This week I finished: Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer: A friend recommended this movie, I think because I’ve been talking about how there aren’t in our environmental situation the “bad guys” everyone thinks. There aren’t “good guys” either. We’re in a system that nobody deliberately created. My book traces the origins of how our system started from people doing things nobody could have expected to lead here. We[…] Keep reading →

Months ago, when I read Adam Alter’s book and hosted him on the podcast, I learned that executives of social media companies often don’t let their children use the services they work for. They know they design them to addict. I recently saw an old friend who works at Facebook. He has two kids. I asked him if he let them use Facebook. He said “no,” with a look of:[…] Keep reading →

I’m approaching one year training for and participating in the NYPD auxiliary police program. I wrote earlier about mustering for the September 11 service. Tonight I walked in the annual memorial service for two auxiliary officers who were killed on duty on this day in 2007. I took this picture as we were starting. Here’s a picture another auxiliary officer took from inside the group. I’m not sure if I’m[…] Keep reading →

Abraham Lincoln talked about a house divided being unable to stand. A Constitution that protected freedom in one place and slavery in another contradicted itself. You can protect freedom only. You can protect slavery only. If you try to do both, that divided house cannot stand. Likewise, you can have a Constitution that protects your life, liberty, and property from me taking or destroying it without your consent. You can[…] Keep reading →

I was reading The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future, by Gretchen Bakke, “One of Bill Gates’s Favorite Books of 2016,” where I learned that refrigerators didn’t follow the grid. I had it backward. Fridges didn’t come about for health or to improve food quality. Fridges became popular to drive more energy consumption, and therefore pollution and depletion. It turns out Bakke gave a talk on[…] Keep reading →

Once, all garbage biodegraded. All garbage would turn into food for something within time scales relevant to human lives. Not today. Plastic can take centuries to degrade, during which time they kill wildlife and poison us. Plenty of residue from our culture poisons more, like pesticides and home cleaning products. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could just drop the parts of the fruit, vegetable, or animal they didn’t want to eat on[…] Keep reading →

Longtime readers know Rob, Andrew, and I appear on each other’s podcasts and programs. They strongly support Trump. I strongly support sustainability leadership. Many people who support Trump or act on the environment consider the other group the enemy. We are friends. I recently appeared on their podcast-now-videocast: When Sustainability Meets MAHA And Making English The Official Language. It was evening and I disconnected my apartment from the electric grid[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone: Let me give you context to what prompted me to watch this movie after so long. I don’t remember when I first watched it. Before learning about sustainability, I thought technology would solve our problems. Mainly I thought fusion would, but along the way nuclear, solar, and wind seemed promising. As I learned more about each, I learned that they didn’t[…] Keep reading →

I wrote in my post a couple days ago, Racist jokes, polluting, depleting, and integrity, I lamented how environmentalists missed the greatest point of acting by your values: credibility and integrity. Sadly, sustainability lacks both. I wrote: Does anyone believe that not polluting or depleting once or twice will end our environmental problems? Of course not. The point of not living sustainably is not to solve all our environmental problems.[…] Keep reading →