I’ve spent the past twenty years thinking about happiness. My Master’s Thesis was on focused Stoic ideas about happiness, my doctoral dissertation dealt with the evolution of Augustine’s understanding of happiness, and more recently, I’ve been doing some work on Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of happiness.  You’d think that, after almost 25 years fixated on the question of happiness, I’d know by now what happiness is and what the best way to become happy would be.  The sad truth is that the more I explore this question, the more my own thinking about happiness evolves and mutates.  Happiness, I’ve discovered, is one slippery concept and there’s a reason why philosophical questions about its attainment have been debated since ancient times.

But the more I study the problem of happiness, the more I come to realize that we Americans have some particularly screwy ideas about happiness that may in fact get in the way of our own long-term happiness.  In particular, we seem to think that real happiness is measured almost exclusively by our present economic conditions (stuff + now = happiness).  Happiness is typically linked to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a measure of how much we are producing and consuming at a given time.  The presumption is that the higher the GDP, the happier the people of a nation must be.  Americans have one of the highest GDPs in the world, so naturally, we must be among the happiest people in the world, right?

But what if the very lifestyle that we are living in the present is a threat to our long-term sustainable happiness and well-being?  Imagine that we Americans are like heroin addicts.  An addict needs his fix all the time in order to be happy, but the approach that he takes to achieving this happiness (abusing drugs) all but ensures that he can’t sustain his happiness in the long-term.  What if our happiness is like the happiness of the heroin addict?   In fact, using GDP to measure a people’s happiness is like asking a drug pusher whether an addict is happy while he is dwelling in a drug-induced state.  The addict may think he’s happy, and the pusher would say he’s happy, but would anyone of sense really believe that this is sustainable happiness?

Fortunately, there’s another way to measure the happiness of people rather than simply by using GDP.  Nic Marks of the New Economics Foundation has developed what he calls the Happy Planet Index.  Marks takes for granted that things like a person’s present perception of happiness and his or her life expectancy are important criteria of happiness.  But he also takes into consideration the impact that an individual’s lifestyle has on the planet when determining whether that individual’s happiness is ultimately sustainable.  The formula he uses for making this determination looks like this:

• Experienced well-being:  people around the world are asked to describe on a scale of 1-10 their experienced state of well-being, with 0 representing the worst possible life and 10 representing the best possible life.
• Life expectancy:  based upon the 2011 United Nations Development Report.
• Ecological Footprint: basically examines how much of the world’s resources are used by individuals in different nations to sustain their lifestyles. 

Here’s the way Marks explains his approach to happiness during his 2010 Ted Talk.

So, if instead of thinking about happiness purely in terms of the ability to consume in the present, we think about happiness in a more sustainable way, how does the United States rank compared to other nations of the world?  The Happy Planet Index has a nifty traffic light score to rank individual nations:  green (good), yellow (middling), and red (bad).

http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/

As you can see, the results are radically different depending upon which criteria for well-being we are looking at.  But if we’re really concerned with sustainable happiness, we need to look in particular at the HPI map.  As you explore this map, consider which are the best countries to live in for sustainable happiness and which are the worst.

I’d like to propose that what Marks says about the happiness of different countries applies to the happiness of individuals as well.  Think about your own life, for example.  Do you perceive yourself to be living a happy and healthy life?  If you do, that’s terrific, but, as Marks points out, you also need to consider whether your happiness is ultimately sustainable.

To determine this, take a few moments and complete the following Ecological Footprint survey.  Try to answer the questions to the best of your ability, and, if you’re uncertain about the answers to any of the questions, just make the best educated guess possible.

https://www.powerhousemuseum.com/online/bigfoot/

At the end of the survey, see how many hectares it takes for you to live the lifestyle that you do.  1.9 hectares would be ecologically ideal, but anything under 2.5 hectares would indicate a more or less sustainable lifestyle.  What was your score on this survey?  How many planets would it take to sustain the kind of lifestyle that you live if everyone on the planet chose to adopt it?

The question that we all need to ask ourselves in the end is whether the perceptions we have about our own happiness correspond with the reality of whether or not our happiness is ultimately sustainable.  Marks seems to suggest that, if there’s a real dichotomy between the two, our happiness is based upon delusion—a delusion that I would argue is similar in many ways to the delusion an addict would have about his own happiness.  At the very least, becoming aware of this dichotomy should make you start to ask some very fundamental questions about the validity of our Western, materialistic notions about happiness in a world characterized by an ever-increasing scarcity of resources.  

To be human means to love, to experience regret and loss,  and to aspire to transcend the existential limitations of our mortal  being.  It also means—more  prosaically to be sure—having to eliminate the liquid and solid wastes that have  built up in our bodies as a result of the process of consuming food and  drink.  In the not too distant  past, people would have eliminated such wastes in an outhouse (basically a big  hole in the ground with four walls placed around it), in an open field or  stream, or by simply throwing such waste out of the windows of their squalid  tenement apartments.  Only in  recent history have human beings had the luxury of evacuating their food waste into toilets and flushing these waste products miles away from where they are living.

 None of us, I’m sure, would like to return to pre-toilet days.  And, provided our toilets are connected to modern sewage treatment systems, the consequences of our modern methods of waste elimination are convenient for society and much more  beneficial for local ecosystems than simply disposing of our waste products in whatever hole in the ground we are able to find.  

But, in our effort to forget that being human also means having to piss and crap, we have created a system to dispose of solid and liquid waste that is so inefficient, so wasteful of the most precious resource that our planet provides us, that we literally commit an act of ecological evil every time we flush our toilets.  

Before you think that I’m exaggerating, consider these facts:  If you live in a home built before 1994 (the vast majority of homes in the United States), each flush of your toilet consumes 3.5 gallons of water. The average person in such a household, therefore, wastes 19.5 gallons of water per day and 7,135 gallons of water per year simply flushing their toilets.  If the typical household includes four people, that household, then, is responsible for wasting 78 gallons of water each day and 28,540 gallons of water each year.

Consider further that water is our most precious natural resource; that we human beings are made up of over 50% water, and without a clean, steady supply of this precious liquid, we simply couldn’t survive as individuals or as a species.  Finally, consider the fact that many parts of the world—and many parts of  our own country—have been experiencing severe drought conditions as a result of climate change.  It has been suggested that water will become such a contested commodity in the 21st century that thewars of the future may very well be fought, not over access to oil, gas, gold, or silver, but over access to a reliable supply of potable water.  
 
And most of us are content to waste 3.5 gallons of this “liquid gold” every time we relieve our bladders!

The solution to this problem doesn’t involve having to squat in our backyards (the neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate that very much anyway).  The easiest solution is to replace older toilets with more efficient models that waste less water.  New toilets have a tank capacity of 1.6 gallons of water—more than enough to flush away whatever comes out of our bodies. Better still, European-style toilets are made with dual flush options, so less water is used to flush liquid waste than solid.  If money is an issue, a free solution is simply to put a 1 or 2 liter soda bottle filled with water into your toilets tanks, which will reduce the
holding capacity of the tank and automatically use less water.

The most important thing that we can do, however, is to stop thinking about water as a free resource with no consequences attached to its use.  While there is a constant amount of water on the planet and in our atmosphere, making waste water potable enough to drink requires building enormous water purification systems that are energy intensive (Singapore has been experimenting with this).  Even in a country as wealthy as the United States, building enough purification systems to “reclaim” all of the water we waste flushing our toilets would be prohibitively expensive.   The solution then is conservation, not reclamation.

This demands that each of us develop a new relationship with water that recognizes just how precious this resource is.  If something is truly precious to us, we wouldn’t consider simply flushing it away without any further thought. 

I used to take a group of students to West Virginia as part of our Appalachia Project every summer. The two Catholic nuns who were in charge of our group spent a significant part of the students’ orientation educating them about how important it was to live in harmony with the local ecosystem.  They then went into a lengthy discussion—much to the student’s dismay, I’m sure—about their system for flushing the toilet.  The students were instructed that, if they absolutely had to use the toilet in the house (as opposed to using the outhouse), they had to follow the following rule: “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.”  It took the students quite a while to get used to this system (their natural inclination, of course, was to flush immediately regardless of whether the waste they produced was brown or yellow), but eventually they got into the routine.  The students probably didn’t continue this practice when they returned to “civilization” (as they called it), but for a while it certainly did make them conscious of an issue
they probably never gave much thought to before. 

So, the next time you feel compelled to eliminate waste products from your body, you may want to consider if the flush you are about to produce is, in fact, absolutely necessary (if it’s yellow, could it stand to mellow for a while?), or, at the very least, whether that flush is wasting much more water than necessary to achieve your desired goal of getting what you eliminate from your body out of your house with reasonable efficiency.

Then we can discuss just how much toilet paper you absolutely need to wipe your posterior before you even consider flushing the toilet.  But that’s a topic for another post.

I’m always amazed when I pass a home in the area where I live that looks like its owners are vying with the Beverly Hillbillies for garish opulence.   It’s not just the bad taste that many of these overblown suburban monstrosities typically evidence—although I must confess that most do disgust my sense of aesthetic propriety—but it’s the waste of resources needed to build and sustain such housing that really troubles me. 

The McMansion trend around the country was one that boomed during the period in which oil and gas were cheap and mortgages were being offered to anyone who could sign on the dotted lines.  The eighties and nineties saw the peak of the McMansion trend with developments springing up overnight in what was formerly farmland and older homes being razed to make way for newer, more ostentatious structures. 

Just to give you some idea of how big our homes have gotten over the past fifty years, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), in 1950 the average house size was 930 square feet; in 2007 it was 2,521 square feet.  The average home, therefore, almost tripled in size during a period which saw average family size shrink.  More toilets for fewer people seemed to be the mentality up until recently.   

But, thankfully, the trend towards “bigger is better” appears to be changing now that Americans are finally becoming aware that the costs of heating, cooling, and maintaining huge homes in a period of economic uncertainty and rising oil prices is not all it’s cracked up to be.  In fact, there seems to be an anti-McMansion trend out there on the part of prospective homeowners.   The real estate website Trulia.com recently reported that more than half of Americans say that 1,400 to 2,000 square feet would be their ideal home size—still larger than the typical home of the 1950s but nothing like the garish monuments to conspicuous consumption that were becoming the suburban norm in the 1990s.    Current trends seem to be bearing out this downsizing paradigm:  In 2010, the average home size dropped to 2,377 square feet and it is predicted to fall to around 2,140 square feet by 2015.

The high cost of heating and cooling homes is certainly driving this trend.  But we should not underestimate the desire of younger Americans in particular to live much more sustainable lives than their parents.  Indeed, smaller homes are not the only things that are currently in vogue:  new homes are also being built using recycled materials, making use of passive solar designs, and often come equipped now with water conservation devices and Energy Star appliances.  It’s not that home builders are suddenly becoming more ecological; it’s that they realize that green home design has become attractive to prospective home buyers.

There are other advantages to owning a smaller home, besides the ecological benefits.  Smaller homes are typically more affordable than larger ones, which means that you can pay off your mortgage much quicker.  A smaller house also means less to clean and maintain, which gives homeowners time and more money to do other things.  Finally, because space is limited in a smaller home, homeowners are less inclined to give in to consumeristic spending urges, because there just isn’t the space to store unnecessary stuff.  Again, this means more money in the homeowners’ pockets and less stuff that will eventually end up in a landfill. 

As someone who believes that any living space over 1,500 square feet is a colossal waste of space and precious resources, I’m delighted that Americans are finally coming to their senses.  Now if we can just get rid of those damn SUVs!

I’ve been having a debate recently with some of my more purist vegan friends about whether a 100% vegan diet is the only way to go when it comes to sustainable living.  To clarify matters for those who are confused by the terminology used by those who adopt plant-based diets, by a vegan diet I mean one that is free of any food items that come from animals.  In practice, this means that a true vegan would avoid eating the flesh of animals (beef, pork, lamb, and yes, fish and chicken as well) and would avoid eating products that come from animals (milk, yogurt, eggs, cheese, chocolate, etc). 

First, here’s where I agree with my purist vegan friends: 

1. A vegan diet most certainly is optimal for the health of individuals.  The China Study—the largest epidemiological study in the world—clearly shows that the closer one moves to a purely plant based  diet, the less one is afflicted by the diseases of affluence suffered by so many Americans (e.g., obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and heart disease).
2. A vegan diet is optimal for the well-being of animals, including egg-producing chickens and dairy cows, which experience as much suffering as animals used for meat.
3. Finally, studies have conclusively shown that our planet itself would benefit if there were fewer animals producing methane (and thereby contributing to global warming) and polluting our waterways with their waste run-off.

So, there are some definite reasons why one would want to go 100% vegan.  You’d look better and be much healthier, animals would suffer less, and the planet would certainly benefit if larger numbers of people adopted a totally plant-based diet. But here’s where I part company somewhat from my noble vegan friends.   I believe that this lifestyle is far too difficult for the average American to adopt.  A vegetarian diet is difficult enough, but just try going out with your friends for dinner on a Friday night and see how many vegan options there are at the local Applebee’s or Friday’s in the New York area (the answer is virtually none). So what I propose is a less purist solution, but perhaps a more practical one that would have many of the same benefits as a purely vegan diet.  I call it “The 80% Vegan”.   Assuming one eats 21 meals a week, in practice this would mean that 17 of these meals would be vegan.  The other four would ideally be vegetarian, but might also include modest amounts of meat products as well.  Those four meals where people could eat whatever they want in reasonable amounts may not seem like much.  But this would allow enough flexibility in one’s diet to avoid annoying your friends when they want to go out for a night on the town and there are no vegan options available.  It would also mean that you wouldn’t have to offend your dear Aunt Sally when she makes her famous leg of lamb on Easter Sunday.Those four “anything goes” meals would also mean not having to worry if you are getting enough protein, vitamin D, iron, and vitamin B-12 in your diet.  The first three are rarely a concern with those who adopt a vegan diet, but the B-12 issue is significant for some vegans. 

Finally, the 80% vegan diet that I am proposing would come closer than either the strict vegan diet or the standard American diet to the kinds of eating habits of our ancestors and people in traditional communities around the world.  Most healthy, traditional diets—think of the famed Mediterranean and Okinawa diets, for example—are mostly plant-based, but include very modest amounts of meat or fish on special occasions. 

The question that I would like to raise is whether this sort of more flexible, less dogmatic veganish diet would (1) be more likely to be adopted by the average American, (2) be more likely to be followed consistently, and (3) produce some of the same sorts of benefits as its more rigid counterpart.

The planet we live on is in danger of being completely swallowed up by our love affair with plastic.  Our landfills are overflowing with the stuff, our wildlife is choking to death on it, and our seas contain islands the size of Texas, swirling vortexes of—you guessed it—plastic. 

Plastic was developed with the best of intentions.  It was a product that could be used over and over again and thus save our forests from being decimated and our natural resources from being wasted to create consumer products.  At first, plastic was almost an environmentalist’s dream: you could create products out of it in virtually any shape and size, for almost any purpose, and it was all magically synthetic.  And no animals had to be killed and no trees had to be felled to make these plastic wonder products.But what no one ever envisioned was that we would one day create plastic products that would be used only once and then discarded at whim.  I’m talking, of course, about the plastic shopping bag that we all use to pack our supermarket food and the retail items we buy at the shopping mall.  It’s estimated that between 500 billion and 1 trillion of these plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year.  Most of us tend to bring these bags home, empty out their contents, and then throw them in the garbage pail without a further thought.  

From our garbage, these bags are then transported to the local landfill.  Approximately 20-25% of a typical landfill weight is made up of plastics (not just garbage bags, of course) and, since most landfills lack adequate moisture and air circulation to encourage decomposition, the plastic we put into landfills remains there almost indefinitely. 
Millions of these bags actually won’t even make it as far as the landfill.    They flutter in the wind, get flushed into river and streams, and pollute our local communities.  Once in the environment, it still takes the average plastic bag  several months to hundreds of years to break down, and when they do, the effects are, if anything, even more problematic than if they remained in landfills.   Toxic chemicals from these plastic bags seep into our soil, lakes, rivers, and oceans.  Tiny bits of plastic the size of plankton are consumed by sea animals, and these chemicals enter their bloodstreams.  And when we consume these animals, they enter our own as well, contributing to cancer and other nasty human ailments.

If you think that paper shopping bags are the solution, they’re not.  Paper shopping bags require more energy to create, produce even more solid waste, and generate even more atmospheric emissions than plastic bags do.

But there is a very easy solution to the shopping bag dilemma:  carry reusable shopping bags with you when you go shopping.  They’re cheap, come in assorted styles, and are extremely compact. 

So why don’t more people bring reusable bags with them when they go shopping?  It seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it?  And yet, if anything, Americans in particular are using more plastic bags than ever before.  So what’s the source of the disconnect between social good and human behavior?

As a matter of full disclosure, I have to confess that I am a person who very often uses plastic bags when I go shopping.  It’s not that I don’t have any reusable bags: I have a bunch that I got for free last year in the trunk of my car.  It’s just that I often forget to take them out of the trunk when I go shopping.  So they sit there while I contribute to the environmental havoc reaped by our nasty plastic habits. 

From my own experience, then, I think that habit gets in the way of changing human behaviors.  We’re all in the habit of jumping out of our cars without anything but our keys and wallets when we go to the supermarket and shopping malls.  What we’ve got to do—what I’ve got to do—is create a new habit of exiting the car, locking it, opening the trunk, taking out the reusable bags, filling them with the items I purchase, emptying the bags of these items when I get home, and then putting the bags back in the trunk of the car for their next use.  If this sounds overly complex, it really isn’t in practice. We just have to create a new habit to replace the old one that is destroying our planet.  It’s quite simple, actually.

The best part is that, as more of us begin to develop the habit of using reusable shopping bags, they’ll become more common and other people will feel more comfortable using them.   We may not completely eradicate the plastic shopping bag in this way, but we can dramatically reduce the number of them that are produced each year. 

And that, my friends, would be a very good thing for this wounded planet of ours!

I hate people who thrive on causing pain and suffering to others.  That's why I hate rapists, pedophile priests, and child abusers.  But these folks are practically saint-like compared to another group that has it in, not just for specific individuals, but for entire generations of human beings not even born yet. 

The individuals I'm referring to are those who, out of purely ideological motivations or because they are whores for corporate interests, continue to spread the idea that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by rabid environmental wackos who hate our beautiful American way of life.  What these folks typically do is find some fringe, right-leaning "scientist" who has "hard data" that proves either that global warming is not really happening at all or that it is not caused by human activity.

Of course, there's virtually unanimous agreement among serious scientists that global warming is real, that it is caused mainly by the spewing of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and that the consequences, if we don't get a handle on this problem, are dire for our species and for the planet as a whole. 

Period. 

End of story. 

There is no real debate about global warming.  There's only the truth that we are screwing up the planet because of our selfish, short-sighted, materialistic human activities and there's the reality that, if we want future generations to inherit a planet that is not completely inhospitable to human life, we'd better act now, before it's too late.   This means living far more sustainably, consuming much less, and radically reducing our global CO2 emissions.

But global-warming deniers will do all they can to prevent us from changing our lifestyles in any way that will cut into fat corporate profits.  The more we consume and the more we use fossil fuels to heat our homes and drive our cars, the more profits there are for multinational corporations like Exxon and General Motors.  And the way our economy is set up, just about the only thing that really matters is nice, bloated profits.  The well-being of future generations is a luxury that a corporation can't afford to consider.

The global warming deniers, however, may finally have gone too far.  Recently, the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by - you guessed it - corporations interested in spreading doubts about the reality of global warming, created an ad campaign comparing those "who still believe in global warming" to some of the world's most notorious murderers, like Theodore J. Kaczynski (aka The Unibomber) and Charles Manson.  According to the Institute, "what these murderers and and madmen have done differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the 'mainstream media' and liberal politicians say about global warming."

After receiving a torrent of criticism from liberals as well as conservatives, the Heartland Institute suspended its nasty campaign.  You can be quite sure, however, that this won't be the end of their attempts to spread misinformation and raise doubts about the legitimacy of global warming.  It's the same strategy that the tobacco industry used to try to cause confusion about the health risks of cigarette smoking.

But just as this misinformation spread by the tobacco industry created a backlash against cigarette smoking, so too will global warming deniers, like those at the Heartland Institute, eventually go too far with their malicious lies.   All right-wing ideologues, after all, share a similar contempt for the intelligence of the average person.  That will ultimately prove to be their down-fall.  The more extreme they get in spreading their propaganda, the more attention they draw to the issue of climate change, and the more they ultimately help those of us on the left to get the truth out.

In the meanwhile, feel free to let the Heartland Institute know exactly how you feel about their campaign of lies!

When I drive through upstate New York, I’m always in awe of the natural beauty of the state of which I am proud to call myself a citizen.  I’m also greatly appreciative of the fairly stringent environmental regulations of New York State that have created a reservoir system in which water is so pure that it doesn’t even require filtration.  It’s actually the largest unfiltered surface water supply in the world!  Very few states in the country can boast that kind of achievement.

That’s why I’m particularly disturbed by a plan that’s underway that would permanently scar some of the most pristine natural areas of the state and at the same time threaten the integrity of our state’s water supply.  What is this nefarious plan, you may be wondering, and what sort of villains are behind it? 

The plan is to open up large parts of upstate western New York to hydraulic fracking for natural gas.  And the villains behind this plan—besides the usual suspects in the gas and oil industry—seem to be our own elected officials in both political parties. 

What is Fracking, Anyway?

In case you’re not up on this issue, the Marcellus Shale is a black shale rock formation that extends from Ohio and West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into western New York.  For years geologists have known that this shale formation contained large supplies of natural gas, but the depth and tightness of the shale made gas extraction difficult and expensive.  Recently, however, the development of  hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, as it is commonly called—has made it possible for corporate interests to get their greedy little paws on this gas, which potentially could mean billions of dollars in revenue for them. 

In order to drill for gas, shale gas companies come into an area, buy up drilling rights from landowners, and then raze large patches of land in formerly undisturbed natural areas. The process of hydraulic fracking itself injects thousands of gallons of water, toxic chemicals, and sand into horizontally-drilled wells under high pressure to release the natural gas from shale.  The Fracking Procedure Dangers of FrackingWhile this process does indeed have the potential to extract large amounts of natural gas, there are some significant problems associated with fracking that have led most environmental groups to condemn the practice.

• With each frack 80,000 pounds of toxic chemicals are leached into the land.  Seventy percent of fracking fluids, furthermore, stay underground and are not biodegradable.  Methane and other toxic chemicals used in fracking can then leach into groundwater, posing a huge health risk for those who depend upon this water (and please remember, millions of people in New York City depend upon drinking water from reservoirs that potentially could become contaminated).
• Recent studies suggest that toxic chemicals released into the air during the process of fracking may pose a serious health risk to human beings.
• Fracking activities can cause seismic faults that can lead to earthquakes (as was the case recently in Ohio). 
• The chemicals used in shale drilling may be linked to increases in cancer rates found among those who live near drilling sites.

These are just a few of the many environmental and health risks associated with hydraulic fracking.  Now, you will hear representatives from the oil and gas industry claim that the dangers of drilling for gas are overstated.  The industry, furthermore, has recently spent huge sums of money to convince people in the areas that could be affected by drilling that the procedures that they have in place for extracting gas are perfectly safe.  Of course, these were the same people who claimed that there was no possibility of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and we are still paying the price for their lies. 
So What Can We Do? As I write this, New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is deliberating about whether to allow fracking to go ahead in New York State.  The signs don’t look positive:  Cuomo and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos have already blocked a proposal for an independent health impact study of hydraulic fracking and are under continuous pressure from gas and oil interests to allow them to rape and plunder the natural resources of our state.     

But what can any one of us do in the face of the millions of dollars that the gas and oil industries have available to distort public opinion and buy compliance from our elected officials?  Individually, we can’t very much.  But collectively we have the power to sway public opinion, force our elective officials to work for the common good, and prevent further degradation to our natural environment. 
So here are a few simple things you can do if you care about this issue:

• Inform yourself about the issue, so you understand fully the price that all of us will have to pay if fracking is permitted in New York State.  A good place to start is at the No Fracking site, which contains as much information as you could ever want to know about this issue in addition to many useful links.
• Sign an on-line petition to persuade Governor Cuomo to ban fracking in New York State.  Or even better, call the Governor’s office directly to voice your opposition.  The Working Families Party has a hotline that makes it easy for you to do this. 
• Talk to your friends and family about this issue and get them involved. Remember, collectively we have a voice and the more people who commit to a cause, the greater the likelihood of success.

Of course there are alternatives to drilling for gas and oil that could eventually supply most of our energy needs in the future, make us energy independent (i.e., no more wars for oil), and have almost no environmental impact.  These are renewable energy sources like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal.  As the price of gas and oil continue to rise—as they inevitably must with world demand increasing annually—these alternative energy sources will become more economically viable and will have the potential to transform our planet. 

So if you really want to stop the environmental degradation and human suffering that comes from gas and oil drilling, then please,

• support the concept of renewal energy both as a personal choice and as public policy.

I hate Black Friday. I hate how it turns our holiday season into an excuse for conspicuous consumption. I hate the kind of people who would spend all night hanging out at some stupid mall in the hopes of getting a sale on some idiotic item that they probably didn't need anyway. But most of all I hate what the consumeristic mindset represented by this day has done to our planet--a planet, basically, that we are destroying in our never-ending lust to acquire more and more stuff.

That's why I was so delighted to wake up this morning and find this ad from Patagonia staring me right in the face.

Patagonia, in case you don't know, is a fairly high-end American outdoorsy clothing store, that probably has been doing fairly well during the recent economic crisis, because its clothing items appeal to the kinds of affluent individuals who can easily afford to buy them. They didn't need to run this ad, but they did it anyway, and, for that, I think they deserve no small amount of credit.

The "Don't Buy This Jacket" ad is part of Patagonia's Common Threads Initiative that encourages consumers not to buy things they don't need, to keep the items they buy for as long as possible, to repair them when they are are broken, and to recycle items that are hopelessly worn out, rather than just throwing them out.

Why is Patagonia going through all this bother when a campaign like this probably won't increase their sales in the short-term significantly? I'm going to give the company the benefit of the doubt and assume that, unlike at most American companies, the people who run Patagonia actually give a damn about the future of the planet. Maybe they have children or grandchildren and don't like the idea of bequeathing them a planet that will be much less hospitable than the one we are already inhabiting.

I'd also like to think that maybe Patagonia is on to something that other American and multinational companies just don't get--namely, that the pursuit of short-term profits at all costs is not a sustainable business model. In a time when many people, including those who make a decent living, can no longer afford to squander their resources on crap they really don't need, it may be time for companies to start producing items that are so well-made that they can be used year-in and year-out without replacement, and to charge prices that reflect the high-quality of this craftsmanship.

Ultimately, this sort of business model would be good for the consumer (less money spent over the long-haul), good for businesses (they still would make a decent profit from selling fewer items at a higher cost), and good for the planet (less crap in our landfills).

Of course, a consumption tax would also have the same benefits, but without insuring that the items produced would ultimately be of a high quality. Besides, no one in government today has balls to propose anything even remotely like a consumption tax. So until we have a third party that actually is beholden to the interests of the American public, we need to speak as consumers with every purchase that we make, rewarding businesses like Patagonia that try to do the right thing for the planet and punishing those that don't.

I don't need to buy a winter coat any time soon: the two I have are about 10 years old and doing just fine, thank you. But when I finally break down and decide to buy a new coat, you can be well-assured that I will check out what Patagonia has to offer...specifically because of this campaign.

Perhaps you should consider doing the same.

Imagine a species that is so fecund that it spreads to every habitable corner of its ecosystem. Then imagine that same species as it voraciously consumes all of the natural resources within its own ecosystem to the point where many of these resources are in danger of immanent collapse.

Then go one step further: imagine this same species—the ultimate carnivore—as it preys on all the other inhabitants of its ecosystem, threatening the very extinction of many of these species.

If such a predator was, let’s say, the Asian carp, there would be no end to discussion about how to limit its spread and manage the harm that it is causing to the Mississippi and potentially to the Great Lakes region. In fact, we would declare war on the Asian carp, calling it an invasive species, and investing as many resources as necessary to reducing its numbers. We’d have a national program of carp birth control with the sole aim of correcting some of the damage that this insidious predator has already inflicted upon the fragile ecosystem of the Mississippi.

In fact, we already have such a plan to deal with the Asian carp, and there is very little outcry about it, because we all recognize this creature for what it is—an obnoxious invasive predator that must be stopped at all costs.

But there’s another invasive species that’s even more obnoxious than the Asian carp, because it threatens, not just a specific habitat, but the continued existence of all life on this planet. If you haven’t guessed by now, the species that I’m talking about is none other than our own human species.

And our species has just reached a dubious milestone. This week the United Nations estimates that humans will reach the seven billion mark. And what does this landmark mean for the planet, you might ask? As the Center for Biological Diversity writes, "The human race is not only the most populous large mammal on Earth but the most populous large mammal that has ever existed. Providing for the needs and wants of this many people — especially those in high-consumption, developed countries — has pushed homo sapiens to absorb 50 percent of the planet’s freshwater and develop 50 percent of its landmass. As a result, other species are running out of places to live.”

Human population in fact has doubled during the last 50 years, leaping from three billion in 1950 to six billion today. The problem gets even worse when one considers that by the end of the century, the human race is predicted to add two billion more members to it’s ranks. That’s nine billion people on a planet that can barely sustain the seven billion inhabitants we already have.

And what does this projection mean for the future of our planet? It means more ecological stress, more deforestation, more mass species extinctions, more global warming, more pollution, more disease, and more famine. Life, in short, by the end of this century, will not only be far less habitable for other species, it will become far less hospitable for our own as well. It’s already estimated that approximately 900 million people around the world experience food insecurity or chronic malnourishment. That number will only get worse as our human population increases.

So what do we do to solve this problem—if, indeed, it can be solved at all at this point? Economic development and the education of women have already done a considerable amount to reduce population rates in the developed world, and there’s some evidence that programs like these are having some positive effects in the developing world as well. But that’s simply not good enough at this point.

Along with economic development and education, therefore, we also need a global population control program that includes access to birth control and support services for women around the world. And more than that, we need a cultural shift whereby we begin to see the wanton procreation of our species as the ultimate sin.

“More trees, fewer people,” should be our new mantra. And those who opt not to have children at all, for whatever, reason, should be celebrated and become role models for the rest of us. We might even consider giving tax breaks to those noble souls who are helping to solve this problem of overpopulation by refraining from spawning offspring—gays and lesbians, clergy, and young couples who simply opt not to have kids.

This may sound a bit extreme, but is it any more extreme than simply standing by while our species destroys what is left of the planet? Is it any more extreme than condemning future generations to a continually declining level of existence in which there will likely be global wars fought to control things we now take for granted, like water?

The approach of Hurricane Irene, which is supposed to hit the New York area in less than 12 hours, has led to an unprecedented evacuation of New Yorkers from low-lying shore areas. If the storm causes the kind of damage that experts are predicting, it could cause more than 500 million dollars in damages to homes located in oceanfront communities.

Now all of us who live on Long Island knew that it was only a matter of time before the next big one hit our area. And yet in the past forty years the number of homes built on the South Shore has doubled. I’ll pass over the fact that these homes are being built on one of nature’s most fragile ecosystem, because quiet frankly this fact is obviously lost on the kind of people who feel compelled to live on the beach. I’ll also pass over the fact that, in many cases, the often opulent homes of selfish individuals who live on beaches or barrier islands only continue to exist at all because of the millions of dollars that taxpayers like myself are contributing for “beach front restoration” (aka, keeping rich idiot’s homes from washing away into the sea).

The question now is what becomes of the homes that are damaged or destroyed as a result of this hurricane? Perhaps it’s time to realize that the very idea that people can “own” a piece of the shoreline is foolish and naïve. Shore erosion—particularly on barrier islands—is a fact of nature, and can’t be stopped no matter how many tons of sand the Army Corps of Engineers plops down. If climatologists predictions are true—and there’s no reason for me to think they’re not—then global warming trends will probably lead to even more severe hurricanes in the future along the East Coast, and will further accelerate beach erosion. These beachfront homes, then, will inevitably be destroyed by nature no matter what we do or how much money we spend to protect them.

So why exactly are we protecting them? Perhaps it is time to heed the warnings of Mother Nature and allow the entire Atlantic shoreline to be returned to its natural state—or at least as much as is possible at this point. The worst thing we could do is to allow people to rebuild in costal areas after their homes have been destroyed. That’s just prolonging the inevitable.

I know that there are those who would argue that it is unfair to make people abandon the wonderful lives that they have created for themselves in beachfront communities. My argument would be that they shouldn’t have been living there in the first place. Anyone with the smallest shred of common sense knows that it is foolish to build a palace on shifting sand. If people choose to ignore this time-tested proverb, then that is entirely their problem. The rest of us certainly shouldn’t be forced to subsidize their foolishness.

I can imagine a time when, after all the ugly seaside mcmansions and mcbungalos have been torn down, we will be left with 2,069 miles of reclaimed coastline, running all the way from Maine to Florida. People will be able to swim, bask in the sun, play in the sand, but they won’t ever again be allowed to build on our beaches. And this, I believe, is a dream that is well worth fighting for.