Nature

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…

An organization I spoke for sent me an award. While I'm honored at the sentiment and appreciate their doing something for me, the problem of the award and its packaging clogging landfills outweighs the value of the physical award. I would have preferred a donation to a cause we both agree with. Watch my video of my year's worth of garbage (with shirt or without, to illustrate the similarity of putting garbage in the environment to putting it on our bodies) and you'll see the packaging for this thing is about a month of my garbage. Mindlessly sending stuff like that is how scenes like the picture below happen: How else do you think garbage happens? Other people but not you? Anyway, here's a picture…

You've already heard an evolutionary reason for obesity, but there's another. The one you've heard is that since our ancestors evolved in environments without much spare energy in their diets, we evolved to love eating high-energy things like sugar and fat and bodies that hold on to that energy, mainly in fat. Then in the past few generations, we filled our worlds with foods high in sugar and fat. People eating the food around them end up eating more calories than they need to live and become obese. I'll tell you a bigger, more relevant change, because people can still choose not to eat the high-energy foods. The problem is they don't. They don't because of a different way we changed our environment. There are…

Q: How do you make a room full of Americans pollute? A: Tell them that stopping polluting will require them to meaningfully change their lives. Even if the changes will improve their lives by their values, based on my experience, nearly no one will meaningfully change their lives, no matter how much they pollute. I find they change if they experience that changing is easier and more effective than they thought, as happens on my podcast, but talking about change doesn't work much. Now, here are some CO2 and plastic production levels that not changing helps augment: Plastic production:

The Silence of the Bugs, an opinion piece in the New York Times by science professor and author of many books, Curt Stager, started by saying: Fifty-six years after Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" warned of bird die-offs from pesticides, a new biocrisis may be emerging. A study published last fall documented a 76 percent decline in the total seasonal biomass of flying insects netted at 63 locations in Germany over the last three decades. Losses in midsummer, when these insects are most numerous, exceeded 80 percent. It covered the apparent collapse of bug populations---an Armageddon, in his terms---we're sleepwalking through, to complement bats, coral, and many other species. Given how much we depend on bugs, his term may be more prescient than we like. I…

In my third year of avoiding flying, not one person I've shared the idea with has communicated to me that they'd consider even delaying one flight. I've met a few other people not flying too. Everyone knows that flying pollutes. People also want to sleep at night, which polluting makes difficult. I've heard everyone explain to me why their flying doesn't pollute, most often that the plane was going to fly anyway, as if airlines fly empty planes all the time but will put people in them if they buy tickets. People talk about flying as bringing something better than regular life. They'll even allow their regular life to degrade to fly sooner or more often. They live for the rush of flying and see…

I had to share a few points I made on a thread commenting on China moving faster than the U.S. on the environment. Someone wrote: "It's a strange shift in affairs that China appears to have the greatest incentives (urban pollution, petroleum imports) today to advance clean transportation and energy while the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level." I responded: "> the US has stalled or moved backward, at least the Federal level. It has at the individual level too for most individuals. Try to get someone to consider flying less. Look at the size of vehicles on the road. How much meat we eat. Air conditioning to point of needing sweaters in the summer and heating to wearing shorts…