Awareness

Raising awareness and education are pathetic, impotent excuses for acting on the environment people hide behind. I've seen people talking about their awareness of litter problems while obliviously holding coffee in single-use disposable cups. There are a lot of Enron environmentalists. You may be one. A main problem with awareness is that people feel aware while they aren't. They're aware of what they know but ignorant of what the don't. When they start feeling aware, they stop changing their behavior and become complacent. Peer-reviewed results Two peer-reviewed journal articles document that environmental self-identity played an ambiguous role in predicting actual environmental impacts. Instead, environmental impacts were best predicted by people's income level. . . individuals with high pro-environmental self-identity . . . typically emphasize actions…

My post in LinkedIn today, "The Benefits of Flying Without the Costs," begins Airplanes have existed about a century and affordable for a few generations. Suggest to typical Americans not to fly and most will tell you it's impossible. That's a lie. I told myself the lie as much as anyone. Don't get me wrong. I like traveling, but now I'm honest with what I like about it and get a lot more out of it. They mean they'd have to rethink their lives. Most of their lives conflict with their values already and could use rethinking, so that rethinking would help them. They've lost sight that people have found ways to be happy for hundreds of thousands of years. The experience of not flying…

What are we doing?! I can't believe how dissociated we are to what we're doing to our world and not stopping ourselves, or seeing that we're making our lives worse in the process. Case in point: this advertisement I saw walking home from teaching the other day. In case you don't know, Manhattan Mini Storage rents closets you can store your stuff in. They have locations throughout the New York. What are we doing?! Here's a partial list of what seems crazy to me: We have so much junk that we pay rent to store what we can't fit in our homes We pay to air condition our junk We advertise our capacity to air condition that junk You might point out some people value…

I can't believe it's not obvious to everyone that driving the problems of pollution, global warming, resource depletion, extinctions, conflict over resources, pestilence, and related issues is overpopulation. It's not the only issue, but it's one of the main drivers. Maybe the main one. People have a weird knee-jerk response to think the opposite of overpopulation is eugenics, Nazism, killing, giving up modernity, returning to living in caves, economic collapse under too many old people, or other bizarre misunderstandings. We're all going to die. We don't have to kill anyone. We've increased our productivity by enough that we can support older populations. Lowering a population only means having fewer children for a while. Humans have done so where the environment prevented population growth for as…