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 […]
Environment
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, […]
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 […]
What would Jesus drive?
As I’ve worked my way through the No Impact project, I’ve forged connections with “conservatives” and orthodox religious types in whose company a “secular liberal” like me might not normally be welcome. But what has interested me is that, when we drop the labels, we find we share so many values in common. I’ve written […]
Why the debate about climate change so falsely rages
There is plenty of science saying there’s climate change. Many of the mitigating measures to do with climate change are things we ought, for a plethora of reasons from national security to child health, to do anyway (use energy way more efficiently, move to renewable power generation, consume fewer planetary resources to ameliorate the other […]
Why I’m fond of saying wisdom trumps science
When one group of scientists first said smoking was bad for you, the tobacco industry funded another group of researchers to say the science was inconclusive. When dietitians began saying saturated animal fats hurt your heart, the beef and dairy industry rolled out their own group of gurus saying “not so bad.” And now that […]
An alternative American dream
I came across a passage in Jerome M. Segal’s Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple of Living that articulates, for me, the kind of real progress that I envision. It goes like this: “The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to […]
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 […]