Nature

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…

Last week I posted a few posts on garbage in Washington Square Park and how not to lose hope. Today, I'm sharing about one of the best parts of nature. Yesterday I took the PATH train to New Jersey, to my secret mulberry trees, to pick mulberries for the first time this season. I already went to town on Juneberries last month. I can walk to enough juneberry trees to pick more than I can eat. The black mulberries I picked (not counting the many I ate on the spot) The mulberries were abundant and ripe. Words cannot describe how sweet and flavorful they taste. They burst in your mouth with flavor that tastes like pure sunshine. Some white ones taste like raw honey. I…

Picking up litter every day in a neighborhood with a few ice cream stores, I find a lot of discarded containers still containing ice cream. People wonder how we waste so much food, yet look the other way when it's themselves. I've noticed a lot of the ice cream doesn't melt, but stays in a semi-solid state. Though I used to love ice cream, now it seems cloying and disgusting, so much fat and sugar. How can it compare with an apple or peach? Why would anyone choose ice cream? Here's what I think was someone's ice cream that they left as litter. It might be some bastardization of coffee, but the point remains. It hasn't melted. What did they do to it to make…

Most people, maybe everyone, seem to think they can live a polluting lifestyle and someone somewhere else can undo their pollution. They'll use plastic and some kid will invent a boat that will scrape it from the ocean or breed a fungus that will digest it. They'll buy a plane ticket and someone will plant a bunch of trees to undo the damage. The scientific ignorance in this view should shock us, but generations of deplorable science education means the people who would be shocked don't understand either. We've all or nearly all been corrupted by a system that teaches resignation, abdication, and capitulation of personal responsibility, on the political right and left, among old and young, male and female, rich and poor, of every…

Why do I harp on flying so much? Doesn't flying only contribute about two percent to global warming? While measurable, that fraction sounds small. And since everyone flies, doesn't avoiding flying inconvenience a lot of people for little gain? The evidence contradicts that view, so time to lose it. Few people fly. If you fly internationally or more than once a year, you're part of a small elite of a few percent of all humans contributing most of the pollution from flying. Flying is probably your greatest contribution to lowering Earth's ability to sustain life. (Not included in the paper: when you commit to stopping flying, after the craving passes, you will prefer life.) At last I found some peer-reviewed numbers on flying in the…

I defy you to find a way to pay for plastic that doesn't make a rich person more rich and cause unhealthiness to helpless people (and wildlife). Despite what marketers have fooled many to think, packaging doesn’t make food fresher. It might keep an individual item fresher, but systemically, it leads us to overall eat less fresh, less healthy food, often consuming doof instead of eating food. Foragers always ate fresh. Americans today nearly exclusively eat prepared, packaged food and consume doof, at least by what I see people stuffing their faces with while the walk and drive. There's no joy in it. Likewise, marketers have fooled many people to think prepared food and doof somehow address needs of poor people while the opposite happens.…