Cover photo credit: Wikimedia user Coyau The picture is gloomy. Humans are consuming the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable clip, and the prospect of reducing that consumption seems remote at best. While global population growth is slowing, there are still more people every day. Each person is consuming more as people around the world get richer. Global trade is reaching deep into …
Our Slice of the Carbon Cycle: A Numbers Game
Photo: Sao Paulo at night by Julio Boaro At the dawn of the modern environmentalist movement, as we awoke to the devastating downsides of modern industrial life, our first and most obvious response was to cut back. If our voracious consumption of Earth’s bounty was hurting the environment, the thinking went, then we should probably trim that consumption. That logic is still sound. Reducing the amount of …
Heuristics take flight!
Sitting in an airplane makes me feel more in touch with my own mortality. It’s hard not to feel vulnerable when I think about soaring through the air in a fragile metal tube at 600 miles per hour. Do you remember your last flight? The roaring engines, the seats shaking during take off and landing, and the unsettling feeling in your stomach as …
Reputation, Trust and the “Sharing Economy”
When my fiancée Jen and I went to Chicago a few weeks ago, we stayed at the home of a complete stranger. A decade ago, this would have been seen as a risky and somewhat weird move. But we felt completely comfortable staying with this man, and leaving our luggage at his house for hours in an unlocked room while we toured the …