On Saturday, I had coffee with Boston College Professor Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. We were talking about throwaway products and the disposable culture which fuel our economy and trash our resources (and which I […]
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Too cute to drown
I know, I know. It’s not about the polar bears. It’s about human health, happiness and security as it depends on the well-being of our planetary habitat. At least that’s the rather cumbersome phrase I coined in order to get away from the “environment,” which to so many connotes something alien, outside of ourselves and […]
Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins!
I’ve been working on my book and today I was just feeling irrelevant and down and thinking that I just didn’t have anything much to contribute to the whole discourse on human health, security and happiness as it depends on the well-being of our habitat. I just couldn’t get any writing done. So, for a […]
The bottom-line problem with sustainability?
According to Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, 80 percent of products sold in the United States are designed to be used once and then thrown away. Now, this is a leap of logic, but for the sake of a thought experiment, let’s assume that 80 percent of the energy and raw […]
Sustainable consumption’s “double dividend”
[First off, let me say sorry about yesterday’s post of a revamped version of the national anthem. Like so many people commented, I couldn’t hear the lyrics. I thought that only the melody had been adapted. I would never have posted it if I had realized that the lyrics had been changed. But onwards…] One […]
Young people: how about an extra five grand?
Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute asked me to alert younger readers in the crowd to the fact that Breakthrough is offering $5,000 fellowships to up to ten of the United States’ “top young organizers and thinkers to develop a vision and strategy for a new youth progressive movement.” From the webpage: “Breakthrough Generation — […]
Oh say can you see
It’s Presidents’ Day here in the United States, a national holiday and a day off for me. But here’s an evocative song performed by the incredible Sufjan Stevens for the day and for the times (if you can’t see the video below, click here). You like? Addendum: Actually, I couldn’t tell that the lyrics had […]
Which candidate can launch us into world leadership in the coming energy revolution?
I’ve said this a thousand times. There are incredible opportunities in our climate change/dependence on foreign oil/economic crisis. I hold this true on both the individual and cultural levels. In part, that’s because creativity loves constraints. If we are constrained by the need to use less fossil fuel, we have the chance to create an […]