From a New York Times science section article by Henry Fountain: Concrete may seem an unlikely material for scientific advances. At its most basic, a block of concrete is something like a fruitcake, but even more leaden and often just as unloved. The fruit in the mix is coarse aggregate, usually crushed rock. Fine aggregate, […]
sustainability
Environmentally-conscious packaging? Think ice cream cone.
It contains the ice cream. It biodegrades. It provides calories. In other words, it has value all by itself. It is not wasted resources. If we must have packaging, why can’t all of it be designed in such a way? In other words, let’s make sure the resources we use deliver value instead of just […]
Making products so valuable that no one wants to throw them away
Part of why it is hard for business to really embrace deep-green environmental practice is that making profit has always been associated with high material and energy throughput. If they make products that are meant to last, they sell less, and their profits go down. Reduced material throughput, for them, means reduced income–even if it […]
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 […]
Moving beyond boring, old sustainability
I’m excited to say that I’ve written the first of what will be a bi-weekly column at WorldChanging. Under a different title, my WorldChanging post begins: The task at hand — to create a new reality; a new way of living with fewer resources while providing a prosperous life for every member of our growing population — […]
Why your business needs to listen to me…
… because a new report out from the major PR firm Porter Novelli on the market influence of deep green folks says so. Well, not just that you should listen to me, but people like me. And like the readers and commenters on this blog. We’re the people who are willing to change our lives […]
The worst and the of best corporate efforts on climate change
Climate Counts, a non-profit that scores the commitment to reversing climate change of 56 major corporations in well-known consumer sectors–from apparel to electronics to fast food–today released their second annual company scorecard (read the full report here and the summary here). Climate Counts gives scores from 0 to 100, based on 22 criteria used to […]
Lifestyle change required
What with Al Gore coming out with his $300 million plan to convince politicians to take climate change seriously, and people like the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin writing about the big problem in solving global warming being the “technology gap,” I’ve been feeling like my little lifestyle experiment No Impact Man and my message […]