Nature

Search the web for "mind body" and you'll see tons of responses. I'm glad. With a tenured history professor as a father, I grew up favoring the mind. I can't say the family neglected the body, but fitness, exercise, and diet came later for me, when I discovered them. I wish I'd appreciated and developed the body earlier---mine and that side of life. Our society seems to recognize the value in not neglecting mind or body, though many parts appear out of balance. Many people will add spirit or soul. I won't argue against including them, but I consider them part of mind. I still believe there are three legs to that stool: mind, body, and nature. Leaving out our minds' and bodies' connection to…

Two cafés. One serves in mugs they have to wash, the other in disposable cups. The first needs a person to wash the dishes, a dish washing machine, and to pay for the real estate and maintenance. The second doesn't have to pay those costs. Starbucks garbage: it's what they make The disposable café can charge less or profit more. The extra money motivates it to expand. It can keep expanding. The first café may go out of business. It may emulate the other and move to disposable. One could see the pattern as good business, but the local picture doesn't account for all costs and business requires effective accounting. The disposable café's costs don't end with the sanitation department accounting. Regarding the mugs, when…

Less than 24 hours after posting about cars becoming disposable, discovering while writing that post that it looks like it's already happening in China, I see this headline: This car will become disposable and will choke landfills The article's tone suggests a wonderful novelty. Yes, it will enable people to do what bicycles do without having to pedal or get rained on, but things don't only give us the effects we want. They give us all the effects. For generations we've watched industries lower prices and make material things more accessible---plastic, clothes, furniture, etc. Every time we react with wonder of the desired results. Then we lament the side-effects evident from the start. We don't lack comfort and convenience. We're choking on waste. We like…

Walking around Manhattan, with many people moving out, sidewalks are overflowing with what they don't value enough to keep. What are they disposing? Sofas, mattresses, shelves, chairs, books, televisions, printers, scanners, lamps, mirrors, plates, toasters, silverware, . . . I could go on. Notice anything about them? All those things used to be once-in-a-lifetime purchases. Some were high-tech wonders when introduced---now disposable. We don't value them as much as the effort to maintain them. We turn them into pollution. Our market system has shifted from creating value to creating craving. People like novelty, I guess, so marketing engineers figure out how to generate craving so they can temporarily satisfy it. Meanwhile, markets motivate people to figure out how to deliver with lower cost. The result?…

People talk about what the virus does, like it spreads on its own or it's waiting or it want this or that. The virus does nothing on its own. It has no means of locomotion. It has no mind to think or choose. It has no volition or will. It reacts. That's it. It's like water flowing downhill. We need to learn its structure and mechanisms to learn how it works, but we need to look at ourselves to change its results. Not blaming. Stating. Everything that's happened regarding the virus has resulted from our behavior and nothing else. I'm not blaming. I'm stating. It evolved to spread more than its cousins by reproducing more numerously based on our behavior. As with the environment, if…

I hope I didn't make too morbid of a title. I cut my finger the other day chopping an apple. My finger started bleeding like in the picture but my pinky finger. I think it's instinctual, but I licked the cut. Being instinctual make sense since research shows saliva helps blood congeal. It was one of my rare (no pun intended) times since stopping eating meat in 1990 to taste blood. Kind of salty. Not that much thicker than water. I don't see the draw of eating meat. I'll stick with not eating it. I used the occasion at last to buy a knife sharpener, as usual used off Craig's List. I'd meant to get one for a while so was glad for the excuse.…

A friend saw elk for the first time after starting spending time in Idaho on a ranch. He's vegetarian. He met hunters. He was talking to a hunter once. They saw a herd of elk. The hunter asked, "how many elk do you see in that herd?" "About a hundred." "I'd guess about that many too. The land around here can support about eighty through the winter." "I guess that means about twenty won't make it?" "No, about twenty will make it." The hunter explained that elk don't triage. They don't survey the food, figure out how many it can support, and tell twenty they have to die so the rest can make it. They all eat what they feel like as long as they…

Most of the pollution in a product happens upstream of what you buy or use. Anything single-use wastes resources before you handle it. Recycling barely reduces a thing's waste relative to not using it. Likewise, once something is made, especially plastic, it will exist for a long time. Future generations will have to deal with it. The more you reduce, the more you realize you don't need things. Why do places label their unnecessary packaging recyclable and reusable so prominently? Because people will buy. You think Trader Joe's hadn't market researched labeling their bags like below? Trader Joe's business model is based on packaging things. Operationally, it makes them money by reducing the need for people. From a human perspective, the business is designed to…

When I see or hear the terms "net zero" and "closed loop" the context is nearly always a polluting company or person trying to justify pollution as not pollution. The terms describe creative accounting applied to pollution, where instead of people losing money, our environment loses the ability to sustain life and human society. I've linked to Decoupling Debunked before. It describes the terms' deception and I recommend it. In the meantime, buy less stuff. Wikipedia's description of creative accounting describes "net zero" and "closed loop" in spirit. You need to change only a few words: Creative accounting is a euphemism referring to accounting practices that may follow the letter of the rules of standard accounting practices, but deviate from the spirit of those rules…