I don’t look for this stuff. It’s impossible to miss. Where is the leadership in sustainability? Why is everyone so slippery? (I know the answer, of course. Lincoln said it best: “Nothing does more damage to you than to do something you believe is wrong.” When you do, you will lie, cheat, deny, and suppress to avoid facing the internal conflict.) I start teaching this semester at NYU tomorrow. The[…] Keep reading →

The title says it all, but let’s look in more detail. Take heroin and you get euphoria, but you also suffer the addiction and ruination of your life. You cause others to suffer too, but not directly from the drug. They suffer from your degradation, running out of money, isolation, and so on. In principle, you could use heroin and not cause others to suffer. Gamble and you occasionally win,[…] Keep reading →

We were all born into a culture with certain values. When I was a child, flying was an unalloyed good. It meant spreading culture, learning new cultures and cuisine, and so on. In principle we knew something about jet exhaust and that extraction caused people to be displaced from the lands and occasionally spilled. Cars meant freedom. The solution to pollution is dilution. But the world changed and our understanding[…] Keep reading →

A friend commented that public transportation should be free. I texted back “I concur.” I’ve considered the issue from many angles before. There are many pros and cons and I’ve concluded the benefits outweigh the costs. Many agree. “Around 100 cities in the world offer free public transit, the vast majority of them in Europe, especially France and Poland,” according to the New York Times’ piece Should Public Transit Be[…] Keep reading →

Elections are coming up. They happen about once a year. People fly all the time. We buy takeout and bottled water all the time. We buy cars all year round and fill up our gas tanks daily. Which of your actions impacts the world more: voting once a year or two or spending thousands of dollars every year on polluting industries that grow from our purchases, infiltrate government, control legislation,[…] Keep reading →

People who tell me I’m wasting my time trying to lead culture toward sustainability: My mom, my dad, the lady at the coop checkout today, nearly everyone. People who tell me to stick with it: Nelson Mandela (“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”), Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Jesus, Winston Churchill (“Never, never, never give up.”). Also Harriet Tubman’s quote I posted a couple days ago: If you[…] Keep reading →

I’m proud to have given blood Tuesday. If you haven’t listened to yesterday’s podcast episode with Sebastian Junger, listen to hear his story of receiving ten emergency transmissions leading to his giving blood regularly. Why ashamed too? Because when the nurse checked me in, filling in my address from my driver’s license, she asked if I’d changed my address. The address in the system showed my freshman year dorm address.[…] Keep reading →

People once wondered if we would run out of fossil fuels. People who liked fossil fuels delight in showing how we keep finding more. “Ha!”, they imply, “we’ll never run out. It’s not a problem. Anyone who thinks we’ll run out is a fool.” We could talk about the finite number of molecules of oil, coal, and gas under the Earth’s surface, but when an economist like Julian Simon says[…] Keep reading →

In college, after I stopped eating meat but still ate dairy, I met a young woman who was vegan. I think I knew then that I intended to become vegan at some indefinite future time, but didn’t see a path to it. I’d lived in Paris a year and learned to love cheese too much. She was allergic to dairy, so ate none. Since then, I’ve often commented that nearly[…] Keep reading →