People measure their carbon footprints in tons of CO2 equivalents and their ecological footprints in similar ways. Those measures make sense because the suffering and early deaths we will cause other humans (and wildlife) occurs in proportion to the amount of greenhouse gases we emit. But I see another important measure. How much money do we contribute to extracting, polluting, and emitting. When we fill our gas tanks, pay for[…] Keep reading →

The main places we learn about our environmental problems: scientists, educators, journalists, politicians, and activists. As a result, we look to them for solutions, along with engineers and entrepreneurs. I may be missing a field or two, but hope I got all. All play important roles, but none of those fields develop skills and experience to change behavior and culture. Culture is key because if we could magically transform all[…] Keep reading →

Sorry, today is a half-finished post. I’m not sure if anyone will read it all, but my main pursuit in it is the persistent myth people knee-jerk fall back on that if we don’t pursue technological progress and market growth then we risk reverting to the Stone Age. After reading Atlas Shrugged and trying to learn what her fans like about her philosophy so much, I found an essay she[…] Keep reading →

Since my TEDx talk in which I begin by talking about growing up near the best sledding hill in the world, each time I visit Philadelphia, I make a point of visiting it and taking pictures of it during different seasons. Maybe it just looks like any other park to everyone else, but it’s incredibly beautiful to me. Near my mom’s house in the “ghetto,” as a neighbor described it,[…] Keep reading →

People act like humans managing our population is some new idea. People have been able to manage our population as long as we’ve been human. When there’s more energy and resources, people have bigger families. America’s westward expansion followed by its extracting and burning fossil fuels created the material conditions for fast growth. In westward expansion, arable land was a proxy for energy since plants converted sunlight into energy people[…] Keep reading →

When people who understand our environmental problems talk about population, they have to pussyfoot around the issue since other people will almost inevitably respond with some Twitter-like attempt to checkmate them by accusing them of racism, sexism, Nazism, or promoting eugenics, forced abortion, or government coercion. That knee-jerk association shows that person’s ignorance more than anything useful. Nazis promoted economic growth and built autobahns (highways). Should we associate economic growth[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been posting Sundays about the books and movies I finished that week. This week I didn’t finish any new books or movies, but I did a few new things. A New Vegetable for Me: Jicama I discovered a new vegetable this week, jicama: I’d never heard of the vegetable, but I saw a bunch of them in the food scrap bin when I dropped mine off. They looked like[…] Keep reading →