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,[…] Keep reading →

A brief political history of sustainability [If you’ve watched my Short Course on Sustainability Leadership, you’ll recognize the following from my session on the political opportunities. I’m putting only the main points here. I’ll develop it more in a future post. I wanted to start writing. If you haven’t watched the course, I think you’ll find it one of the most important resources on our culture, the environment, sustainability, and[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been working for months on what to show on SpodekMethod.com. My book Sustainability Simplified refers to the page so it has to help people who want to learn and to more. It’s pained me for it not to be ready for so many months after the book has been on sale and the New York Times profiled me with a two-page story starting on the front page of the[…] Keep reading →

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[…] Keep reading →

After picking up litter today, I had to look up octopus intelligence. The first link on my search was titled Octopuses may be so terrifyingly smart because they share humans’ genes for intelligence. Why did I have to look up their intelligence? Because of how disgusted I felt, but didn’t feel I felt disgusted enough. Below are three increasingly horrifying pictures of a garbage can in the northwest corner of[…] Keep reading →

I confess I haven’t read Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, but I’m working so much on opposing coercion and tyranny, I keep coming across him. I’m trying to learn more about the conditions that led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Learning history is one thing. Getting inside the hearts and minds of the people acting is another. What values were they acting on or not? If you[…] Keep reading →

Once, all garbage biodegraded. All garbage would turn into food for something within time scales relevant to human lives. Not today. Plastic can take centuries to degrade, during which time they kill wildlife and poison us. Plenty of residue from our culture poisons more, like pesticides and home cleaning products. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors could just drop the parts of the fruit, vegetable, or animal they didn’t want to eat on[…] Keep reading →

I hope I don’t start a habit of posting references to articles, but it’s hard not to share ones that say “In the next 30 years, we’ll make four times more plastic waste than we ever have.” That headline came from science.org, which referred to a journal article, Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made, from Science Advances. We’re drowning in plastic. It doesn’t break down on human[…] Keep reading →

Living more sustainably isn’t hard. Our human ancestors did it for 250,000 years. Our non-human ancestors did it for billions. Most life forms do, maybe all except we modern humans. Living more sustainably in a culture that for whatever lip service it falsely pays to sustainability rewards the opposite is hard. Then the problem is people—that is, social and emotional, not technical. After all, it costs less, requires less time,[…] Keep reading →