Nature

Did restaurants used to serve healthy food?

Sit-down restaurants are unhealthy

Fitness / Nature

Did restaurants used to serve healthy food?

Did restaurants used to serve healthy food? They only seem to serve pleasurable, but unhealthy food now, with rare exception. I also feel like people used to go out for food rarely, and for fast "food" yet more rarely, but now eat out regularly, for fast "food" just as often. Sit-down restaurants are no healthier than fast "food," for that matter, and are often less, according to the study in this article. Restaurant owners and chefs know what brings you back: sugar, oil, salt, and packaging. Not fiber and freshness. I think a lot of people don't know what eating healthy means and may never do it regularly. Fruit, vegetables, spices, herbs, mushrooms, and so on have incredible flavor, more richness and complexity than restaurants,…

October 5, 2017

My ecological footprint

Global Footprint Day calculates what they call my ecological footprint from my behavior as I report it

My ecological footprint

Some environmental reading led me to a web page---The Global Footprint Network---that calculates your ecological footprint from your answers to questions about how you live your life. Go to the page and calculate yours if you want. I don't know their assumptions or methods, so I can't speak to its accuracy. With neither shame nor pride, I present my results: I seem to use less than many---little enough to leave plenty of nature for everyone else, though not if the population keeps growing. When I calculate my ecological footprint including a few flights per year, which I'm not doing now but used to, it rises above 1.0 Earths per year. I find lowering my impact improved my life, though I didn't think it would at…

October 4, 2017

An ideal year’s outcome

Leadership And The Environment Coming Soon

Audio / Leadership / Models / Nature / Podcast

An ideal year’s outcome

A recent workshop I attended had me write my dream of a "Year of Opportunity"---that is, what I'd like to make happen if I achieved everything I could. Normally we don't share our greatest hopes and expectations since they enable others to judge us---for dreaming too much, for being unrealistic, for thinking too much of ourselves, for not achieving our dreams, and so on. So what? I'm going to share anyway. It's mostly about the podcast I'm working on, Leadership and the Environment, as the start of a movement to change mainstream beliefs and behaviors so people want to lower or reverse their impacts enough to act meaningfully. For context, the podcast features well-known and influential people taking on personal challenges to live by their…

September 30, 2017

A path to happiness

Awareness / Nature / Tips

A path to happiness

Get some fresh fruits, vegetable, and other ingredients. Make a delicious meal. Invite some friends over to enjoy it with you. Try to be unhappy then. It's hard. If you prepare well, impossible. Creating that environment makes you happy. You might say, it's only for the moment, or not true happiness. I suggest instead of evaluating it, figuring out how to extend it to the rest of your life. That's what I've done. The more I do it, the easier it is. Or rather, the more skilled I get at making my life as happy as I want. In the meantime, here are some cherry tomatoes from my CSA farm.

September 25, 2017

Fitness / Nature

I prefer fitness

I was teased for being chubby as a kid and wore a t-shirt at the beach and pool to cover myself. I was athletic in college and graduate school, though didn't eat that healthily. I thought I did, but I ate a lot more fiber-removed food than I would today (that is, any) so I still had fat around my waist. Today I'm fit. I prefer fit to chubby. By my values: Fitness feels better My food tastes better I eat more food (though fewer calories) It saves time It's more convenient I look better I have more fit people in my life My abs aren't male-model level, but they're close. I knew getting more fit would feel good, but I underestimated how much. Fitness…

September 24, 2017

Technology won’t save us from global warming

Coal factories

Technology won’t save us from global warming

Anyone who has been stuck in a traffic jam has thought how an extra lane would open traffic and undo the jam. Anyone who has studied traffic knows that creating more lanes creates more traffic, not less. More efficient technology tends to increase consumption People think of technology as making things more efficient. More efficiency should lower power use, right? Sometimes it does, but in the long run in many cases it leads to increased overall use, as traffic does. In the case of efficiency, it's called Jevon's Paradox, after a guy who noticed in the 1860s that more efficient coal-based steam engines led to using more coal. You may think efficiency should solve problems, not increase them. Nice theory, but when observation and theory…

September 23, 2017

Eating healthy is not more expensive. Not knowing how to cook is expensive.

Fitness / Nature

Eating healthy is not more expensive. Not knowing how to cook is expensive.

Search online which is more expensive between healthy and unhealthy food and you'll find many posts in both directions. In my experience, buying fresh produce in season is cheaper than any buying practice I've had. Same with buying dried legumes like beans, lentils, and split peas. In-season produce tastes the most delicious, which is my most important measure of food. Fruits and vegetables are most plentiful in season, so farmers are trying to get rid of them, which means low prices for large amounts. Packaged can't compete. Before I figured out how to prepare food from scratch fast and without much effort, I couldn't calculate how cheap it was. I wouldn't look at the cost of collard greens since I'd have to throw them out.…

September 22, 2017

How NOT to reduce your pollution

Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Nature / Tips

How NOT to reduce your pollution

Do you want to pollute less but can't stop yourself? If so, I bet you're approaching it in a way that's doomed to fail. You're probably lying to yourself about how hard it is too. People ask me a lot: What do you eat if you don't eat packaged food? What do you do to make up for not flying? Where do you get your protein? Did you ever notice how if you ask someone the time just after they looked at their phone or watch, they often don't know? We often feel an impulse to check. Then, once we have, we forget because we didn't care, we just acted on the impulse. I've learned that almost no one cares about the answers to the…

September 21, 2017

Refrigerating junk we don’t even have room at home for?!

We're air conditioning junk we don't even have room at home for

Awareness / Nature

Refrigerating junk we don’t even have room at home for?!

What are we doing?! I can't believe how dissociated we are to what we're doing to our world and not stopping ourselves, or seeing that we're making our lives worse in the process. Case in point: this advertisement I saw walking home from teaching the other day. In case you don't know, Manhattan Mini Storage rents closets you can store your stuff in. They have locations throughout the New York. What are we doing?! Here's a partial list of what seems crazy to me: We have so much junk that we pay rent to store what we can't fit in our homes We pay to air condition our junk We advertise our capacity to air condition that junk You might point out some people value…

September 19, 2017

What will it take to stop us from paving over everything?

Nature / Visualization

What will it take to stop us from paving over everything?

Normally when I think of human achievement, I think of our cultural history. For example, of New York City's history and value, I think of the Met, MoMA, Columbia, NYU, Central Park, its various other museums, concert halls, and so on. This Manhattan looks like quite an achievement: From another perspective, we as humans have turned nature into culture but also lifeless concrete. We came into a world full of natural resources, abundant with everything we needed to live. Many parts of life balance many things, always locally working. There were predators and parasites, but there was also a world of food, trees, clean air, and clean water. Everywhere we went we used things up, then moved on. No sizable places remain untouched. We have…

September 16, 2017

LeadÂ Yourself Before Blaming Scientists for Not Solving Global Warming

Lead Yourself Before Blaming Scientists for Not Solving Global Warming

Inc.com / Leadership / Nature

LeadÂ Yourself Before Blaming Scientists for Not Solving Global Warming

My Inc. article today, "Lead Yourself Before Blaming Scientists for Not Solving Global Warming," began Lead Yourself Before Blaming Scientists for Not Solving Global Warming Everyone is quick to point fingers. We're less quick to take responsibility, but that's what leaders do. Leaders take responsibility. We know the futility of blaming others, however much we indulge in doing so. We can't change the past. We can, however, act in the present. A leadership and business perspective can help a lot in climate change, and I don't mean by promoting technical innovation. Twice in the past two days, and many times in past months and years, have I heard people fault scientists for things like Publicizing their findings ineffectively Not publicizing their findings enough Sharing data…

September 15, 2017

The environment: Little things matter but NOT because they add up

Little tips to help the environment

Awareness / Choosing/Decision-Making / Leadership / Nature

The environment: Little things matter but NOT because they add up

The internet is filled with "10 tips to lower your carbon footprint" and "21 easy ways to help the environment." Here's a screen shot: There are too many pages of them to count. They aren't working. Sure, some people might change a light bulb or two, but greenhouse gas levels aren't decreasing, nor is pollution, nor resource depletion. The number one problem with "little tips" People say enough little things add up to big differences. When the people leading others to consume fossil fuels wantonly are the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump, the measure of change is against their results and no amount of changing to LED bulbs will accumulate to compare with their results. Even so I still recommend acting on small things, but…

September 13, 2017

Why high intensity interval training works, according to me

Fitness / Models / Nature

Why high intensity interval training works, according to me

Now that I've picked up the habit of high intensity interval training, I've developed a belief about it that explains why it increases your cardio-respiratory system so well---that minutes of HIIT exercise can give you the benefit of hours of moderate exercise. Muscles develop when you stress them. You build skeletal muscles by stressing them, such as by lifting as much as you can. If you can left, say, 25 pounds with some muscle, then lifting 20 to 25 pounds will cause it to develop. Lifting a 5-pound weight with that muscle all day won't stress it to rebuild. If the heart and diaphragm are muscles, they'll probably develop when you stress them, which happens when you push them as hard as you can. Just…

September 6, 2017

Food comes from dirt, not plastic bags, boxes, and bottles.

Food comes from dirt, not plastic bags, boxes, and bottles.

In my 20s and 30s, in Manhattan, I went to the latest gallery openings and clubs. I even showed my art there and hung out with world-famous DJs. I considered what I did sophisticated and valuable. Maybe because I'm older, maybe because I'm wiser, a main highlight of me summer these days is visiting the farm where my farm-share food comes from. I ate tons of tomatilloes and cherry tomatoes fresh from the stalk or vine. There was a potluck lunch where they served corn picked that morning. I brought one of my famous vegetable stews, made with vegetables from that farm. People somehow brought a lot of store-bought cookies, brownies, chips, and so on. How they decided to bring store-bought processed junk to a…

September 4, 2017

What could make me give up leading in the environment?

Dov Baron and Full Monty Leadership

Audio / Leadership / Nature

What could make me give up leading in the environment?

Following up yesterday's advice from Dov Baron to answer the 5 whys, the next question he recommend me answering was what could make me give up leading in the environment. Listen to the conversationÂ (on iTunes) My first answer is if people changed their behaviors enough that the work was unnecessary. Since the overwhelmingly most common behavior people show when I prompt them to think about changing their behavior is to justify why they shouldn't change, I don't see this change happening without significant leadership. Frankly, I'm disheartened by how much people put their interests ahead of everyone else's... how much they suppress and deny consideration of their externalities and the effects of their behavior on others. That lack of empathy and self-enforced ignorance to maintain…

August 24, 2017

Nature / Perception

The Problem With a Carbon Tax

Shakespeare may have said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you can't smell taxes and the principle doesn't apply to them. The evidence? Call the estate tax a death tax and suddenly support for it drops, even among people who agree with it in principle, whose communities would benefit from it, and who would benefit from it personally, as Frank Luntz showed. I support shifting taxes from some areas to taxing greenhouse gas emissions, but as far as language goes, as a carbon-based life-form, I don't like the sound of taxing the basis of my life. The problem that the tax will, I hope, contribute to solving isn't even carbon, an innocent element that cycles throughout the biosphere. Nor…

August 19, 2017

How to have a great conversation in Manhattan

Composting in Manhattan

Habits / Nature

How to have a great conversation in Manhattan

Here's how to have a great conversation in Manhattan that works every time. Take your compost to a compost station and talk to someone else dropping theirs off. To have compost to drop off means you've stored it in your small apartment, probably keeping it in your freezer, until one of the days the stations is open, before they pick it up. Then you have to carry it there and drop it off. Then you see when each other ate over the past few weeks. It's not hard. It's fun when you make it a habit, but you still have to do it, which means you have the motivation, which means you have a lot in common and don't mind other people thinking you're doing…

August 15, 2017

Nature / Visualization

Pollution, Native Americans, Priorities, and the Opposite of Progress

Working on leadership and the environment, I've thought of people trying to reduce pollution. People my age and old will remember the public service announcements of the 70s with the Native American amid scenes of garbage and pollution, a tear rolling down his face at the tragedy of what we've done to the land, blithely ignorant of it. Here are two versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Suu84khNGY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_QGBWaD-A4 The Opposite of Progress These announcements came out in 1971, nearly half a century ago. I bet we pollute on scales few dreamed of then. At least then we drank water from faucets where it was clean. Now we use multiple bottles per day, even when we can get cleaner, cheaper water from the tap. Last I heard, 9% of…

August 14, 2017

Reviews of my famous no-packaging no-recipe vegan stews

Art / Creativity / Fitness / My Favorite Posts / Nature

Reviews of my famous no-packaging no-recipe vegan stews

Taste is a matter of taste, so you may not enjoy my food as much as I do, but I've grown confident enough in it to invite people more, including for business meetings and podcasts, including a Nobel laureate, titans of industry, and more. Some probably have walk-in closets bigger than my apartment. I've asked people to write reviews so you know what to expect. (EDIT: Here are pictures from a corporate event with Faherty clothes, where I spoke on sustainability and personal responsibility and cooked for over 50 people, producing no trash (the organizers brought bread and butter and got alcohol sponsorship independent of my stews). EDIT 2: Here are pictures of me speaking on sustainability and cooking my stew at Lululemon's flagship 5th…

August 5, 2017

Awareness / Nature

Wall of Fame Honors in Growth Bias Busted

I can't believe it's not obvious to everyone that driving the problems of pollution, global warming, resource depletion, extinctions, conflict over resources, pestilence, and related issues is overpopulation. It's not the only issue, but it's one of the main drivers. Maybe the main one. People have a weird knee-jerk response to think the opposite of overpopulation is eugenics, Nazism, killing, giving up modernity, returning to living in caves, economic collapse under too many old people, or other bizarre misunderstandings. We're all going to die. We don't have to kill anyone. We've increased our productivity by enough that we can support older populations. Lowering a population only means having fewer children for a while. Humans have done so where the environment prevented population growth for as…

August 4, 2017

Fame for my no-packaging no-fiber-removed food… and cold showers

Fitness / Nature / SIDCHAs

Fame for my no-packaging no-fiber-removed food… and cold showers

If you know me, you know I've taking cold showers for years. You may also know a big part of my inspiration was Joel Runyon, whose posts on cold shower therapy (search for my name at that link) motivated me to take cold showers every day for thirty days, which I now do every fourth day. I've sponsored his tremendous 777 challenge, to run 7 ultramarathons on 7 continents to raise funds to start 7 schools, which he finished, making him one of the few to finish an ultramarathon on each continent. And he beat his target funds for the schools. He's in Brooklyn. I invited him and his girlfriend for dinner last night. Needless to say, I had food from the farm. She's in…

August 3, 2017

Awareness / Nature

“Awareness” of the environment? Oh please.

People keep talking to me about "raising awareness" about the environment. Sometimes they talk about it as a first step, as if it's progress. Many don't realize it, but they actually see awareness as their final step. As in, they consider themselves aware of what's happening, and then continue doing what they always did. A lot of people use awareness not as a stepping stone but as a source of complacency. The big question Does awareness matter? I put it this way: If you interviewed someone and their rÃ©sumÃ© said they were aware of the experience the job needed, but never actually did what you needed, would hire them? You'd consider them a clown. Imagine this interview: Interviewer: We're looking for someone with ten years…

August 2, 2017

Fitness / Nature

People want to give you garbage and make you fat and sick while acting nice

Since inviting people over for my famous vegetable stews more and asking them not to bring packaged food, I've noticed trends in gift giving. People almost never give gifts unwrapped. They nearly alway put them in boxes with wrapping both inside and out, all of which ends up in the landfills. In other words, they give you garbage. People who bring food almost never bring healthy food. It nearly always features sugar, fat, alcohol, or some combination. In other words they make you fat and sick. Normally people feel guilty eating fattening foods, though I suspect westerners, especially Americans, have learned to suppress those feelings. Giving them as gifts helps overcome such feelings for both giver and receiver. Never having experienced another person's thoughts and…

July 29, 2017

Models / Nature

Problems in global warming with “every bit helps” and little tips to do little things

Leading cultural change, one of the big tasks is to change collective beliefs. One of my big discoveries of my experiments with avoiding flying and food packaging is that what I expected to feel like deprivation and sacrifice ended up becoming two of the greatest changes in my life. Living by your most important values, especially when they override less important values that you were doing without thinking, improves your life. While avoiding packaged food and avoiding flying aren't life-or-death decisions, they affect a lot in your life. I knew my book would come out in my year (now 17 months and counting) of not flying, so I wouldn't be able to tour. Here is one of the biggest problems with suggesting "every bit helps"…

July 28, 2017

Economics is wrong about growth

My Inc. post about growth and steady state economies

Education / Models / Nature

Economics is wrong about growth

My recent post at Inc., "Economics Is Wrong About Growth And It's Ruining Everything," begins Economics Is Wrong About Growth And It's Ruining Everything Even Adam Smith foresaw an end to growth. How did we lose sight of it and think we could grow forever? Nearly everyÂ economistÂ I've heard say anything aboutÂ economic growthÂ says it's necessary for a population's well-being, as has nearly every comment I've seen on the subject from non-economists. They add that economic growth requires population growth, with its tragic results, so far, ofÂ pollution, resource depletion, andÂ global warming. They further add that both the economic and population growth must be exponential, but they don't consider the results of exponential growth. Exponentials grow fast. In less than the time from the Roman Empire until now--that…

July 24, 2017

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