Can anyone imagine a sports or business team suggesting the way to success is to ignore teamwork and only focus on individual action? Here is what winning as a team looks like. You can imagine how it feels. When I hear someone say, “one person’s actions don’t matter”, “only governments and corporations can make a difference,” and the like, I want to let them in on how a come-from-behind victory[…] Keep reading →

Growth-based economics is so twisted, it acts as if degrowth is hard. Imagine the case of an island with enough resources to sustain, say, five thousand people with five thousand people living on it. Should they grow the population? Might deliberately choosing to limit birthrate to bring the population to, say, four thousand make them more resilient in case of a natural disaster that limited food production one year? If[…] Keep reading →

Can we grow enough forests and use enough regenerative agriculture to sequester enough carbon to undo global warming? To answer this question you have to understand the two carbon cycles. I’m simplifying, but you can think of two different cycles of carbon. One is the regular life cycle of carbon-based life forms. When something lives, it contains carbon, including trees, humans, and everything living in dirt and the oceans. When[…] Keep reading →

Recent New York Times stories, Harvard Victory Pushes Admissions Case Toward a More Conservative Supreme Court and Affirmative Action Cases May Reach Supreme Court Even Without Trump, both by Anemona Hartocollis, lay bare a national divide. [Note: You may notice the “recent” stories are from last year. I wrote this post soon after the articles but held back on posting it. I keep reading about well-meaning people apparently deliberately misunderstood[…] Keep reading →

The greenhouse effect was front page news in the 1980s and known long before. Plus plastic, mercury, deforestation, extinctions, and you’ve read the front page. You know the problems. We don’t just not act. We tell ourselves lies that we’ll solve the problem. We’ve told ourselves lie after lie, scam after scam, to keep from changing our behavior. The Scams The following are all scams that delay acting. None of[…] Keep reading →

If you choose to act on sustainability, you will face darkness. You will want to give up. You will feel alone, misunderstood. I don’t say so to dissuade, but to prepare to face a part of all of us. Nobody is polluting because they are monsters. We’re all human. What is the alternative to confronting this part of us? To give up? To try to ignore and forget and try[…] Keep reading →

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 →