Readers who have followed my blog over a year know that for the past few years I've taken pictures of the trees people throw out on the street. Since history shows that the tradition that Americans associate with Christmas came from paganism, and I'm concerned people who complain about "wars" on Christmas or Christians, I call them Christmas Pagan trees. That way if someone quotes me about how we can change this tradition without attacking Christians' faith, they can see I'm not waging war on Christianity, but on something borrowed from paganism. To clarify, I have no problem with paganism either. I do have a problem with people cutting down trees for reasons even they don't believe in. Everyone knows we have environmental problems. More…

The building with the clock tower in the picture below is my local public library. The iron fence behind the guy in the white hat encloses a park behind the library. It had two crab apple trees in it. As far as I could tell, nobody else knew it produced crab apples. The branches were higher than you could reach or even see the crab apples since they were the size of grapes. Still, the fruit would drop to the ground in the fall. Little yellow crab apples would cover the ground. I would collect them and eat them. I suspect most Americans wouldn't like them because of their tang, but I found them plenty sweet. A few months ago I noticed one of the…

This photograph shows a guy employed by a local "business improvement district" to pick up litter, the "BID" on the gray trash bag and his coat/uniform show. How do we reach this level of failure? In principle we shouldn't litter. For that matter, with all the talk about circular economies and reaching "net zero," shouldn't we not produce goods that could become litter? Doesn't New York City have a sanitation department? Let's look at the number of failures of people violating their values, policy, and so on that we reach a private organization picking up litter. People aren't using trash cans The sanitation department isn't cleaning litter. On the contrary, it motivates people creating waste since we paid for it to be cleaned The Business…

I see these plots a fair amount from people on the right. They come from Bjorn Lomborg. They're a straw man and a distraction. Global warming is a problem, but it's one of many. As I've written, I recommend Only specify fixing climate and carbon if you want to wreck everything else (forests, biodiversity, rivers, etc) because that happens when you do. There are other places where our behavior mediated through the environment is killing people by the tens of millions. For example, as I wrote in Why I work on sustainability leadership here and now despite other things I could do instead: The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals, reports that nine million people have died per year from breathing polluted air…