Nature

I've written how trees people buy for Christmas are a pagan tradition in You Don’t Need a “Christmas” Tree—a pagan tradition. A reminder of the waste you can avoid. For some reason, everyone in the world doesn't follow my suggestions to start healthier traditions for Christmas. Instead, they fund the practice of growing Christmas pagan trees to cut them down and send them to landfills or with giant fossil-fuel burning machines, cut them apart into mulch, claimed to be made available for lawns, but I'll be mostly ending up in landfills. I saw my first tree being thrown out this season, believe it or not, on December 24. Why wait for Christmas to throw away the tree? I saw a few more on Christmas and…

I write about how unsustainability led to imperialism, which led to colonialism and slavery. But wait. Why bring up all this awful history? Haven’t we learned from it? Have we learned from history? Aren’t we moving on from it? Look at all the things that can solve our environmental problems: carbon taxes, electric vehicles, carbon offsets, more efficient batteries, and so on. Can’t we solve each problem one at a time as it arises? Aren’t you letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? There’s a difference between intent and effect. If nature responded to intent, I’d support all those well-meaning ideas, but nature is a complex system. Press down on a bicycle pedal and the bike doesn’t go down. It goes forward. Likewise…

Tell most Americans that an airline is investing in "sustainable airplane fuel" and their ability to think critically flies out the window. They'll believe anything you say that will let them tell themselves they can fly sustainably. Likewise with offsets, anything labeled recyclable, recycled, or compostable: people will presume anything is possible if it lets them avoid stopping polluting and depleting. Yet a few things they consider impossible. However much they say value sustainability and denigrate others who don't act as not caring or deniers, the following issues lead them to stop thinking and shut down any more consideration of acting more sustainability. Environmentalists, in particular, don't challenge them, so don't act sustainably. Their resulting lack of integrity, credibility, or knowing what they're talking about…

The Ecomodernist Manifesto talks about "decoupling," meaning growing the economy and population without growing environmental impact. Techno-optimists talk about "green growth" and "closed loops." Just giving an idea a name doesn't make it possible. These concepts have been debunked like cold fusion and perpetual motion machines, yet people like to use them to rationalize and justify business as usual. But the people promoting decoupling, green growth, and closed loops don't believe themselves. If you believe you can grow the economy, population, or both without increasing environmental degradation, it follows that you believe we can decrease extraction without lowering GDP. So you shouldn't mind not extracting fossil fuels or uranium. After all, if they're decoupled or the loop is closed, the economy doesn't need them. Or…

I love people and I love technology. Nobody wants ten billion people enjoying all the technology they want as comfortably and conveniently as they want more than I do. If we do it, we must do it sustainably if we want to avoid collapse, and unfortunately, we are not on that path to do it. If such a future is possible, it’s tempting to keep living as we do and hope someone will make each unsustainable part sustainable. Many of us hope we’ll replace fossil fuels with solar and wind, plastic with something biodegradable, deforestation with vertical farms, and so on. Yet each of these substitutions instead leads to greater consumption—solar panels require more batteries; wind turbines require additional development; and on and on. What…

People keep suggesting that markets will adjust to scarcity. Sometimes, but not always, especially when innovation and technology develop faster than they can react. For example, with fishing, we develop tools to find fish with sonar and satellites, other tools to haul them in better, improved boats, tools to unload and ship them, and so on. The short-term result: we increase the fish hauls even as fish populations drop. The long-term result could be that our last hauls of fish could be the most full, not signaling the market so it won't adjust except when it's too late. Likewise with oil. We use oil to find and extract oil. We find new ways of creating oil, like fracking. The short-term result: we increase the oil…

Here's our second livecast, following up our first livecast on sustainability leadership with Evelyn Wallace. You'll see me cooking one of my famous no-packaging vegan solar-powered stews. You'll see it impromptu, as I hadn't prepared. The sun shone for the first time in three days, so I squeezed in some charging time until just before starting, so instead of our planned conversation, we talked while I prepared stew. https://youtu.be/phvJ5p2aY_4