Restaurants, stores, and playgrounds for kids around me put up plastic flowers and grass to make things look pretty, but plastic is the opposite of flowers and grass. If it hasn’t hit you, take a moment to ponder what we’ve done. We’re replacing lovely, healthy things with what kills them and us. We’re accepting the opposite of life and nature in favor of kills nature because of the most superficial[…] Keep reading →

I posted last week At last, I dropped my electrical utility account. They sent me this bill off-sequence for a smaller amount than usual. Might it be my last electric bill ever? I don’t know how far I should extrapolate. I’m sure life will change in ways I can’t predict, maybe necessitating reconnecting to the grid. For now, at least, I’m enjoying the freedom, fun, and discovery of keeping my[…] Keep reading →

The United States has a Bill of Rights in its Constitution guaranteeing several freedoms around religion, speech, the press, bearing arms, search and seizure, speedy trials, and a few others. Imagine you woke up to headlines that for some technicality no one had noticed for over two centuries, the Bill of Rights had been improperly processed and turned out it was invalid. That is, imagine the Bill of Rights didn’t[…] Keep reading →

In February I took pictures of a Fiji water bottle littered after a few sips drunk, despite water fountains within a few steps. Someone paid to extract oil, refine it into plastic, use it to ship water—WATER!—around the world, so they could drink a few sips and pollute our world with the plastic. That post was Disgusting and totally unnecessary. Pure pollution, no benefit. Check it out if you want[…] Keep reading →

I mostly post about lost nature, but here’s a post on its resilience: a blue jay that visits my rooftop. I’m not a bird watcher, but who doesn’t love colorful birds? Growing up in Philadelphia, I saw blue jays all the time. Blue birds were less common and disappeared over the course of my childhood. In Manhattan, pigeons and house sparrows comprise nearly all bird species. Sometimes I’ll see a[…] Keep reading →

Sometimes I wonder if I should stop posting my zero kilowatt-hour electric bills, but if I had had a role model I would have done it earlier. Someday some people will join. It’s hardly extreme to do what every human being who ever lived did until a century ago and may still do. It’s extreme to think, “well we live healthier than they did” and other myths and not care[…] Keep reading →

Bill McKibben wrote about economic growth yesterday in the New Yorker, asking “To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower? The degrowth movement makes a comeback.” He referred to a 2020 New Yorker piece “Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?.” The latter piece nearly exclusively looked at how economists looked at growth. Why should we listen to economists? Is it a science? Consider physics. In 1896, the renowned[…] Keep reading →