Stories

The Village Sun profiled me after seeing me charging my battery with solar panels a few months ago. The reporter, Otto Fritton, spent time talking and learning what I'm up to. I'm not doing it for myself or for pipe dreams. Check out the story: The Spodek Method: Saving the planet and ourselves by not harming others. It begins: Often humans struggle to understand their impact upon a larger humanity, making the prospect of changing their mindset and committing to environmental sustainability daunting. After all, what can one person do, if anything, that will have an impact on others in a world of 8 billion people? According to Josh Spodek, though, the answer to the question “what can one person do?” is not as bleak…

The other day I was picking up litter in Washington Square Park, not making a big deal about it. I just do it as a matter of course. Something happened that often does: people got annoyed at me. The details aren't important, but they rudely approached and got angry at me. The interaction with me isn't the point. Something they said, that many people say, is. They said, "there are people whose job it is to do that," implying I shouldn't pick up the litter and that littering isn't a problem because someone else gets paid to do it. People feel entitled to throw trash on the ground. They don't realize they're causing taxes to go up, or fees to business improvement districts. The policy…

I think I mentioned that cleaning out my dad's basement led to discovering a few boxes in which he stored some of my stuff without telling me, so I found a bunch of things I hadn't seen in some cases since the 1980s. It may be tempting for some people just to throw things away. Some of the things I found included tennis balls from when I took tennis lessons, a few baseballs, and some other sports balls (racquetball? I'm not sure what a couple of them are for). Forty-year-old tennis balls aren't good for playing tennis with, so what can I do with them to avoid throwing them away. Let's remember that once you extract oil from the Earth's crust into the biosphere, the…

I gave blood today. The medical system never ceases to shock me with its needless waste, senseless rules ostensibly based in safety but clearly not, and mindlessly following those rules without question. For context, I met an NYU researcher, Cassandra Thiel, who researched and published on comparing an operation performed in two hospitals, one in the UK, the other in India. The Indian hospital impacted the environment five percent---that is, one twentieth---as much as the UK hospital for the same operation, and got at least as good patient results! Here are some articles on Thiel and her research:  Reducing Pollution From the Health Care Industry  'Green' cataract surgery model drastically reduces environmental footprint ‘Green Surgery Model’ Reduces Hospital Environment Footprint Also, a few weeks ago…

The temperature yesterday approached 80F (26.5C) and was in the low to mid 70s (23-24C) today. That means my neighbors are going to start using their air conditioners. As best I can tell, several of them turn them on in May and turn them off in September or October. The street constantly sound like air conditioners. Sound pollution is pollution. Regular pollution is pollution too, and air conditioning provides plenty of both. Still, people want that blast of cool air when they get home, even if it means air conditioning an empty home all day. The building almost across the street is a fire station. I doubt they pay for their electric bill, so I'm not surprised to hear their air conditioner running when I'm…

Last night I finished what I expect to be my last substantive edits for the book. Barring a big error or discovery, future edits will be only within paragraphs, not moving them around. I've made it my primary focus for several months and a priority for years. This step is a big accomplishment. After hitting send to send it to my editor and publisher, I sat back in my seat and suddenly felt like I had just finished a marathon. I hadn't realized how much energy editing was taking. It was also close to 9pm, I hadn't eaten dinner yet, and had my evening calisthenics. Oh, it was also a lifting day and my first returning to my usual weights since my four-day water-only fast,…

When getting electrical power requires climbing eleven flights of stairs, you learn to reduce consumption. My pressure cooker usually uses the most energy. I have to gauge how much food to put in based on how much charge remains in the battery and how much sunlight I expect in the days to follow cooking. The forecast says three days of rain, so I won't cook today, for example. When there are several days of sun in a row, I might cook without a second thought. Well, I still need to climb all those stairs, so I won't cook blindly. I might check my work and exercise schedules. My physics background tells me the amount of energy needed to heat the food is Q = m…

I value learning from people who think differently. A lot of people seem to value cultural exchange. Probably the most different place from the United States I've visited is North Korea, twice. I grew up equating flying with travel and the only way to explore other cultures. Now that I've stopped flying, I see how I had made myself dependent and ignorant by a practice (flying) that is destroying cultures, homogenizing the world. I still want to learn from people with different backgrounds or who think differently. I've shared at length how much cooking seasonally and locally connects me with people from other places far more than going to restaurants of other cuisines, which are increasingly homogenized and homogenizing the world. Likewise with many other…