Nature

Can you imagine a world without pollution? Seriously try. Most people I've asked recently have been unable to. I don't think before my recent experiments and reading of history and anthropology that I could have, yet all humans lived without polluting more than a few hundred years ago. We've lost the ability to imagine what happened. I can't imagine a world without pollution if we continue seeking it with more technology. Exercise to the reader: try to imagine a world in which nobody pollutes. Not net zero carbon emissions, no pollution at all. Things that existed before humans don't count as pollution, like fire, lead pipes, and poop. Note that thousands of years ago, cities existed with over a million people that got all they…

I grew up learning that American culture meant can-do. That we took on challenges as a nation and as individuals. When the going got tough, the tough got going. The bigger they come the harder they fall. Now we face a challenge: our lifestyles are lowering Earth's ability to sustain life, already killing tens of millions a year, projected more. Anyone can tell that we as a nation and every one of us as an individual have to pollute less, that is if we want to live by the Golden Rule. If we want not to cause human population to collapse. So in an effort to show what we can do, I show we can pollute less. As a side effect, the lifestyle change improves…

Looking out my window at the night sky, I saw what I thought was a bright star but was a plane. Living in Manhattan, I haven't seen a star-filled sky in years. Think about what that means. For millions of years, our ancestors could look up at the sky and see stars filling it. It might rain one night or be overcast, but you know what I mean. We evolved to find the stars sparkling, appearing to rotate around us each night in one sense, each year in another, beautiful. Nothing in nature surpasses it in instilling feelings of awe and beauty in use. The light from stars in the galaxy may have traveled a hundred thousand light-years. The light from other galaxies may have…

Ask yourself: what’s the right amount of pollution per person? Cheap plastic has led to nearly every item sold in supermarkets being packaged. How long can we live when every single thing we eat, a necessity for life, pollutes and hurts people? When you think about it, I think you’ll realize with eight billion people, if everyone pollutes forever we eventually drown in pollution. I can only conclude the right amount is zero. I don't see any other positive amount working. We must eventually reach that goal. Here's an American park showing surplus garbage. Not one piece is necessary for fun, health, longevity, or anything else, let alone life. People identify it as tragic and outrageous, though it's nothing compared to the fuel from one…

In February I posted Cities aren’t loud, cars are, partly to promote the wonderful video channel Not Just Bikes. I recommend listening to the host, Jason Slaughter, on my podcast, then watching all his videos. While I could have promoted any of his videos to start with, I started with his video showing how much of noise in cities comes from cars (and even more from motorcycles). Well, it's late July in New York City. I don't think I've turned on my air conditioner in years, but I think nearly everyone else does. To be clear, I've worked several hours a day for several days each of the past few weeks in NYU buildings, but I spend more time at home and don't use the…

Yahoo! Life Unearthed quoted me in a story about people avoiding flying for climate reasons, People are swearing off air travel because of climate anxiety, by Jasmin Singer. I would add plenty more reasons to avoid flying beyond climate, including pollution, displacing people and wildlife from their land, and doing to nations what cars do to cities, but they focused on climate. The article also quotes Flight Free USA, whom I work with and admire. Check out the article! And embrace living locally and loving where you are. When you do, you realize everything flying brings you, you can get without it, and without polluting, turning everywhere into tourist traps, not living far away from people you love, and so on. We've become so spoiled…

Conservatives say that if you give people food and money, they won't work for it and they'll learn not to work. As Milton Friedman said, if you pay people to be poor, you'll have a lot of poor people. Liberals say nobody wants to be poor. They don't want to stay poor. If you don't help them, they'll drag on society. If you do, they won't, and they'll rise back up. The more I look at longer term human patterns, the more I see the problem not with people but with a system that evolved away from a world we evolved to handle. Before agriculture, for hundreds of thousands of years, we had to get our food. I don't know the details, but I suspect…

I grew up seeing the cereal aisle as normal. Shelf after shelf of boxes, all colorful, with a nutrition label on the side, some game or distraction on the back, a plastic bag inside a cardboard box, and a few companies making them. Inside them were things I didn't think to ask where they came from or what they were made of. It just seemed normal to me to see things puffed up into circles, hoops, or alphabet letters; flakes; crunchy nuggets; shredded I-don't-know-what; and so on. Looking back, I see them as far removed from nature. But since supermarkets seemed normal and the aisle was in every supermarket, and everyone bought them, they seemed normal. At some point, maybe graduate school, I switched to…

I hear a lot of people promoting "dismantling capitalism." It's not easy to define capitalism. I'm not sure what laws they specifically mean to change, if changing it through legislation is the plan. In any case, I see our culture as the problem. Many describe American culture is focused on the individual. I see it that way too, but what changed recently that led to the amount of pollution and acceptance of it so much greater than ever? You could say technology. I'd agree, but technology has changed culture. How so? I don't see how anyone could look at the level we accept pollution, for example in my recent Washington Square Park videos and pictures, and not see different values than any culture in history.…

I've developed the simplest explanation for why carbon offsets don't work I've seen. Fossil fuels underground are outside the biosphere. Extracting them puts them into the biosphere. Once here, if we burn them, form plastics, or similar industrial processes, they will eventually end up in the most stable form, meaning a form in which they don't break down, they linger for longer than human time scales, and they poison living creatures, eventually us. Common end results include carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that warms the globe, carbon-based acids in the ocean that acidify it, and plastic that smothers animals and disrupts our hormones when it reaches us. Offsets only shuffle carbon around the biosphere, but don't change the process of it settling into a stable…