Anyone who knows me knows how much I love spending time in nature and want to conserve it so it can regenerate. Still, even I considered the idea of giving rights to animals and nature weird and possibly counter productive. This article’s headline made me cringe at first, Streams and lakes have rights, a US county decided. Now they’re suing Florida: How can streams have rights? How can they sue?[…] Keep reading →

Martin Seligman is known as the father of positive psychology. In his words, “when I started, psychology was all about fear, conflict, struggle, and competition. I was part of movement that changed it to be also about meaning, control, love, engagement, accomplishment, success, and hope.” He started that change by chance. In 1967, studying depression and responses to challenges, he discovered an unexpected result in dogs. He had administered an[…] Keep reading →

I grew up learning about the Great American Melting Pot. It said that Americans came from all over the world but that spending time together would create a common culture of collaboration. As a kid, I didn’t question that things would work that way. Someone in the families of everyone I knew had arrived here not that long before. at least as far as I knew. I didn’t think to[…] Keep reading →

An observation based on my experience with physics and economics: both fields create models that predict how nature will behave, often people for economists. Then we observe nature and people. In physics if nature contradicts our predictions, we say we’re wrong and the model needs fixing. When people behave differently than economists predict, economists say people are wrong and need fixing. Economists claim that a country’s or the world’s population[…] Keep reading →

I posted on handling what people call pandemic fatigue to Thrive Global today: Pandemic Fatigue? How to Achieve Pandemic Thriving. Here’s the text of the article: When I learned I would be locked down indefinitely, knowing we were all heading into unknown territory, I looked for role models. Who had handled such a situation successfully? Nelson Mandela had been locked down for twenty-seven years, most of that time on a[…] Keep reading →

“Our finest hour” never describes a bright sunny morning with the birds singing, however fine such an hour. I associate the phrase with the movie Apollo 13. The flight director said the astronauts’ perilous state after an explosion in space on the way to the moon “could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever experienced.” His peer responded, “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our[…] Keep reading →

People disagree on how great or not great America is. Some say we’ve lost our edge in this area or that. Others say we excel in everything. By some measures like GDP we’ve outperformed others for generations. Our military dominates others in total size and firepower. We’ve almost never been invaded. What makes us excel when we do? I’ll answer this question from my perspective not to say good, bad,[…] Keep reading →

Corporations and governments are pledging to lower emissions, maybe to net zero (What “net zero” and “closed loop” mean.), by 2030 or 2050. Nearly everyone recognizes goals past the pledgers’ retirement close to meaningless. What will give them meaning is not hope or appreciation, but accountability, especially imposed from without. Even with accountability, these pledges could set earlier targets. We all know they can. The tragic message from everyone except,[…] Keep reading →

I don’t have to do what I do to act in stewardship to others. I get to. By avoiding flying and packaged for or by picking up others’ litter or training people for free to start offshoots of my podcast, I’m not missing out on better things or sacrificing my time. If you think stewardship to others, especially those helpless to protect themselves from my actions that hurt them, lessens[…] Keep reading →