I can’t believe how many people parrot things like “Be the change you want to see in the world” and then sustain the status quo. Do you believe what you say or not? Why not live it? In my experience, being the change works. Not living by your values fails.

My letter to the New Yorker’s editor in September led to a reporter, Zach Helfand, visiting and writing a story on me. They published it today (including spotlighting it, see below): Off the Grid in the Big City: It begins, “Josh Spodek disconnected the circuit breaker in his apartment, and now—thanks to solar-powered vegan stew—his carbon footprint is about that of three house cats.“ Along with the New Yorker piece,[…] Keep reading →

Part 1 of the introduction shares a few stories to frame how I approach sustainability, then describes the outcomes I designed it to bring about, mainly to enable you to lead yourself to a more sustainable future that you’ll find preferable to any alternative.

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 →

160 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Union army had been freeing slaves in seceding slave states for over a year and the proclamation didn’t free all slaves, nor did it end slavery, so to say, as I’ve heard, that one stroke of the pen freed all the slaves overstates the case. Still, it was a major step forward. Beside freeing many slaves, it pressured slave[…] Keep reading →

When I spoke to Tom Szaky, founder of Terracycle, on the podcast, he shared an origin story. He had bought a used industrial composting machine and arranged with Princeton’s food services team to take a few barrels of their food scraps. it was summer, the composting machine arrived late, and the barrels of scraps were mostly sealed. When they opened the barrels, the stench was revolting, the maggots everywhere, and[…] Keep reading →

Today begins month 8 of my apartment disconnected from the electric grid. I’d wondered what I’d do as the weather got colder and days shortened. Now I passed the winter solstice so days will lengthen. The weather will still cool for another few weeks, but I may have passed the hardest part. It occurred to me I might just have to keep going for the year. We’ll see. It can[…] Keep reading →