the planet.

If we make many individual drastic changes like these, a total solution might emerge. I really hope it won’t involve walking long distances.