Would you expect a plantation owner to have any idea how to abolish slavery? They would be the last people to ask to make a strategy for ending the practice providing their livelihoods and wealth. To ask a plantation owner to end slavery is to ask them how to give up everything they feel they own. They’d risk vengeance from the people they freed. They’d have to acknowledge their actions[…] Keep reading →

People sometimes ask me my definition of sustainability. Usually I say something about maintaining earth’s ability to sustain life. Because we humans depend on other life, maintaining earth’s ability to sustain life means its ability to sustain human life too. I like lots of life, but I like human life especially. I’m testing a new definition of sustainability: To be able to live without taking or harming others’ life, liberty,[…] Keep reading →

A brief political history of sustainability [If you’ve watched my Short Course on Sustainability Leadership, you’ll recognize the following from my session on the political opportunities. I’m putting only the main points here. I’ll develop it more in a future post. I wanted to start writing. If you haven’t watched the course, I think you’ll find it one of the most important resources on our culture, the environment, sustainability, and[…] Keep reading →

I was listening to a podcast ostensibly about sustainability and nature. The particular podcast isn’t important because this pattern happens in many places. One of the guests was talking about tourism that seemed no different from any other tourism, but she called it eco-tourism. The only difference I could tell from any other tourism was the name. People were destroying cultures and ecosystems as much as any other tourism. The[…] Keep reading →

I want to clarify some consequences of realizing that polluting means hurting people, as I wrote in my post Replacing “sustainability” with “not hurting people” and “polluting” with “hurting people”. People often say that some people can’t worry about sustainability because they’re working three jobs to take care of three kids and having to worry about the next meal means they don’t have the luxury of worrying about the environment.[…] Keep reading →

This post is about how to think about fixing historical wrongs, like reparations for past injustices. Imagine playing soccer on a tilted field. Amazingly, I found an image of such a thing online, but it shows a field tilted sideways. I mean tilted so one team has to run uphill on offense. Almost surely one team will have an advantage, though my soccer-playing friends can’t tell which. [Edit: I since[…] Keep reading →

I spoke this post title in conversation. As I said them, I realized I had to post them to my blog: “I solve problems. I’m not putting band-aids on symptoms“ Most purported solution I see proposed for the environment put band-aids on symptoms. I don’t oppose helping the poor, conservation efforts for the Amazon or other nature being encroached on, avoiding straws, eating less meat, turning off lights when not[…] Keep reading →

I generally define sustainability as not lowering the amount of multicellular life earth can sustain. Single-celled life turns out to comprise a lot of life and our behavior may not affect it, but I’m partial to humans and the life we depend on, like other animals, plants, and fungi. Humans have decreased the amount of life. If sustainability keeps the number unchanged, it’s like a zero net affect. Unsustainability means[…] Keep reading →

Some problems are like a mosquito. It may bother and annoy you, but usually not enough to keep you from what you’re doing. Say you’re walking and a mosquito bothers you. You may swat at it and try to kill it, but you can generally keep doing what you were doing. Many people see our environmental symptoms as mosquito problems. They see them as bothersome, but not enough to turn[…] Keep reading →