Sometimes I feel like I’m responding to someone who fell on the subway tracks. No one else acts. I jump down onto the tracks to help the person to safety, but the person is morbidly obese and struggles just to lift themselves from the ground. They’ve decided to stop trying. “It’s too hard. It’s not worth it.” They resign themselves to the train hitting them. “As long as I can’t[…] Keep reading →

I wrote recently in When changing fast is easier than slow about the growth in number of slaves in the United States based on a peer-reviewed paper From ‘20 and odd’ to 10 million: The growth of the slave population in the United States, by J. David Hacker in the journal Slavery & Abolition. That paper also reported the cumulative number of slaves in the United States. Before looking at[…] Keep reading →

Rationalizations and justifications no matter how specious and self-serving sound legitimate and true to the person using them. I hear a lot of rationalizations and justifications on why people pollute and deplete. To the person saying them, they sound legitimate and true. Rarely are they. The other day someone repeated one I’ve heard before but didn’t realize how insidious and powerful it is. The person saying it stuck with it[…] Keep reading →

Researching more for my upcoming book and planning to write opinion pieces, I’m learning more limited government, free market thought and practice relevant to sustainability and the environment. It’s relevant beyond anything I expected. If only people asked questions of people they disagreed with and listened to their answers in 2024 as much as they tried to convince and defeat, we’d have solved a lot of problems where we mutually[…] Keep reading →

Our environmental problems have become a politically polarized issue. Why? I don’t know values of any political tradition that oppose clean air, land, water, and food, while all seem consistent with stewardship. Meanwhile, the main political tribes seem to see their opponents as obvious enemies, blatantly exacerbating the problems. Liberals say conservatives and libertarians don’t care and are greedy. They say they prefer profit over helping other people or wildlife.[…] Keep reading →

I like the idea that if I create something, you and I agree on a price, and we exchange your cash for my product then we mutually benefit. The more I sell to people voluntarily choosing to buy what I made, the more mutual benefit I create. What if to make my product, I harm someone? For example, if in my manufacturing process, I save money by dumping mercury in[…] Keep reading →

People jump to treating our environmental problems as rooted in science, therefore they look for solutions from scientists. I’m seeing the problem more as social than scientific in the following way. First, I want to clarify that understanding the mechanisms by which Earth’s ecosystems are changed depend on science. I’m not challenging that we understand the mechanisms through observation, experiment, debate, and the other tools of science. When I pollute[…] Keep reading →

On my seventh appearance on After Dark with Rob and Andrew, I share how I’ve been diving into conservative history, thought, philosophy, and community. Both hosts have been on my podcast and I meet Rob periodically in person in Manhattan, where he lives too. About the hosts: Rob is the founder of The Multicultural Conservative Foundation, whose mission is to promote the political diversity of conservatism through social media. He[…] Keep reading →

I see the statement Everyone should change except me. as one that defines our time. We recognize the problems. Like traffic, we all contribute to them, but also like traffic, we feel like they—other people—cause it and we’re caught in a mess of their making. Of course we cause traffic as much as anyone. We cause our cultural and environmental problems too. We could change.