I started my experiment about two weeks off my electric billing cycle, so about two weeks into my sixth month, I think this bill marks my fifth in a row with zero kilowatt-hours: Every month from the first until this one, I’ve thought I couldn’t go on much longer and expected to give up. But I keep thinking of people displaced from their land for fuel and minerals I don’t[…] Keep reading →

Several friends and readers pointed me to recent long article in the New York Times, What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay by Noah Gallagher Shannon. Does this paragraph describing and quoting the country’s president sound familiar? [Uruguayan President José] Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked[…] Keep reading →

In its August 22 issue, the New Yorker published a piece, Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration: For the developing world, refrigeration is growth. In Rwanda, it could spark an economic transformation. August 22 happened to start my fourth month of my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, which is to say 3.93 months longer than I expected to make it. The article was about bringing[…] Keep reading →

I talked to a woman a generation older than me. She told me how she and her husband agreed that they were glad to have lived full lives before humanity faced the environmental tragedies she considers inevitable. Many people have done that calculation where they hear when our situation will get catastrophic. I did it at least a decade ago, when I first read the prediction that there would be[…] Keep reading →

I got my latest Con Ed bill, for August. For many people August is their highest bill, from air conditioning. Well, mine is zero kilowatt-hours for the third month in a row. Today is day 110, about 108 days longer than I thought possible before starting. You probably think you couldn’t do it. I thought I couldn’t either, until I did. Instead, this is Freedom: not hurting people. What else[…] Keep reading →

Once we valued higher goals than ourselves. I don’t know if younger generations have seen Casablanca, but those of us who have remember Rick’s lines at the climax: Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that[…] Keep reading →

The bigger an achievement, the more it’s just the start of another stage in your life. Maybe swimming across the Hudson was my start of learning that you don’t have to fly to create life experiences, that we don’t have to accept what others consider impossible, and that we aren’t risking our lives to do things people have done for thousands of years. I’ve used the picture of my swimming[…] Keep reading →

My proposal and rationale for the next amendment for the United States Constitution. It will sound crazy, impossible, and too hard at first, as it did with me. But the more you consider it, the more the objections will fade. It is the right tool for the right job. Nothing else is. I’ll write more about it later. For now, just the audio.

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 →