The other week, I had lunch with Transportation Alternatives (TA) Executive Director Paul Steely White and I told him about my recent blog posts discussing how both the planet and the people could be happier if we built villages instead of suburbs and public transportation networks instead of highways. I mentioned that there had been […]
Activism and Social Change
Like falling off a log
I hadn’t heard this before, but Story of Stuff’s Annie Leonard, who I had dinner with the other night, told me that Paul Hawken said that living sustainably should be as easy as falling off a log. In other words, it should be the easiest, normalist, most natural thing to do. But it’s not. This […]
Environmentalism and social justice
The environmental advocate should strive to be the social justice advocate’s identical twin. That is not to say that they should be the same entity, but that environmentalism should proceed as though they come from the same egg. Social justice and environmentalism are born together. They have the same DNA. At best, the environmentalist shares […]
Little old me
A few weeks ago, at NYU, I was asked to give a short talk in response to a talk by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute (you may remember that Michael and I had an email debate here on the blog a few weeks ago). You can watch my little talk by […]
Demand better
I’ve been thinking about how to say this all night, and finally, I realized that I’d already said it close to the way I meant to (but I added the emphasis in bold tonight): I am not realistic. I never want to be realistic. God save us all from realism, especially if it means we have […]
Forced to face the big questions
For the longest time, for me, it was easy to live by default. To go along living like everyone else. Not to question. But the reason I started the No Impact project was because the crisis in human safety, security and health as it relates to the grave problems of our planetary habitat forced me […]
Visit your senator and representative and tell them what counts!
Talk about fun! 1Sky.org is giving us the chance to work together to show that each of us make a difference, and that we make even more of a difference if we work together. You see, in just a few weeks, from March 14 to March 31, our senators and representatives will be heading home […]
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 — […]