Freedom

You can imagine all sorts of reasons that made it more possible for me to live with my apartment disconnected from the electric grid than you, but admit it: if you didn't know I did it, you'd believe it was impossible. Yet today began my seventh month. I'm not saying because I could do it, you can. I learned that because all human beings did it for 300,000 years, I could. I didn't think it would be possible and I'd lived with my fridge unplugged for eight months by then. I aimed for one month not knowing how I'd make it past a few days. If you thought something was impossible and then it happens, some beliefs that led you to consider it impossible are…

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 energy and ecological crises. In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”…

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 more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050. I calculated I'd be 79. People around my age and older concluded, "that situation sounds bad, but I'll be pretty old, so not for me, but it will be bad for someone. I hope they solve it." Already, that conclusion is sad, or would be when…

The end of today marks the end of one month off the electric grid in Manhattan. Like the experiments before it, including avoiding packaged food for a week, avoiding flying for a year, and unplugging my fridge, before starting, I didn't think I would make it, I thought it would worsen my life, and I didn't know what challenges I'd face. Also like those experiments, I enjoyed the results and learned in ways I couldn't have predicted. Experiential learning does that in ways reading, writing, and analyzing don't. For example, I experienced limitations of solar like three overcast, rainy days in a row. I connected with people and cultures across time and space who couldn't just go to the fridge or order takeout for food.…

This post is me trying to express the sadness I feel seeing litter everywhere, increasing, imagining the beauty Manhattan island once held before we paved it over; seeing how doof covers over beauty of the human body with disease and excess. My sadness runs deeper than that lost beauty. I lament the abdication and capitulation of responsibility. At least half the people I see walking the streets of this city are carrying something disposable. Nearly everything they put in their mouths comes with poison packaging it. They act as if they had no choice, as if it was normal that every thing they eat or consume comes with pollution. They've given up on nature. They don't know what they're missing. They act as if not…