Ela Bhatt passed yesterday. She knew me when I was a baby and I had lunch with her a couple years ago when she visited her family in New Haven. My parents knew her in Ahmedabad, India before I was born. My father remained very close friends with her until she passed, meaning over half a century. She acknowledges him in her book Anubandh: Building Hundred-Mile Communities. The Times of[…] 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 →

Context: People consistently push back on the suggestion of them acting more sustainably, especially environmentalists and liberals, claiming that individual action doesn’t achieve meaningful results, as if acting sustainably was a burden or chore. Since when did acting in harmony with nature become so onerous? Why pretend to care about the environment if you don’t like it so much? New view: How about any action at all? Nearly no American[…] Keep reading →

Today begins my sixth month disconnected from the electric grid. I didn’t think I would make it more then a couple days when I started. Instead, I’ve found the experience liberating and joyful. Not hurting other people eases the conscience. In fact, connecting with them through taking more personal responsibility for how I affect them, including you, mitigated through the environment. It’s a sustainability leadership exercise first and foremost. More[…] Keep reading →

What did Abraham Lincoln mean when he said “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”? Doesn’t everyone recognize him as one of the nation’s and history’s great leaders? Doesn’t that mean he was a great man and figured out what to do? You might think coming up with the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment required great genius. On the contrary, he couldn’t[…] Keep reading →

Pollution hurts people. I polluted less in the past four or five months than ever before. Not polluting connects with people and cultures. Why don’t we try more? Here’s the bill: What my sustainability leadership will lead to If you think what I’m doing is pointless or won’t add up, you don’t know how leadership works. At the very least, some people will think “You can do that? I want[…] Keep reading →

I meant to post yesterday that it began my second year with the fridge unplugged, but I forgot because as unbelievable as it felt to make it more than a few days the first time, it just takes practice. All humans lived without refrigerators for 300,000 years until about a hundred years ago. Then we became entitled, dependent, and obese. It turns out what made it work most was relying[…] Keep reading →