I can’t think of a message I received from environmentalists that suggested I would enjoy the experience of trying to live more sustainably. Every message from every source, including the most ardent environmentalists, told me living more sustainably meant giving something up. We had to worsen our lives to possibly help someone far away or in the future. A definite loss here and now for a possible gain sometime somewhere[…] Keep reading →

Litter isn’t a result of too little sanitation. It’s too much production and people still buying it. I’ve meant to post these pictures since I took them in the spring. I took them on a regular day. If you think cities mean more garbage, our per-capita environmental impact is less than Americans who live outside cities. If you think this garbage and treatment of public property is disgusting, as I[…] Keep reading →

I wrote recently in When changing fast is easier than slow about the growth in number of slaves in the United States based on a peer-reviewed paper From ‘20 and odd’ to 10 million: The growth of the slave population in the United States, by J. David Hacker in the journal Slavery & Abolition. That paper also reported the cumulative number of slaves in the United States. Before looking at[…] Keep reading →

You can’t stop the global heroin trade if you’re worried about your own supply. This post is about people who are addicted, perhaps without realizing it or in denial, to behavior causing others to suffer and die finding themselves impotent to change others. They haven’t tried to change themselves so they don’t know what change takes. Would you take piano lessons from someone who read a lot of books on[…] Keep reading →

Several bestselling authors on the environment suggest that people solve problems, so more people solve more problems. They conclude that we should keep growing the population. A century and a half ago people believed “rain follows the plow.” They created what looked like science proving that settlers moving west across North America creating farms would cause rain to fall more. To me, “more people solve more problems” looks like a[…] Keep reading →

I write in my book about how imperialism arose from people needing more resources than where they lived provided—that is, from living unsustainably—and that others wouldn’t trade for. Scroll down for videos that illustrate the pattern happening in history. There are many more videos like them, but I like these. I’ll give some context from my book first. I quote a book from a professor where I went to business[…] Keep reading →

I was talking to a solar expert on installing solar panels to my roof, now that my coop board has approved my looking into a pilot program. He brought up a satellite view of my roof. Check out this image from satellite view: If you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see it, but you can see my solar panels! All those black squares are tiling to walk[…] Keep reading →