Nature

You've probably heard of movements to give rights to animals and bodies of water as ways of protecting them. When I first heard the idea, I found it far fetched. Then I remembered we extend rights to corporations, so why not other non-human and non-living things? I generally hear about giving rights to things we consider beautiful or sustaining, like animals and rivers. What about giving them to oil, coal, and other things that pollute when extracted and introduced into the environment? Presumably, if fossil fuels had rights, they would want to stay where they are, let alone not to be burned up. I wonder if anyone has worked on giving them rights. What if we could stop their extraction in one fell swoop, at…

Following up my post about Hundreds of trashed dead Christmas pagan trees, 2025 from late February, I saw what I figure will be the last one thrown out for the season at the end of March. That's how many trees we kill for a holiday tradition based in a different time and place, that we're still throwing them away, like octopuses in the garbage, months after the holiday. Different either than now, when landfills are full and old growth forests empty, or when Jesus was born, which was Bethlehem, a place with no sleigh bells ringing or reindeer. I'm sure Jesus is pleased, looking down from above if he is, that his birthday is being so honored, by stuffing the misplaced symbol of his birth…

Yesterday in My favorite solar panel I wrote about the problems with the solar panels we produce. Since they require nonrenewable resources to make and don't biodegrade, we lower earth's ability to sustain life in making them and disposing of them when they stop working. As far as I know, that problem happens for all ways we create energy besides eating plants and fungi and using wood. We think we need them for life. People often tell me they think we can't live without polluting, that even breathing and pooping pollute. Yet humans lived without lowering earth's ability to sustain life for 250,000 years. Other life forms have exhaled and pooped for billions of years without lowering earth's ability to sustain life. We don't need…

If something destroys life, liberty, and property, making it more efficient leads it to destroy less life, liberty, and property, not zero. Stopping doing it would stop destroying life, liberty, and property. We know life doesn't require pollution, despite our cultural beliefs. The quality of life of people who live sustainably doesn't appear lower than ours and in many cases appears higher, also despite our cultural beliefs. Let's look at a specific case. Say you have a machine that burns oil. Ways burning oil hurts people include the extracting the oil, which often destroys wildlife and thereby hurts people, displacing people from their lands to reach it, and polluted air from burning it. If you make it more efficient, you might think you pollute less.…

I was thinking about how some religions suggest people to pray facing east, Jerusalem, or Mecca. Quoting Wikipedia, "Prayer in a certain direction is characteristic of many world religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith." I couldn't help pursue the question. What happens if you're on Mars? How would you figure out the direction to one of these places from Mars? What if we achieved interstellar travel? How could someone figure out how to pray? If you have to pray and can't figure out what direction to face from a place, should you not go to that place? I thought I was exploring a frontier, but it turns out people have considered this question. According to a different Wikipedia article: The International…

Increasing efficiency forever can't reach zero waste for many physical processes, but I think people feel otherwise. Or fantasize. When you hear about airplanes being made more efficient, or electric vehicles, computers, or whatever, do you think that if we keep making them more efficient, they'll eventually not pollute? In the graph below, where the green curve approaches the horizontal line, it will lower forever but never drop below a certain amount. This pattern happens when processes have physical limits, like flying, cooking, or heating. You can make them forever more efficient but they'll never require zero energy or produce zero waste. Then if you multiply their use by an exponentially growing economy or number of people using them, their total pollution continues to increase.…