Katherine Roth interviewed me about unplugging my fridge and apartment from the electric grid and Bebeto Matthews photographed me cooking and putting my solar panels on my roof. Read the story and see the pictures at A fridge too far? Living sustainably in NYC by unplugging. I hope it helps achieve one of my main goals for this experiment: for a few people to say “You can do that!? I[…] Keep reading →

Longtime readers know one of the highlights of my summer is visiting the farm providing my summer and fall CSA vegetables, Stoneledge Farm. Since the pandemic, they haven’t chartered a bus for us in the city without cars. I’ve been biking more, including two overnight rides to Philadelphia, each 125 miles over two days. They were fundraisers and, since my group raised the most funds, I ended up getting free[…] Keep reading →

You’ve heard my conversations with award-winning authors, scholars, and other experts on slavery. With a couple I’ve talked about the connection between that system and ours. Most of the time, I’ve thought of the connection as an analogy. For a while, I’ve seen the connection as closer. Andrew Hoffman, University of Michigan professor in its business school and its School of Natural Resources and Environment, wrote of his discovering the[…] Keep reading →

Do you pick up litter when you visit your parks? What do you find? Do you find syringes and Narcan (an emergency drug to resuscitate someone who overdosed on opiates)? I do. Here’s some of what I found in Washington Square Park. Before you look, be sure to read after the pictures so I can explain why I keep posting about all the drug paraphernalia I find there. Why I[…] Keep reading →

Election years mean candidates fill my mail box with garbage. Here’s a couple days’ worth. Next week there will be more. Now multiply by hundreds of thousands of mailboxes in my district and hundreds of millions across the country. I guess the environment matters except when your interest are more important–what everyone says before they pollute. I call places that send me unsolicited mail to stop it, but it doesn’t[…] Keep reading →

If you make a polluting system more efficient, you pollute more efficiently. People don’t get that making one element of a system more efficient may lower pollution locally while increasing it overall. We like to think of prices dropping making technology more available, democratizing it, but by its fruit do you know a tree and the fruit of our culture is poisonous garbage. Technology augments our culture. I’ve written before[…] Keep reading →

I’ve been saving my recycling to take to my building’s recycling bin when I empty my trash, but the years keep rolling and I haven’t filled a load of trash. I’m going to bring my recycling to my building’s recycling bins. I haven’t kept track of when I last emptied my recycling. I think it was more recent than my trash. Here’s the plastic, glass, and metal from I believe[…] Keep reading →