Remember the Single-Tear Anti-Litter Ads From the 70s? You’ll Cry Too at Our Pollution Levels Today The chart below puts Keep America Beautiful’s “Crying Indian” public service announcement in today’s deplorable context A headline in The Guardian two days ago, “$180bn investment in plastic factories feeds global packaging binge” led me to some statistics about plastic production. Plastic Production Then The chart I saw, reproduced below, showed dramatic increase around[…] Keep reading →

One of my top resources on the environment is the book Limits to Growth. Reading it was revelatory. They approached the environment the way I thought made sense, then created a model, researched the numbers, plugged them in, and got answers. What made sense was what they call a systemic approach—not to look at one of all the interacting parts, but to look at the whole system, including how the[…] Keep reading →

Apple approved my podcast, Leadership and the Environment, for iTunes yesterday. If you want to help the environment, I hope you’ll review it there. Why review Leadership and the Environment? Leadership and the Environment helps people who want to change their behavior but feel discouraged. Americans pollute and degrade the environment more than almost anyone. Everyone I know wants to degrade less, but does little. I see a leadership vacuum—someone[…] Keep reading →

A friend wrote Your perseverance in not flying around is beyond impressive. 🙂 Are you still not consuming normal packaging? The longer you live outside a system, the less its goals and values control you. As with fitness, my skills living by my pollution-related values becomes easier all the time. I responded I’m no longer “not flying” or avoiding food packaging. I’m living by my values, which means creating adventure,[…] Keep reading →

I decided to have fun with a spreadsheet and calculate how much I’ve lived of historical times. I’m surprised to find I’ve lived a meaningful fraction of historical periods—all the more so if I live to 100. See the tables below. First, I’ll share some highlights. How much of history I’ve lived For example, I’ve lived 2.3% of the time since Jesus. 2.3% is small, but I wouldn’t have expected[…] Keep reading →

Normally when I think of human achievement, I think of our cultural history. For example, of New York City’s history and value, I think of the Met, MoMA, Columbia, NYU, Central Park, its various other museums, concert halls, and so on. This Manhattan looks like quite an achievement: From another perspective, we as humans have turned nature into culture but also lifeless concrete. We came into a world full of[…] Keep reading →

Working on leadership and the environment, I’ve thought of people trying to reduce pollution. People my age and old will remember the public service announcements of the 70s with the Native American amid scenes of garbage and pollution, a tear rolling down his face at the tragedy of what we’ve done to the land, blithely ignorant of it. Here are two versions: and The Opposite of Progress These announcements came[…] Keep reading →