Today I posted about My fifth annual cooking workshop at Drew Gardens: pictures and video. I also made these two videos to show off Drew Gardens. I don’t think I posted a walk-through before. Anyone wondering how much they can change a neighborhood will love these videos. For context, here is what Drew Gardens looked like before, barren and strewn with garbage. After looking at it, watch the videos. The[…] Keep reading →

I love Drew Gardens’ space and community. Every year I lead a workshop on cooking, though less now about low-cost, low-waste cooking. Now I focus on helping them create a food coop there. The city has some programs I consider “push,” where they try to supply fresh, local produce to the community. Having grown up with parents who, because they struggled to make ends meet, started a family food buying[…] Keep reading →

Regular readers know I volunteer to deliver food that stores were going to throw away to groups that make it available for free to anyone who wants it, and sometimes to people directly, always for free. The context: free food distributed with disposable plastic One of the groups, Food Not Bombs, distributes food that many volunteers bring. They also distribute for free hot food that they cook. I believe all[…] Keep reading →

I posted this question before in A paradoxical consequence of considering animals, plants, and rivers people, but wanted to pose the question more directly: If rivers and animals are people, then are no human people indigenous, only colonizers? That is, if we consider animals people, doesn’t that they are indigenous and that humans who came into their territories are invading colonizers? I was reading about how humans crossed the Bering[…] Keep reading →

I read an article, The Costs of the Cloud, by Ashley Dawson in the New York Review of Books and wanted to note for future reference how much artificial intelligence pollutes and depletes. When asked how they think AI will affect the environment, most people seem to respond to a different question: “Can you think of ways AI can help with the environment?” They’re doing what I wrote about in[…] Keep reading →

One day charging with solar in Washington Square Park, I saw a bunch of birds flapping around on the panels. I’m not sure if you can see them playing around in this picture. The video below partly captures their playfulness, but not as much as seeing them. They’d flap up onto the panel, then flap around up and down, solo, in pairs, and in groups. It was a warm day,[…] Keep reading →

The first time I unplugged my fridge was December 2019. A few months later Covid hit and I lived outside the city a couple months. My fridge remained unplugged, but I don’t count that time since I wasn’t home. The next time I unplugged earlier in the year: November 2020, and made it six months or so before spring warm weather made keeping things fresh harder. The next year I[…] Keep reading →

First and foremost: any preventable death is tragic. The goal of this post is to prevent deaths while making people’s lives more safe, secure, and healthy. Any reading to the contrary misunderstands me. You’ve seen tragic headlines of people not surviving difficult environmental conditions. A couple recent ones from Phoenix include ‘This should be a necessity’: Hundreds in Phoenix area die at home without air conditioning and Lack of air[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been reading an anti-colonialist pro-indigenous book. The author is very critical of colonists and those who do not honor the lands of indigenous people. The book doesn’t mention the recent movement to consider animals, plants, and rivers people. I first considered it crazy, but we treat corporations as legal persons. If we do, does their being people mean the first people in an area are colonists, not indigenous? I[…] Keep reading →