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 […]
climate change
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 […]
Calling on the President-Elect Obama to make climate an immediate priority
From a blog post by Gillian Caldwell, executive director of 1Sky, about how we can help the President-Elect and our other newly-elected representatives do the right thing on the climate crisis: The results of yesterday’s election are encouraging for our economy and our planet’s future, but we’ll only achieve the change we need by pressing […]
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 […]
The complexities of human nature and saving our habitat
There is a love poem by Pablo Neruda, the late Chilean activist, poet and Nobel laureate. It’s called “I do not love you except because I love you.” Maybe it’s not a love poem. Maybe it’s a truth poem. It’s a poem about the truth of human nature. It’s a poem written by a […]
Sharing a limited planet
Yesterday, for the purposes of provoking conversation, I posed the question of whether the earth would be better off without people. I, of course, don’t believe this at all. But I do think dealing with the question causes interesting conversation. I was particularly intrigued by the response of Ruchi, who writes the blog Arduous. She […]
The big question
I was in conversation with a product designer today. He works hard on sustainability issues. He starts, with a new client, by designing exactly what the client wants exactly the way the client wants it. Once he’s worked with a client for a while, and has gained the client’s trust, he can begin to suggest […]
Boiling down the lessons of the No Impact project
Well, at least according to Alma Gaul, a journalist at the Quad-City Times in Davenport, these are the lessons I learned after the year-long No Impact project: “First, he learned that it is possible to live with a much lower impact and that individuals can make a difference. ‘This has become explosive,’ he said. ‘There’s […]