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 […]
Consumerism and Materialism
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 […]
Bottled water isn’t the answer
On Monday, the Associated Press released a report on the discovery of trace amounts of various types of pharmaceuticals in drinking water around the country. I got invited to discuss the subject on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (go here if you’d like to listen). The conversation quickly turned to bottled water as a possible solution, […]
Throwaway science
Apropos of our recent discussion on disposability (see here and here), the Guardian, in its green living column no less, trotted out that old tired question about whether a reusable ceramic cup is really better than disposable cups. They use that ancient statistic that says you have to use a thousand polystyrene cups before you equal […]
Economic progress?
Day three in bed with the flu, so I’m just offering you this one-minute video from Adbusters. If you can’t watch in your email or newsreader, watch it here.
Our problem, you see, is insufficient materialism
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 […]
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 […]