Jen from Brooklyn once left, as a comment, the story of Nachshon, who was the first of the Jews to enter the Red Sea when fleeing from Egypt. Nachshon, she wrote, was just this guy, not a leader or anything like that. Nachshon didn’t have the slightest idea how he was going to get across […]
No Impact Man
Because our backs aren’t against the wall
Sorry for the swearing, but I was at an exhibition of activist art from the 1960s and I saw this poster. I believe the boy in the picture is burning his draft card. What struck me is the fact that this boy doesn’t look like a hippie or an activist or anyone at all who […]
More on living the green life out loud
Yesterday, I posted on making a spectacle of living green as a way of bringing attention to our environmental emergency. It turns out I’m not the only one who uses the strategy. Lots of readers left behind comments on their lifestyle strategies for getting attention (see the end of the post). Among those readers is […]
In praise of making a spectacle of living green
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to decide to go against the cultural flow in the way that one lives and even more if you decide to advertise the fact. But I’m thinking that, of the many ways to assess which environmental lifestyle measures make the biggest difference, one way is to decide which […]
America’s love affair with the car more of a forced marriage?
From a post by Harvey Wasserman on CommonDreams.org: In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses. Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail […]
The cultural barriers to environmental change
Here’s an alternative title for this post: nasty neighbors and mean people you meet in the street. But that would just be bile and silliness and bitterness and not addressing myself to the real obstacles to social and environmental change which are at play, which are important to understand. Because what’s happened is that a […]
Day off for me
See you Monday!
Whales versus submarines–which do you prefer?
Photo of melon-headed whales stranded off Kauai Does this tear the hear out of anybody’s chest but mine? [Environmental] groups say that sonar can be as loud as 2,000 jet engines, causing marine mammals to suffer lasting physical trauma, strandings and changes in breeding and migration patterns. They contend that courts are perfectly capable of […]