There’s no mystery what causes more forest fires than ever: our polluting, depleting behavior causing global warming. If your behavior causes fires like humanity has never seen before, you are extreme for causing extreme results, not me for behaving traditionally.

Not flying is normal. Jesus didn’t fly. George Washington didn’t fly. Abraham Lincoln didn’t fly.

Power grids are not normal. The Buddha never plugged into an electric grid, nor did Mary Wollstonecraft, Laozi, or Aristotle.

Adding 80 million people per year to our population isn’t normal either.

Meanwhile, you and your extreme polluting behavior make New York City look like a nightmare, as if California experiencing more for years wasn’t enough or millions of people dying annually.

It’s not hard never to fly again, never to eat factory farmed meat again, and to stop buying from Amazon. You can, as of this moment, do all of those things with no planning. Here’s what you helped make of New York City. Do you really think keeping doing what your doing isn’t going to kill people you care about, even if you don’t care about the others?

Here’s another view. If you know where to look, you can almost see the World Trade Center (which we could have made into a park with living plants and animals). On a normal day you can see it crystal clear:

Your pollution gets into my apartment. This is the middle of the afternoon, when it’s normally bright as day:

• ← 691: Oliver Burkeman, part 1.5: Embracing Our Inevitable Limitations on Time and Energy
• Another zero kilowatt-hour month: May 2023 →