Models

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 that hurt others and violated their own values, then lied to themselves and others about it. I'll copy the above two paragraphs, changing the domain from slavery to polluting and depleting. See if the perspective illuminates not to listen to polluters about how to stop polluting. It may be tempting to avoid comparing something to…

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, or property and when taking something from nature, you leave at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others. You can probably tell I'm drawing on established enlightendigenous values. The first part comes from the US Constitution, the second from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government. It seems like this…

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 people she described seemed to think of themselves as good guys, but as far as I could tell, based not on their behavior or impact on others, but only on how they thought of themselves. Putting the prefix eco- before tourism seemed to justify their categorization in their own minds, as far as I could…

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 away from living the life they wanted in their culture. Other problems are like a flat tire when riding a bike. These problems won't go away. They increase if unsolved: if you try to keep riding, you'll break the bike. If you keep going, you'll likely fall and injure yourself. A flat-tire-on-a-bike problem you have…

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 water that supplies a city, would you call a market where I sell that product a free market? No one in that city consented to drinking mercury. I contend it was not a free market. Pollution destroys life, liberty, and property. Some things that can be cleaned up you could call an externality that new…