I haven’t written out the vision for the future that seems so clear to me in how preferable all will consider it compared to today, yet unimaginable to nearly everyone addicted to the comfort and convenience pollution allows. Of eight billion, nearly no one even wants to try. Towering over all other aspects of life after we stop polluting will be the horror we look back on the cruelty of[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday morning I packed up a lot of stuff: my pressure cooker, solar panels, battery, and enough food for a bunch of people, and took the subway to the Bronx to give a workshop. Maybe fifty pounds total, but worth it. Drew Garden, in particular, one of my favorite spots in New York City, partly for its beauty, partly for the people who make it happen. Often when I talk[…] Keep reading →

Mitzi Perdue has had a lifelong fascination with what it takes to lead the best life. She got to watch up close and personal how her father co-founded and was President of the Sheraton Hotel chain, and she also got to watch how her late husband, Frank Perdue, built his father-and-son chicken company into a company that today employees 21,000 people. Both men had tremendous focus, they had a penchant[…] Keep reading →

In its August 22 issue, the New Yorker published a piece, Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of Refrigeration: For the developing world, refrigeration is growth. In Rwanda, it could spark an economic transformation. August 22 happened to start my fourth month of my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, which is to say 3.93 months longer than I expected to make it. The article was about bringing[…] Keep reading →

Cooking from scratch with mainly local ingredients and no electrical power has taught me about cuisine. To clarify, I haven’t gotten any training on cooking. I’ve only had to figure things out based on what’s available. It dawned on me (and I could be wrong, I’m not a historian or anthropologist) that cuisines developed based on what edible things were around in regions—plants, animals, fungi—in what quantities and times. People[…] 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 →

People keep complaining when I say I do something to pollute less that not everyone can do it. They lecture at me things like that not everyone has access to a farmers market and that there are single mothers in the world, as if anyone didn’t know these things. Keep in mind that polluting, by definition, means hurting people. Stop complaining that trying to pollute less—that is, to hurt people[…] Keep reading →