Nature

About four-and-a-half years ago I learned that flying New York to Los Angeles round trip coach polluted about a year's worth of driving (from this video of Caltech-trained Oxford physicist David Mackay speaking at Harvard, I think). Before learning that statistic, I thought I polluted significantly less than anyone with a car, as I lived in Manhattan and didn't own one. Instead, I realized that I polluted more than my identity allowed. Prompted by my earlier challenge to avoid packaged food, which became one of my life's great successes despite wondering if I could do it before trying, I expected a similar challenge to live by my values at the cost of comfort and convenience would lead to similar personal growth. I settled on challenging…

Holidays mean people sending cards as a proxy for emotion. Those cards are heading to the landfill and making them created emissions. You can kid yourself all you want that the paper is recyclable or they aren't that much mass, but you know you're lying to yourself. Most of the waste happened before you got the cards, a lot of the material never makes it to recycling, many cards include plastic in coatings or elsewhere that make recycling them impossible, and recycling only decreases the impact of the problem, it doesn't reduce or stop it. Actually, increasing the supply can reduce costs and increase total waste. This point sounds subtle, but it's as important as realizing that building roads doesn't decrease traffic and congestion. It…

Hypocrisy is a challenging, accusatory, powerful word. Let's get out of the way that I'm not perfect, I don't claim perfection, and I often don't act. Here are examples of things I hear from people who claim to care about the environment and probably believe they pollute below average, but pollute comparably to average Americans, meaning more than nearly any in history. "It's the journey, not the destination," yet they fly around the world to chosen destinations, polluting more than nearly anyone who has ever lived when they could enjoy activities close to home. They seem to prefer the destination, not the journey, when they want to travel. "Be the change you want to see in the world," yet they act on the conflicting belief,…

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I took Amtrak to California instead of flying. But I'm concluding that one of the worst tortures humans could inflict on each other might be to force a Japanese train engineer or conductor to work for Amtrak. I can only imagine his or her suffering. Late Today, Amtrak canceled two trains without warning. On the way west from New York, we arrived in Chicago two or three hours late. I understand that Japanese passengers start looking uncomfortable if their trains are a few minutes late. Here's a Japan Today post on Japan's shinkansen best in world at safety, punctuality. Americans regard our nation as the best on many things. Not trains. I lost count of how many people referred…

People keep describing my working on the environment as "saving the world." I guess I can see the confusion, and I don't mind improving the environment being a side effect I like, but it's not what I'm doing. I call the podcast leadership and the environment, with the word leadership first, for a reason. My main goal is to help people improve their lives by living by their environmental values. My work is about people first---to enable them, not to tell them what to do. Living thoughtlessly doesn't improve your life. Knowing your values and putting off acting on them, which nearly everyone does, especially Americans, leads you to repress your feelings and beliefs, lowering your self-awareness (subconsciously undermining the claims nearly everyone makes of…

When I was a kid, America considered bottled water froufrou---a European luxury. Now many people prefer bottled water. They don't see it as an inessential luxury. They believe it's healthier. Yet, as a population, we're less healthy than then. As a nation, our land and water is less pure and less clean than then. Why you drink bottled water How do you explain people thinking they're healthier when they aren't? Simple: the bottled water companies market better than people think for themselves. We don't realize it. On the contrary, most people would probably say that marketing doesn't affect them. But consider this: if people believe something is healthier---healthier than what? What are they comparing bottled water to? Partly to tap water, but studies show tap…