Nature

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…

Many people point out how suffering from environmental problems like pollution and sea level rise correlate with skin color and ascribe the cause to racism. You don't have to look hard to see who lives in America's Cancer Alley and Sacrifice Zones and compare their skin colors against the largest shareholders and board members of the companies profiting from creating those areas, or the people displaced from their land to extract resources or dump garbage compared with the people who pay for the plane tickets and SUVs the resources power or buy the cell phones and disposable diapers dumped there. It seems plausible, but I agree with Eric Williams and Ibram Kendi that slavery caused racism, not that racism caused slavery. Hierarchies that allow one…

If you want to leave the world better than you found it, which will help you leave your legacy better: To inhale deeply on a cigarette and blow the smoke in a baby's face or To fly somewhere on vacation? Blowing smoke in a baby's face seems worse, doesn't it? I bet none of you would do it. But flying hurts more babies more grievously. It pollutes billions times more. It displaces people (and wildlife) from their land. Funding it will fund more extraction. Flying homogenizes once-diverse world cultures. It separates families and tears communities apart in the name of bringing people together. The list goes on. I picked flying, but I could have said buy an SUV, set the temperature above around 68F (20C)…

Have you read many of the responses to my Ars Technica article, I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan? Many push back about what I shared and I'm learning from them. Not that they differ from many online forums, but I noticed a few trends. Many of the responses object to things I didn't say, even putting in quotation marks things I didn't say. Many assign me intent I didn't imply and don't have. Some said things I did were easier for me so they couldn't do them while others said things I did were hard so they couldn't do them. Nearly no one picked up on my goal to be a role model, ideally to prompt some people to say "You…

I can't believe how many people parrot things like "It's the journey, not the destination" and then consider any travel not involving flying as beneath them. Do you believe what you say or not? Why not live it? In my experience, the journey is more important.

Talk about acting sustainably enough and some smarty-pants will tell you that individual action doesn't matter, that BP duped you by creating the personal footprint calculator to distract you from them. If you haven't heard, here are a few articles and posts for reference, but I wouldn't read them: BP popularised “carbon footprint” to greenwash and guilt-trip. Here’s how. Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook Demystifying the concept of personal carbon footprint Those articles talk about how the companies are the problem. They should change. We're not the problem. They say we need big changes, not little ones one person at a time. People like this then avoid reducing their pollution. Way to teach BP…

The title says it all. Hit a piano with a sledgehammer and you'll get some noise. You can call it music if you want, but I prefer to play scales. I start with a mindset shift then follow with a lifelong process of continual improvement, the Spodek Method. We overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can in a year. That's how you reach Carnegie Hall and it's how we could, as a culture, reach sustainability. I was invited to another conference on sustainability. People were flying from all over the world to attend. Why should anyone listen to you suggest we pollute less if you don't listen to yourself? If you think life is that much worse living sustainably,…