Did America’s founders know they’d win in 1774, say, at the time of the Intolerable Acts? Did the other colonists? Did people think independence was possible? Nobody knew. Probably most would bet against their fighting the greatest empire in history. We who work on changing culture to sustainability are like America’s founders in 1774. Obviously I’m not saying exactly. There are many differences, but in that we are taking on[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been reading podcast guest Manisha Sinha’s book The Counterrevolution of Slavery, which recounts how slaveholders spoke and acted to justify and advance their institution of slavery. I know to expect it from having seen it before in podcast guest James Oakes’s The Ruling Race and Jenkins’ Proslavery Thought in the Old South, but I’m still shocked at how relevant their thinking is today. They treat a different institution, but[…] Keep reading →

When I started working on sustainability instead of hoping someone else would fix our problem, I saw my goal as restoring nature, also conserving and protecting it. Learning that our environmental problems result from our behavior, which results from our culture, has taught me that we have to work on ourselves. I see how much our culture promotes addiction, pollution, depletion, and plunder. I see that we are abandoning or[…] Keep reading →

Maybe you’ve heard me share how from when I had my own kitchen, I always had ice cream in my freezer and pretzels and Doritos in my cupboard. I struggled to pace my consuming them, but nearly always ate more than I meant to, but kept buying more. Now I say there isn’t enough money in the world for me to eat that stuff. I also talk about my relationship[…] Keep reading →

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 →