Media coverage on me mostly presents me as an environmentalist. When they report on my disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid, avoiding flying, and taking a decade to fill a load of household garbage, they post pictures of solar panels. They know what readers look for. I tell them that focusing on my solar panels and how I make do is like going to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and asking what shoes he wears, what routes he takes, and how exercise is healthy.
They would miss that the point of the boycott wasn’t shoes, walking, or exercise but liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security.
Everyone misunderstands why I avoid polluting and depleting. Also liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security.
I’m not an environmentalist. Most environmentalists I know of make my skin crawl, especially the well-known ones.
The middle steps between avoiding polluting and depleting and liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security
To clarify the middle steps between avoiding polluting and depleting and liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security:
First, I don’t want to hurt people without their consent.
Polluting and depleting hurt people without their consent, therefore I try to avoid polluting and depleting.
Second, polluting and depleting violate the Constitution by depriving people of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, as well as the Declaration, which says that for a government to be just requires the consent of the governed. This nation has a cancer alley, death mile, and other sacrifice zones, as well as many other ways people are deprived of life, liberty, and property without their consent. They also violate property values as understood by the founders, ratifiers, and public.
Third, just because this nation doesn’t enforce its own Constitution and Declaration doesn’t mean I don’t honor these founding documents. We as a nation and species can stop polluting and depleting, the only way to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” or the equivalent in other countries.
To enforce the Constitution and Declaration after over a century of promoting the opposite means changing our culture, which requires leadership. You can’t lead others to live by values you don’t live by yourself. So I’m living these values, so I can lead that cultural change.
