This is a guest post by Ruchira Shah aka Ruchi aka Arduous. I’m a recent transplant to London, and I had plans to check out the neighborhood around Ladbroke Grove. But as I sat riding the Tube, the rain started to pour down, and suddenly an afternoon of walking outdoors didn’t seem like the best […]
Environment
A story of our interconnection
I had breakfast this morning with the man I call my rabbi (though I am not Jewish), the amazing Rabbi Steve Greenberg. He brought me a copy of a new booklet “Food for Thought,” published by the New York City non-profit Hazon, which “works to create a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community, as a […]
The problem with happiness
Well, what I mean is that there is a problem with happiness as a measure of whether limited planetary resources should be used. I talk about this a lot, right? I talk a lot about how if we only choose to use the resources that actually make people happy and cut out the things that […]
How should we vote?
OK. Deep breath for me, because I take great pride in the fact that readers from across the political divide come to this blog and I don’t rock that boat easily. I believe firmly that the time for solving things through divisive party politics has passed. I believe that Republican and Democratic voters have many […]
Moving beyond boring, old sustainability
I’m excited to say that I’ve written the first of what will be a bi-weekly column at WorldChanging. Under a different title, my WorldChanging post begins: The task at hand — to create a new reality; a new way of living with fewer resources while providing a prosperous life for every member of our growing population — […]
The ridiculousness of relying on “market indicators” to run our planet
We’ve all heard talk of the efficiency of the free market. You know, as the idea goes, companies will only do what customer-citizens want them to do, because if they don’t, customers will sanction the companies by not buying from them. There are all sorts of reasons why this doesn’t work, of course, including the […]
The Green Collar Economy
I wanted to alert you all to the just-published The Green Collar Economy–How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones. As Time Magazine puts it: “Van Jones does not look like your typical environmentalist. He doesn’t wear Birkenstocks. He’s African-American in a movement that tends to be overwhelmingly white. His background is in […]
If you eat fish, you eat plastic
On Tuesday night I had the great honor of introducing Markus Eriksen and Anna Cummins of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation when they gave a talk at NYU. Last summer, Markus and a colleague sailed a junk raft made from 15,000 plastic bottles from California to Honolulu in order to bring attention to the huge […]