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 […]
global warming
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 […]
Al Gore’s good news on climate change
In case you missed Al Gore’s OpEd in yesterday’s New York Times: … Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis. Economists across the spectrum — including Martin […]
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 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 […]