Nature

I was sitting on a bench in the park. I looked up and saw the tree whose trunk was in front of me and branches above had lots of yellow berry-like fruit on it. All the branches were too high to reach. Then I looked down and saw fruits all over the ground. I know from experience last summer to respect wild berries, but I was curious. This park is curated and city-owned, so I doubt they'd take on the liability of growing a poisonous plant. Still, last August's experience was life-changingly awful. I picked up a few of the fruits, cleaned one off, and took the tiniest nibble I could. It tasted like apple, though more tart and stringent. It looked vaguely like an…

Often when someone tells me about flying somewhere, buying doof, or other polluting they apologize to me. I'm not being hurt, or not nearly as much as poor people, people in poor countries where we dump our waste and extract resources from, kids forced into child labor sometimes slavery, future generations, and wildlife. There's no question they're paying to accelerate these problems. They barely affect me. Why don't they apologize to the people they hurt? If they apologize to me, not them, I don't think they're really sorry. How can they confuse the messenger with their hurting others so much? I'm not promoting sustainability for personal gain. I can make a lot more money with a PhD in physics and an MBA than trying to…

At over half a century old, I suspect this post will be the first of many observations on aging. When I was younger and heard people talking about things that happen as the body aged, I knew it would happen to me, like getting slower, taking longer to recover, losing strength, losing flexibility, and so on. Those things weren't so bad when it meant I could play ultimate at the elite level. I could always still play summer league. I could run marathons. Even when I couldn't run marathons, I could still exercise regularly. The first big thing that hit me that wasn't just not being near my peak was my first injury that my experience told me would take a week or two to…

I've written about how every single item in every cart I saw in a trip to a supermarket was packaged, mostly in plastic. I suspect the cardboard was plastic coated. People drink a lot of bottled water too. Most of that stuff takes five hundred, maybe a thousand years to break down. Consider when the absolute basics of life require polluting. Either we change our culture and stop accepting it or consider this calculation. Let's figure out what number, say in grams, would work for packaging for each meal. We have to multiply that number by eight billion, since everyone has to eat. It would be nice to say the poorest don't get packaged food, but corporations dump it on them as one of their…

The title says it all: California is permanently on fire, island nations are being submerged, and New York restaurants are heating the outdoors. Here is a restaurant around the corner from me. If you can't tell, the red glow comes from the glowing heaters above the tables. Restaurants got to use public property for the pandemic, but you'll notice no one wearing masks because it's over. This space outside is about the size of the restaurant's indoor space, meaning they got to double their space for free while the public lost its space. But the big slap in the face is that they are heating the outdoors, burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow, a situation they are helping hasten. In all fairness, all the…

It's tempting to look at fossil fuels and global warming and conclude: a fuel that didn't release greenhouse gases would solve our problems. Then we look at nuclear plants whose fuels are uranium and other elements. Splitting them doesn't release greenhouse gases. They look like improvements. Why not switch to nuclear? The switch looks yet better when you consider other problems with fossil fuels. They release more than greenhouse gases: mercury and other poisons. We turn them into plastics, which make their way into our foods and bloodstreams. Mining and extracting them displaces people (and wildlife) from their land, leads to spills like the Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon. Internal combustion engines produce most noise pollution. Politically, the concentration of power leads globally to…

I'm prompted to write today's email from a story Heating Your Expensive Apartment Is About to Get More Expensive, that says: "the average New York City residential electric bill of 300 kilowatt hours per month is projected to go up 22 percent, from $95 to $116." 300 kilowatt-hours per month?!? WTF? You don't have to get it to zero (yet), but nobody needs 300 kwh per month. If that's the average, many use more. A friend told me he told a friend about my off-grid experiment, who responded that "too bad it doesn't scale." Too bad she she is shortsighted. Polluting hurts people. Not might or sometimes hurts people. Always and for centuries for much of our waste today. Rich or poor, whatever one's skin…

Cooking from scratch with mainly local ingredients and no electrical power has taught me about cuisine. To clarify, I haven't gotten any training on cooking. I've only had to figure things out based on what's available. It dawned on me (and I could be wrong, I'm not a historian or anthropologist) that cuisines developed based on what edible things were around in regions---plants, animals, fungi---in what quantities and times. People needed to live and wanted things to taste good. They must have put together what they could as best they could. I've developed a bunch of dishes that I don't know if others would like, but I love them. I'm just mixing what's around, but I've never tasted things like them. I'm experimenting fermenting, sprouting,…