This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto, who blogs at www.idratherbe.tv/injapan. “It’s so weird that you heat your whole house,” my wife said one winter. She’s Japanese, and when we first got married, here in the United States, we got a lot of mileage out of the “I can’t believe you people […]
Happiness and Life Satisfaction
What makes a life good for a) The planet and b) Ourselves
So I’m having breakfast with a friend of mine who is having kind of a midlife crisis and he tells me that when he was young, he had the choice between going into finance and one of the arts and he chose finance. He felt, in a lot ways, like this was contrary to the […]
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 […]
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 […]
On buying more than status
What follows is a passage from the draft of the book about my No Impact project. I thought you might enjoy a glimpse into my progress. The draft, by the way, is turned in and I await comments from my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This passage is about some experiences we had in […]
Livable streets for happier planet and happier people
By now, if you read this blog regularly, it can be no surprise that what we do that is good for the habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security is most often good for our quality of life. Gardens in the streets instead of parking places for carbon-emitting cars mean a 7% […]
Strangely, a way to enhance both technology and environmental activism
A study of the Structures of Participation (STROPs) in Museums from xDesign Project on Vimeo. Start by remembering these words: “structures of participation.” Now let’s go… I’ve argued before that, when it comes to using resources effectively, it is not only that we should make sure that our designs and production processes are energy- and […]
Does high resource use make a great life?
This photo (sorry for the poor quality) shows one half of an empty basketball court that I’ve ridden past many times during my car-less vacation in Greenport. It’s in someone’s back yard. Never once have I ever seen anyone playing basketball on it. And I thought: some dad or mom might have worked so hard […]