Choosing/Decision-Making

I love the site Low Tech Magazine, which I consider one of the best on the net. Reading its piece Too Much Combustion, Too Little Fire, the section "Energy Use Compared: Ancient vs. Modern Households" made me think of my food power consumption. It was December and I don't heat my apartment so it's cool. Yet my refrigerator was on. As I started to wonder if I could get by without it, at least during the winter. The apartment is cool anyway and my food is less perishable -- more root vegetables, cabbage, etc -- I figured the best way to find out was to try. As I mention in my TEDx talks, the pleasant surprises that avoiding packaged food and flying improved my life…

As this phrase---if we don't lower our birth rate nature will raise our death rate---came out of my mouth in conversation yesterday, I could tell it captured a lot in a few words. I expect I'll start saying it more and promoting it. It gets to the heart of what we need to do. All research I know of says that we are over the planet's carrying capacity, which means if we don't lower our population, it will crash, as does every population that overshoots what their population can support. People can't get past thinking that the growth rate is decreasing, but the growth rate isn't even the population going down. It's just rising more slowly. Pick any environmental issue. Its causes lead to overpopulation.…

Remember this scene of Cypher's selling out his crew for his personal pleasure in The Matrix? https://youtu.be/Z7BuQFUhsRM My letter to an 80-year-old, prompted by an article on the environment 80-year-olds and 20-year-olds will view the environment differently. 80-year-olds might consider global warming, plastic pollution, extinctions, and so on abstractly. If environmental disaster will hit around 2050, that's someone else's problem. To 20-year-olds, 2050 is the prime of their lives. They have to deal with messes that generations before them left for them. I've emailed with a guy in his 80s whose only interests that he acts on regarding flying is his own. He loves the consequences of his actions that he wants, such as visiting places, and ignores the ones he doesn't like, like the…

How's this for simple and effective: Require all single-use items to carry a message that they pollute. I'm not sure the best wording, but something like: Short version: This object pollutes and is unnecessary. Please reuse durable alternatives. Long version: This object pollutes and is unnecessary. Making it created greenhouse gases and depletes resources. Disposing of it poisons our food supply. It may take centuries to break down. Using it makes you responsible. Please reuse durable alternatives. The messages don't mandate behavior, so it's not a nanny-state action. It provides information to make the market more transparent and companies more accountable. Nations around the world do it with tobacco, nicotine, and alcohol.