I gave a keynote and led a leadership workshop near Harrisburg, PA—a place halfway between where I grew up in Philadelphia and where my dad grew up, in Pittsburgh, so we passed through there many times growing up. I learned that the city hosts a Civil War Museum, so arranged to spend half a day there. I recommend it. A few items affected me beyond what I would have expected.[…] Keep reading →

Over and over, people refer to societies that were colonized as indigenous. For example, I see nearly all Native American groups referred to as indigenous. Here’s a dictionary definition of indigenous, which covers the meaning here. indigenous adjective in·​dig·​e·​nous 1 a : produced, growing, living, or occurring natively or naturally in a particular region or environment b usually Indigenous : of, relating to, or descended from the earliest known inhabitants[…] Keep reading →

The more I learn from different traditions, the more I find each group claims that their intellectual and cultural forebears are the people everyone likes and says the others descend from the ones everyone dislikes. I grew up in liberal, progressive households and schools. I learned that people who worked for liberty and freedom, and who fought against slavery and tyranny were the ones our traditions descended from. I learned[…] Keep reading →

Living in New York City means eventually many people will pass through my neighborhood so I host people for visits in my home a fair amount. Though I spend most of my time here and visitors average maybe a few hours a week, I think they cause more pollution and depletion in my apartment than I do. One big reason is that they use hot water for everything and heating[…] Keep reading →

On December 25, 2025, I wrote a post Help restore my shaken confidence in people from Christmas Eve day that recounted a troubling experience I had delivering food to a community fridge. I wrote about how after spending a lot of time and energy on a holiday, a group of people showed tons of aggression and zero gratitude pushing everyone out of the way to get all the food they[…] Keep reading →

I found a piece that expanded on something I wrote in Sustainability Simplified about how racism developed. Since I found that we needed to change culture to restore sustainability, I’ve been learning about abolitionism and related issues, since abolitionism is an example of humans changing global culture where no one thought it possible, then it happened, started by a small number of visionary people. In my book, I wrote: Oxford-educated[…] Keep reading →

Paul Ehrlich died two weeks ago. I read The Population Bomb a while ago and heard him speak in many interviews. I recently listened again to a few recordings of his and read a few articles of him. In each he was speaking to people who liked him and agreed with him so he spoke freely. In each he called people who disagreed with him “idiots” or something like “people[…] Keep reading →

It’s difficult to empathize with people we disagree with. It’s difficult to look at the world as if you knew only what they knew and nothing of what you know that they didn’t. Many people seem unable to distinguish understanding and empathizing with someone from agree with or supporting them. I think part of our inhibition comes from fearing that we’ll find that we would have felt and done things[…] Keep reading →

We are living in the wake of the corruption of otherwise great people, in particular George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, as well as their peers. They risked their lives to promote liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security. They claimed those values were universal but defended them for themselves and their peers only. Their corruption was not to extend them to their slaves. The legacy of their corruption[…] Keep reading →