During World War II, posters like this persuaded us to ration, save food, conserve gas, turn our electric lights off at night and not talk about where our soldier relatives were deployed. With a little leadership, we changed our behavior for the sake of the common good. We changed the social norms. So my question […]
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What No Impact feels like after ten months
Unremarkable. Life as usual. Isn’t that strange? You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more […]
A race to save the planet
When my friend Elizabeth drops her son off at school in Connecticut, the moms gather in the courtyard to chat. There is a cool new feature to their SUVs which allows them to lock the doors while leaving the engine on. They stand around, a bunch of them, having a nice chat, while their motors […]
A letter from Bill McKibben
Dear Friend– There are occasional moments in history when we desperately need leadership, and this is one of them. If we’re going to deal with global warming, then we need to go beyond politicians who say the right words and find champions who will actually do the tough work to transform our energy economy. And you could play a […]
A company I’d buy from—part 2
I was talking yesterday about how a company could make a loyal customer out of me by being the first to make a good-faith effort to clean up its own environmental mess. The example I used was a way to easily return CFL bulbs, which contain toxic mercury, for recycling and disposal in a non-crushable tube through the postal service. […]
A company I’d like to buy from
The way I see it, if a company makes a product with toxins in it, then that company should take responsibility for making sure that, once the products are used, the toxins don’t end up in the environment. About as likely as a dog cleaning up after itself, right? Maybe. But I’ll tell you this: if a company adopted […]
To hell with the polar bears
I don’t really mean to hell with the polar bears, of course, but I got you reading, right? What I am thinking more and more about is the fact that we have present environmental problems that are already affecting the health of all of us–and most especially our children. In particular, I’ve been thinking about […]
Time for reconciliation
Because I had no religious upbringing, I like to say that I belong to all religions. I read texts from Judaisim, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, humanism and others, too. What grabs me in each is the call to mystery, the reminder that fundamentally, my existence is bigger than I understand. That is important to me […]