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 […]
Society
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 […]
More on community versus consumption–smart growth
There is an ad I saw at the movies. A man wakes up, presses the snooze button, gets up late and arrives at a work meeting disheveled and disorganized. All his colleagues frown. Cut to the scene replayed. The alarm goes off. The man scoffs down a Pepsi. He jumps out of bed, puts on […]
Apropos, first, of nothing and, then, of something
Apropos of nothing: The other night I was lying in bed, being held hostage by my daughter Isabella who insisted she would only go to sleep if I stayed there with her. She was mad that I had made her go to bed at all. She said, “I don’t like you anymore, Daddy.” So we’re […]
Greening the planet by making green profits and creating green jobs
One of the arguments against capping our greenhouse gas emissions is the effect it will have on the economy. Renewable resources cost more, hit the bottom line, mean less profit, and lower standards of living, the wrongheaded argument goes. Then there are the businesspeople who see the incredible opportunities in our crisis. It’s simply a […]
Forgive me if I sound too pious
I have a friend, a Zen teacher, who lost his daughter a decade or so ago. Years passed, and he asked his own teacher, “I have been meditating for many years, but underneath, I still feel an abiding sadness. Am I doing something wrong?” His teacher told him, “What you feel is Universal Sadness.” When […]
Time to live in the gray
So, it’s been a year. Twelve months ago, 52 weeks ago, 365 days ago, my little family–one wife, one toddler, one dog, one husband–embarked on a project to live with as low as possible an environmental impact for one year, smack bang in the middle of what some people think of as the most polluting […]
It pays to be charitable
Around the time I started the project, I became friends with a professor at Syracuse University named Arthur Brooks. Arthur had just come out with the book Who Really Cares, his study of charitable giving that showed, among other things, that people who give to charity end up wealthier. In other words, to generalize, it is in our best […]