Nature

Here's a typical email with a message I see all the time. This one was to me, but I see it in all contexts: "I’m sorry but I have to cancel our meeting of tomorrow. There’s just too much going on at the moment and I need the time." The message is always something like: I care about the environment. It's incredibly important. I plan to act on it. There's just this one thing that's more important. and they never get to it. There's always one more thing. Billions of people have been expressing this sentiment for close to a century. What a lot of empty lip service and self-delusion! Do people realize how much they're either lying to themselves or to everyone else? What…

Several neighborhoods in New York City with commerce form local civic groups called "Business Improvement Districts" that provide extra services they find the government provides too little. Examples include safety and security by hiring people in uniforms walk a beat like cops used to, but not enforcing the law, just being present. The BIDs effectively charge a tax to provide what would normally be government services that remain unmet. I bring them up because they often hire people to walk around with a trash can on wheels and a device to pick up litter with. To clarify, we pay people to pick up our litter. Here is a street cleaner paid to pick up other people's litter, unbelievable though it should sound, though sadly it's…

My friend visited a place of his childhood near his grandmother's home. Where once there was a forest, all remained were vast tracts of stumps. I could cry at these images. The most recent damage came from beetles. Winter cold would limit their eating, but global warming prevented that cold, so they just kept eating. The fallen trees were hazards for fires and other problems, plus people could use the wood for fires, so the government cleared out all the fallen trees. This once-forest is in Europe. My friend told me that another part of the problem was that long before global warming, this forest was old growth, which people centuries ago cut down. They replaced the once-diverse trees with one or two types of…

Parents tell me all the time, "If you had kids, you'd see you can't help polluting." They sound smug about it, like they checkmated me and showed they were smarter or more experienced therefore unassailable. So far I've listened with curiosity. I'm not a parent, so they've experienced things I haven't. On the other hand, their conclusion doesn't make sense. People have had children since the first person, 300,000 years ago, but we only started polluting two or three centuries ago. I've often felt like responding, "I haven't tried to fix all the world's problems myself overnight. I've worked to fix the problems I face and have reduced my pollution and therefore my hurting others by over ninety percent in under three years. If I…

Picking up litter in Washington Square Park I found yet another discarded mostly full plastic bottle of Fiji brand water. Someone may have paid a dollar or two for water shipped ten thousand miles to a city with water rated among the best in the world, then not even drunk twenty percent of it nor even put it in the trash, let alone a recycling bin. It doesn't matter that it's just one bottle. No step of this value chain improved the world or anyone's life. Every step polluted it. It reveals our values. When I was growing up, we viewed bottled water as some froufrou European expensive affectation. Now we saw it as necessary, as if a store without a dozen brands of bottled…

Here's the latest. The kilowatt-hours numbers don't lie. You can do it too. Yes, you can, even if you have kids, a job, or whatever excuse. Not one single human was connected to an electric grid more than about a century ago.

Disconnecting from the grid put me in touch with a few people preparing themselves and their families for an apocalypse, as does just living in America. It seems that population includes many people who buy portable solar panels like the ones I bought. I can't criticize them. On the contrary, it occurred to me that their believing that people can live sustainably can make them great role models, in contrast to many so-called environmentalists who don't even try to live sustainably and call for huge funding for solar and wind that are not clean, green, or renewable, as if calling them "clean," "green," or "renewable" would make them so. Maybe I'm missing something, but with eight billion people on a world that can sustain about…

Talking about an amendment banning pollution raises many questions. One of the biggest is how to define pollution. Beijing air pollution I'd expect an actual law would result from democratic processes. Encyclopedia Brittanica's definition isn't bad: Pollution occurs when an amount of any substance or any form of energy is put into the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed or safely stored. The term pollution can refer to both artificial and natural materials that are created, consumed, and discarded in an unsustainable manner. Wikipedia's seems too broad: Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change. as does the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Any substances in water, soil, or air that degrade the natural quality of…