I find carob to be a fascinating topic, yet I’ve been putting off writing this post for weeks. I’ve been so disheartened by the state of the world, with the endless stream of stories about ecological distress and destruction that a post about carob seemed pointless. In the face of it all, advocating for sustainability just feels like fighting a losing battle. Seeing Reuters’ coverage of the mass influx of 49,000 emigres in one day into Ceuta, Spain, floored me* and pushed me to finish this post.

The Amazing Carob Tree

While only two letters differentiate it from cacao, they are worlds apart. I blame health nuts and hippies for misleading the public to believe that carob could ever be a reasonable substitute for cacao, thereby destroying any chance it had of gaining a market presence in the US. And I’m not the only one, since Jonathan Kauffman notes that “carob traumatized a generation…during the height of the 1970s natural-foods movement. [C]arob infiltrated food co-ops and baking books as if it had been sent on a COINTELPRO** mission to alienate the left’s next generation”.

Upon adopting a vegetarian diet in the early 1990s, I eventually found my way to the only natural foods store within a 50-mile radius. I bought a bag of carob chips out of curiosity, since they were supposed to be a healthy alternative to chocolate chips. They were utterly unpalatable, which resulted in me avoiding carob for decades—until I was hiking on Crete. Our guide stopped at a carob tree and encouraged us to try the pods. That was when I discovered how good carob actually is, when it’s not being passed off as chocolate. I also found out how vital carob was to the survival of the Cretans during WWII. When I later visited Cyprus, I heard a similar historical account.

The fruit and seeds of the carob tree are versatile and offer the added benefit of being non-perishable. The whole raw pod is edible or can be dried to make into powder or flour. Carob gum (aka locust bean gum) is used as a thickener. It can also be boiled into a sugary syrup, used as a cheaper substitute for honey or to make alcohol. Carob is high in fiber, potassium, iron, and provides 7-10% of the RDA of calcium. Unlike cacao, it’s low in fat and is caffeine-free. Studies support that carob can aid digestion, manage cholesterol, and is a low-hypoglycemic index food, possibly even able to regulate insulin levels. In addition to human food, it’s long been a source of animal feed and is used in cosmetics.

Native to the Mediterranean, carob is perfectly suited to the climate, thriving in dry terrain without needing much water or fertile soil. Adding to the wild trees scattered across the Mediterranean, ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman farmers cultivated the tree, planting orchards. Most civilizations considered carob to be a peasant food or a cheap sweetener, mostly producing it for animal feed. There were two exceptions.

On the island of Cyprus, carob was considered ‘Black Gold’, notably its single biggest agricultural export for a century, shipping animal feed and syrup across Europe. Long before that, however, carob gained notoriety for a different reason. Ancient Greeks found the seeds of the carob pod to be consistently uniform in mass. The Greek word ‘ceratonia’ morphed into ‘qirat’ and eventually ‘carat’ in French, as carob seeds gave traders a light-weight, cheap, and effective way to appraise gold’s purity and gemstone weight.

The Cretans were among those who mostly produced carob for animal feed. During WWII, when the island was blockaded, the population survived on carob. Though locals recognized the debt of gratitude they owed to carob, its association with wartime poverty, low social status, and animal fodder persisted for decades. Cretans recently managed to ‘rebrand’ carob, broadening its appeal among the locals. Its nutritional content begs it to be sold to health-conscious consumers (as the 70s health-nuts and hippies realized) and, as time went on, the islanders wanted to preserve their cultural heritage, embracing the tree’s role. Carob rusks are a daily breakfast food and it’s common to find carob bread and cookies in shops.

On Cyprus, though also used as an emergency wartime staple, carob was never stigmatized. Embedded in Cypriot history and culture, carob was not just a valuable export, but a part of daily life for most people. Perhaps the Cretans caught on to what the Cypriot tourism industry had long been doing and started marketing its carob products and history to visitors.

Carob is worthy of much more than being passed off as a chocolate substitute. Carob lacked the high level of economic and cultural significance cacao held in Mesoamerica that contributed to its value and, when ‘discovered’, as a New World luxury good for the Europeans. It’s too bad that carob lacked the ‘exotic’ appeal that cacao held, since production was unlikely to lead to the mass deforestation subsequently caused by cacao production—first in Mesoamerica by the Spanish and later in West Africa by the French and British. Carob is a far more sustainable crop than cacao, even when mass-produced.

When not masquerading as chocolate chips or impersonating a chocolate-like candy bar, carob is truly delectable. Unless cacao crops are utterly decimated, carob will never rival its appeal. Even if it reached the same level of popularity as cacao, the trees demand so little water and thrive in poor soil, making carob far less taxing on the environment. If cacao were ethically produced (as is the intention of the beleaguered Harkin-Engel Protocol) instead of leveling rainforests for monocropping, it would be on par with carob production. Like carob, in its natural growing conditions, cacao improves soil quality. But monocropping significantly increases the need for fertilizers and insecticides, not to mention the environmental impact it has on the ecosystem and global warming. An added bonus of carob is that it’s fire-resistant—an important factor at a time when Europeans are seemingly confronting wildfires on a daily basis.

Knowing all these fascinating things about how flavorfully nutritious and environmentally impressive carob is, I still resisted writing this post. Here’s where I got stuck. Advocating for carob might encourage more people to try it—not as a chocolate substitute (noooo!)—but when baking to swap out some wheat flour or as a sweetener substitute for sugar, since both of those agricultural products are far more environmentally demanding. More tourists might opt to try carob cookies or bread when visiting the Mediterranean, supporting the local economy and sparing the import of alternate baking supplies. But, ultimately, encouraging carob consumption is not enough to even begin to get the planet on track to alleviate, let alone reverse the effects of climate change. Even if every reader adopted every single sustainability suggestion I have made over the last few years, we’re still nowhere close.

Another factor that stuck in my mind was that, when visiting Crete, I was happy to see wind turbines on the hilltops, but then found out that the locals actively protested putting them there and continue to fight against adding more. I find this dishearteningly ironic that an island relatively more affected by climate change is rejecting renewable energy sources that can help to mitigate climate change.

So why did the news about the mass flow into Ceuta propel me to finally write what had been floating around in my head for the last two months? What we do—or don’t—matters. Despite my frustration, I don’t give up. Every day, I still make the effort to be more sustainably-responsible. Similarly, if I can reach people and encourage reasonable actions and decisions that promote sustainability, then maybe there’s hope that the planet’s rising temperatures will not cook us all to death. Though daily news feeds make me question whether we can save ourselves from imminent apocalyptic conditions, at least I know that I’m doing what I can to help avoid that eventuality.

*If I were still teaching, I would design an entire course to this situation, as it hits every international relations topic in a introductory textbook. The causes and implications of this event are that profound. Here’s more on the topic if you’re interested.

**For non-political scientists and others not in the know, COINTELPRO is a reference to a secret FBI program set up in the mid-1950s that ran through the 1970s, targeting pretty much every group (and then some) that J. Edgar Hoover deemed to be a threat.

That I love to travel is no secret. A day doesn’t go by—when I’m on the road—that I’m not thinking about the places I’ve been and where I’d like to venture. When Jorden and I decided to discuss travel on our podcast, I knew I was in for a rough ride. With all the air miles I rack up in any given year, the only thing I could do that’s worse is take a private plane.

Evaluating the most sustainable option is my daily default, which is why I feel terrible about flying. Attempting to be my best ‘sustainability self’ can be frustrating. My struggle reminds me of a TV character in The Good Place. Doug Forcett worked so hard to rack up points to ensure his entry into the ‘good’ place that he skipped out on many pleasures of life. Doug was so obsessed with being kind to everyone, regardless of how they treated him, materially lived the life of an ascetic, and subsisting exclusively on plants he could grow. In fact, his diet resembled strict adherents to Jainism who forgo root vegetables, because it requires killing a living thing.

I feel this way about travel, though I’m not going to live like Doug. Satisfying my wanderlust means leaving a bigger footprint by flying to the places I want to visit, but I’m not willing to make the trade-off of staying home. For some, traveling locally is an acceptable substitute, but swapping Indianapolis for India just doesn’t cut it for me. Even though I am regularly a tourist in my own city (awesomely, Cincinnati has a lot to offer) and have seen a lot of the U.S., the urge to take off runs deep.

I have a few things working in my favor that reduce my overall carbon footprint. I’m happy to eat a plant-based diet and I’m not terribly materialistic or a collector of anything. While, by no means, does doing these things even begin to offset my carbon flight footprint, there are other ways to reduce my overall impact.

Getting There and Around

Flying is atrociously taxing on the environment. Air travel accounts for 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions caused by only a fraction of the world’s population who set foot on a plane in any given year. Like other sustainability concerns, as incomes rise, more people will fly, further increasing total carbon emissions. If I cherry-picked data, I would only cite this study showing that domestic flights comparatively contribute 40% more emissions per passenger-kilometer than long-haul flights. However, even though international flights are more fuel-efficient, flying longer distances means they generate 50% more overall emissions than domestic flights. Either way, flying pollutes A LOT.

Not to bum out everyone who’s a fan of ‘cruising’, but they are the worst possible way to see the world. Cruises manage to combine some of tourism’s worst sustainability problems in a single vacation. In addition to high emissions and air pollution, cruise ships generate bucketloads of wastewater and food waste, then concentrate thousands of visitors at a single tourist destination for the day. When I was hiking on Santorini, the cruise ships lined up at the port, long queues of tourists snaked up the hill to the main city. Navigating was a nightmare, so I waited out cruise ship visitation hours before heading to Ipapantis Street. I wasn’t sure how the cruisers even had enough time to enjoy the sights in Fira, let alone see much of the island.

Upon deplaning, the destination determines just how sustainably possible it is to get from Point A to Point B. Where public transportation is available, trains, subways, and buses are an easy, affordable, and low-impact way to get around. Even with luggage, I prefer these options. Even though public transit from the airport and within a city center might be feasible, sometimes that’s where it ends. The less developed the country, the less likely it’ll have adequate infrastructure, making getting around the country in an eco-friendly way a challenge.

Regardless of the destination, many tourists don’t have the luxury of kicking around the globe at their own pace, so the trade-off for maximizing time might mean resorting to private transport. On a recent trip to Southeast Asia, I was so happy to take the train for connections in Laos, though I would have missed several stops along the coast of Vietnam without opting to hire a driver. Though I wasn’t in an electric vehicle, around half of car trips I took in Laos and Vietnam were in E-cars, which particularly noticeable at a time when petroleum prices were skyrocketing.

The Local Experience

Over the years, I’ve traveled extensively with small group tour companies that support local businesses, rely on local guides, and give back to the communities we visit. Because many of the hotels, restaurants, and shops that tourists frequent aren’t locally-based, the amount of money that remains in-country varies. It’s no surprise that local businesses earn just $5 out of $100 in developing countries.

One of the reasons I continue to rely on the same small group tour companies is that their objective is immersive experiences. The itineraries necessarily include star attractions, but they also include off-the-beaten-path sights. In Northwest India, there was no way I was going to miss the Taj Mahal. Without question, it’s one of those places I came away saying that photographs don’t begin to do it justice.

The lesser-known neighboring Amar Singh Gate is completely overshadowed by the Taj Mahal, but spectacular. While visiting, walking around the fairly empty fort, I wondered how many people miss this when opting for a day tour from Delhi to see the mausoleum. There are plenty of reasons: Short on time and/or funds; want to see as much of the enormous country as possible in one trip; checking another ‘must-see’ off a ‘bucket list’ of places to ‘do’.

But in breezing back and forth, they miss out on the local experience. My time visiting Northern India included an unforgettable walk through a local village where we attended a Hindu service. We stayed at a family’s heritage estate that provided local jobs and sourced food from neighboring farms. On a day excursion from Delhi, I would have missed all of this.

Souvenirs Abound

I attribute my wanderlust to my grandparents who loved to get in the car and drive. As far back as I can remember, we went on day and weekend trips. Though I always came home with a souvenir-I was a strange kid, I expect, because I collected postcards. But the best part was the journey.

Over the years, I’ve met my fair share of people who enjoy traveling in order to shop. In fact, some holiday packages—notably to Morocco, Turkey, India, Guatemala, and Vietnam—are billed as ‘shopping tours’, while other destinations, including the UAE, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Riviera Maya, are touted as places to buy gold, gems, and luxury goods in tax-free havens. I met a Danish family in Halong Bay, Vietnam, who sheepishly admitted that they like the cheap holiday they get, but carry the biggest suitcases possible for their annual shopping spree of the high-quality, yet inexpensive (for tourists with dollars, euros, and pounds) handmade suits and leather shoes. I had a similar experience with another Australian couple who bought his-and-hers matching leather jackets as they shopped their way across Morocco.

While visiting a handicraft cooperative in Peru, a woman in my tour group laid down $400 for a sheepskin vest. I was surprised because with the mild weather in Brisbane, she said she wasn’t sure how often she’d have the occasion to wear it. The couple mentioned they loved to buy stuff when they were traveling, while they debated whether she should buy the vest. They already had an entire room in their house that had become the default storage unit for had amassed over the years and expected the vest would just end up in there, too.

I used to feel obliged to bring home gifts for family, friends, and co-workers, but eventually shifted to only buying something if I saw it and thought ‘so-and-so would really like this’. Invariably, it’s a locally-made product, like the elephant and turtle figures I bought made from melted metal ordnance in Laos.

Per capita, Laos has the misfortune of being the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Scores of unexploded bombs and landmines from the Vietnam War litter the countryside, remnants from American attempts to cut off the Ho Chi Min Trail. The Lao government funds an agency to remove the unexploded ordnance (UXO) and provide local communities with a source of income by making souvenirs from it. Though UXO gifts can be found at street markets throughout the country, tourists are warned to only purchase them at the official Visitor’s Center, airport, and authorized shops to discourage untrained people from attempting to disarm UXO.

Taking the Rs on Vacation

Oh, the temptation those tiny little bottles congregated in hotel bathrooms, just inviting me to open them up to experience a new scent, only to last through a shower or two then into the bottle goes into bin. Sometimes I resent the Rs of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, having to be a more responsible person when I travel. I learned quickly after my first month-long international trip that dragging around too much luggage was a drag. But even as a light packer, I carry refilled travel-size toiletry bottles and bar shampoo to minimize my impact.

Much to my delight, more accommodations are switching to wall-mounted, refillable amenities, saving the world one tiny plastic shampoo bottle at a time. It’s not because they got an eco-conscious; it’s because it’s much more cost-effective buying in bulk and cheaper in places lacking public waste collection (and forget about recycling facilities). The same goes for all those signs noting that sheets will only be changed every few days and requesting guests to reuse towels: Saving water, detergent, electricity, and hotel staff hours equal more profits.

I’m certain one of the biggest challenges of any accommodation or resort providing buffets face is food waste. This is a tough one because asking diners to waste less food sends a much different message than asking guests to reuse linens. Encouraging diners to empty their plate before taking more food or letting trays empty, even near closing time, potentially leads to bad service review, which no provider wants.

It’s Up to Me

I crave something different. I need to go abroad to satisfy my urge. But I also need to be able to live with myself with the choices I make. In all my years of teaching about sustainability issues, the best response I could give when students asked for advice about how to live a more planet-friendly life was that they ultimately had to decide for themselves where to draw the line.

Each person needs to determine the trade-offs they’re willing to make. Of course, this isn’t a satisfying answer in the least. Having a roadmap with specific directions would be much easier. The closest thing to a roadmap is reducing beef consumption and minimizing food waste, since these changes reap the biggest eco-rewards. It’s kinda hard to make a good case for wasting food, so for those committing to changes, that’s fairly simple. But skipping beef for some is on par with me reigning in my wanderlust.

I’ve recently been hearing the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Black Summer” a lot. I was curious as to when it was released and found that it won MTV’s Best Rock Video* for 2022. The song was written in response to the devastating bushfires that plagued Australia during the 2019-2020 season. Dubbed the ‘Black Summer’, bushfires caused an unprecedented amount of damage, affecting 80% of the population.

Reports of Australia’s January 2026 bushfires hit international news, as the southeast combated ravaging blazes during a summer heatwave that destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of bushland, killed tens of thousands of livestock, and razed 900 buildings in just one week. Wildfires are so common and such a threat in Australia that My Fire Watch is a site dedicated bushfire hotspots and danger zones. It also tracts those in neighboring Indonesia, Singapore, and Papua-New Guinea, where wildfires are also on the rise.

The biggest challenges come from decreasing rainfall, lightning, and ‘firehawks’. Indeed, the black kite, whistling kite, and brown falcon contribute to wildfires, particularly in northern Australia, spreading fire by picking up burning sticks to drop in dry grass in order to make it easier to catch their prey. Indigenous people have a long history of relying on these birds for controlled burning for land management to minimize wildfires, just as their counterparts in North America kept forests healthy—but without the help of these birds.

As detailed in a 2025 study, 43% of the most devastating wildfires have happened in the last decade. Increasingly, inhabitants who never would have expected to be at risk of wildfire face this danger, while others who previously had excellent air quality are choking on smoke and ash particulates. Though previously uncommon, Chile has been at greater risk of wildfires in the last decade due to increased drought conditions. In six of seven years, Washington state lost more acreage due to wildfires than any previous decade from 1985-2014, with 2015-2024 destroying more than twice that of the previous three decades. These are just a few of the countless examples from around the world of increased incidences of wildfire spreads.

Why Getting Our Attention is So Difficult

As an undergraduate, I took a course entitled Politics & The Arts. At that time, I decided it would be the first topics course I would offer as a professor. It allowed me to tap into my own creative interests while exposing students to a variety of pressing topics. Using movies, music, cartoons—and some media that was seemingly foreign to them (Read a novel?!?)—I revealed how creators of both fine arts and popular culture used these mediums to discuss political issues.

One topic of focus, near and dear to my heart, was the environment. Reading the backstory for “Black Summer” reminded me of the Talking Head’s 1988 “Nothing but Flowers” music video I used for class. Despite having a catchy tune with lively dancing, it’s a critical commentary on environmental degradation. They’re quick, but statistics about rainforest clearing, consumption, and hazardous waste flash up during the video to highlight the direction things are headed.

People are likely to become inured to the blatant cries from NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, that fades into the background noise amid the deluge of information bombarding us from seemingly every facet of our lives. Artists take a different tactic, though their methods to draw attention to sustainability issues require more attention to get the message. I didn’t make the connection between RHCP’s “Black Summer” and the Australian bushfires until I’d looked it up. Apart from the title, the lyrics aren’t telling.

I recently came across the newsletter Climate-Colored Goggles. Sammy Roth takes a similar approach to what I did in academia. He uncovers connections between pop culture and climate change, highlights people in the limelight trying to make a difference, and encourages readers to consider what we can do. But, like the Talking Heads and the RHCP, messaging is only a fraction of the problem.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome

A reset of what is considered the ‘normal’ state of nature is a bigger challenge to getting at the underlying issues causing climate change. Shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) was coined by a fisheries biologist, Daniel Pauly, as he described how both scientists and the public undergo a ‘reset’, as each generation accepts a new norm for environmental decline. Written as a one-page Postscript in the Elsevier Science journal in 1995, Pauly accomplished something that’s the envy of every academic: His brief, 945-word “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries,” basically went viral—for academics, that means that the publication became a seminal work, repeatedly cited as researchers latched onto the concept he described to explain how ecosystems degrade.

SBS explains generational shift, which is easy to understand why it happens, and, therefore, why it’s difficult to encourage people to consider their sustainability impact. Arguably, what’s more important, yet should be easier to accomplish, is getting people to see right here, right now, how our actions are making the planet hotter. ‘Seasonal creep’ is subtle, but it’s right under our noses. Summer is cutting earlier into spring and lasting longer into autumn. Seasonal creep is the reason the International Olympic Committee has been forced to rethink its approach to choosing locations for both Summer and Winter Olympic Games.

It’s more difficult to compare what a snow-capped mountain looked like 30 years ago to the loss of snow today. It’s easier to see by comparing photos, but rarely makes a deep enough impression on a person to compel them to act. Relying on data as far back as 1880, the USA National Phenology Network (USE-NPN) tracks ‘first leaf out’ and ‘first bloom out’. They have some pretty neat time-lapse leaf and bloom maps tracking lilacs and honeysuckle, the earliest spring plants. Just as I’d mentioned in my Halloween post that seasonal creep has disrupted the timing of pumpkin-harvesting in the autumn, spring springs much earlier.

This year, the honeysuckle arrived in Cincinnati two weeks earlier than the average for 1991-2020. Not only is it coming earlier, but changing climate conditions are conducive to the increase in volume of what is an invasive species in this region. Despite my best efforts to keep the honeysuckle at bay, it is relentless, growing longer, larger, and denser, pushing out native species. During the height of bloom, I can smell it indoors, even with the house completely closed.

Effecting Change

Though we’re faced with reasons on a daily basis to promote sustainability, a meager number of people commit to the two most effective and low-hanging fruit changes to make: Cutting back on meat consumption and reducing food waste. (Broken record alert: Swapping out beef for literally any meat for just one meal a week makes a huge difference.) At the same time, we’re stressed out about the effects of climate change, resulting in the American Psychological Association declaring in 2017 that climate change causes mental health issues.

The increase in extreme weather conditions and seasonal creep should alarm us to act. Instead, we don’t act on warnings. Instead, a crisis hits and we do the best we can, basically ‘rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sinks’, as my spouse says. On this Earth Day 2026, I hope you will consider your impact and (re)consider the easiest sustainability changes you can make.

*In case you missed the news, MTV aired its last music video ever on December 31, 2025. (As Bowling for Soup lamented, it’d been a while since MTV actually played music.) Appropriately, the last video MTV aired was appropriately the one that launched MTV: “Video Killed the Radio Star”. I didn’t watch, but the appropriate penultimate video would have been “Internet Killed the Video Star”.

St. Patrick apparently had a staff in one hand and a Guinness in the other when he banished the snakes from Ireland: Why else would March 17^th be one of the biggest beer days of the year? But with rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and increased flooding, Irish brewers need to implement sustainable production to help mitigate these issues. Guinness seems to be on board, noting that it is only ‘263 years into our 9,000 year lease at the St. James’s Gate brewery’ and intends to be in it ‘for the long haul’.

Sustainability Challenges

Hop growers face the same challenge that coffee growers began encountering in the 1990s. Even though more people drink coffee worldwide, consumers opt for single-serving to-go specialty cups over pots of coffee. The beer industry is coping with decreased volume of production, as consumers swap out for cases of beer in favor of microbrewery and craft drafts. Increased popularity of low-carbohydrate diets, along with an explosion in popularity for ‘craft non-alcoholic’ (a.k.a. ‘non-alc’), due to claims over health concerns, diet drugs that decrease appetite (and, thus, caloric intake), generational shifts, and the impact of tariffs on beer exports.

Washington state had long been the center of hop production in the U.S., growing 75% of the country’s supply, and worldwide. In 2024, that changed when Germany unseated the US by harvesting over 4,500 more acres of hops. Adopting similar strategies as coffee producers had, hop producers are looking abroad for brewers and drinkers, now exporting almost 50% of US-grown hops abroad to expanding markets, such as those in South America

Willingness to pay astronomical prices for blended coffee drinks led to a market glut that took years for adjustment by coffee growers. In the same way that coffee retailers cashed in on this cow, selling pricey individual cups of ‘coffee’, while growers suffered the consequences of oversupply, both coffee and hop farmers must adjust to lower demand while coping with increased production costs due to environmental challenges. Drought conditions in Washington state have intensified spider mite activity, necessitating greater use of pesticides. So unprecedented was this lack of precipitation that one farmer sprayed for the first time ever in 2024. His family farm wants to maintain its organic certification. In order to reduce the amount of organic pesticides needed, they also introduced a breed of beetles that feed on mites and use top-down irrigation that concomitantly washes off the dirt that attracts the mites.

Mexico is the world’s largest exporter of beer. (This is not an answer I would have gotten right at pub quiz or on Jeopardy!) Combined, the US and Canada imported over 90% of all Mexican beer. Often overlooked is the fact that, when exporting agricultural products and beverages, the producing country’s water is exported, as well. Production of any sort—clothing, vehicles, microchips, or solar panels— obviously requires water. But when foods and drinks cross a border, water is physically exported along with them, taking it out of the local water cycle. Coupled with climate change, increased demand for its beer (which requires four liters of water to make), along with growing global demand for Mexican tequila, contribute to the country’s high level of water scarcity.

Greener Beer, Hoppy Buildings, and Drunken Fish

In a seven-country survey, beer drinkers said they would be willing to pay up to 30% more for more sustainably produced beer. Whether they’ll be willing to pay $3-$5 more per glass will determine their actual level of commitment. Sustainability challenges may prove more difficult at bars and pubs, but festival organizers might have an advantage. At Munich’s 2025 Oktoberfest, organizers sought to highlight the changes they’re making. To green-up the festival, they shifted to renewable electricity, trapping water for reuse, and offering more plant-based food options.

Appropriately coinciding with Earth Week, Shade City Brewfest, held at the Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise, is focused on making this outing environmentally-responsible. In 2024, they accomplished an amazing feat. Relying on compostable and reusable food packaging, along with requiring participants to bring their own cups and water bottles, the total amount of waste produced at an event hosting thousands of people was just one bag of trash. Meanwhile, The Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado has been tracking their sustainability record since 2018, working toward waste reduction and resource recovery.

Various projects have been developed to use beer waste. Moving toward a more circular economy, biodegradable packaging, biomass, fertilizers and packaging trays, packaging, alternative leather, and construction materials, repurposing beer waste, and upcycling unused parts of the hop plant offer endless repurposing possibilities. For salmon farming in Norway, they’re working on a way to use beer waste for feed. In the final stages of production, this method would be more environmentally sustainable than their current reliance on imported soybeans from South America.

Another innovative strategy starts in the vat. The appropriately-called Toast Brewing replaces 25% of malted barley with surplus bread waste, while the also well-named Crumbs Brewing uses leftover bread to brew its specialty Sourdough Pale Ale and Rye Coffee Porter (which, yes, also uses discarded coffee grounds). These are new kids on the block compared to what the Marmite Food Company developed over a century ago, using the protein-rich residue from beer brewing to make its eponymous product. The Aussies followed suit in 1923, inventing the similar spread, Vegemite.

The Big Bottlers

Not to be outdone by craft and microbrewers, big producers are more committed to sustainability improvements driven by economic incentives, with the added benefit of good press. Guinness is part of Diageo, which, like Carlsberg, Heineken, and Anheuser-Busch, has ambitious goals for 100% water security in high-risk areas and is on track for carbon-neutral operations by 2030. They also share similar objectives for sustainably-sourced, traceable ingredients, security for farmers, and circular packaging.

Packaging issues facing brewers vary from those of the non-alcoholic beverage corporations, whose biggest problem is plastics. For beer-makers, bottles have a greater likelihood of being harvested in established recycling streams, as glass can be endlessly melted down and reused. But producers need to close the loop where bottles don’t make it to the recycling plants. Heineken developed a project to repurpose bottles for construction materials in the Caribbean, reducing the need for sand to make concrete and gravel for paving.

What started out as a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by dyeing the Chicago River green, should also serve as a reminder of the environmental issues we face. Beer-makers have countless options to reduce, reuse, and repurpose resources in production. It’s up to consumers to push them in the right direction.

With the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in full swing, I thought about an assignment I gave in Globalization, a class designed to show how we have become more interdependent with others around the world. This interconnection through the global economy, technology, politics, and socio-cultural norms impacts the quality of the environment and the living standard of people.

For their assignment, I linked a few articles about previous Olympic Games and had them connect globalization concepts, including ‘justice globalism’ and ‘glocalization’ with specific issues that emerged surrounding this international event. (If you really want to know more about these concepts, just let me know.)

Things are Heating Up

Headlines like “Snowmakers Feel the Heat” and “As Winter Warms” were commonplace even before the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. When a friend who recently moved just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, mentioned how little snow they get, I was taken aback. I had just assumed that because she lived in the Alps, it would be a winter wonderland. As it turns out, though Grenoble, France hosted the Winter Olympics in 1968, for France to host in 2030, the events must, instead, take place 100 miles away in Haute Savoie and Briançon, more than a thousand feet higher in elevation to compensate for the impact of climate change. While weather conditions dominate the headlines, few spend much time on the underlying causes.

It wasn’t until 1998 that sustainability issues hit the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) radar. Unlike current concerns about a lack of snow and sufficiently cold temperatures for the Winter Olympic Games, the first mention of climate change was due to heavy snow caused by extreme weather at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. Indeed, environmentalism was on the Japanese Olympic Committee’s minds well before these Games began. The previous year, after years of negotiations, the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol, a landmark treaty seeking to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, was finally signed in Japan. The Japanese Olympic Committee clearly had this objective in mind as they adopted the motto “Coexistence with Nature” for the 1998 Winter Olympics. It took a few decades, however, before the IOC followed Japan’s lead in making sustainability a priority.

Climate change was really starting to have an impact by the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 and again in Sochi, 2014, with rising temperatures affecting racing conditions. Interestingly, artificial snowmaking was introduced in 1980 for the Lake Placid Games. One of the numerous studies has compared whether previous Winter locations [like Lillehammer (yes), Turin (questionable), and Sochi (no)] remain viable sites for future Games. Yet, it wasn’t until 2024 that the IOC commissioned a study to consider the viability of future host locations.

And though the Winter Games get most of the attention, the impact of climate change is also a rising issue for the Summer Olympics. Concerns about excess heat affecting the athletes were first mentioned during the 1996 Atlanta Games. At the time, however, global warming was not attributed as the cause; rather, it was attributed to weather conditions. Fast-forward to the 2020 Tokyo Games (held in 2021), which were noted to be the hottest Games in Olympic history, where 146 athletes reported illness due to the extreme heat.

It’s Not Really About the Weather

To address the weather challenges facing the Games, countries and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) need to be more committed to focusing on the underlying environmental and social issues. It’s not surprising that a truly global event should be open to criticism from a wide variety of social justice groups, among them, human rights advocates and environmentalists. This international event offers activists an opportunity to highlight their cause. The IOC wants to keep politics out of the games, disqualifying athletes seeking to speak out. However, its policy does not apply beyond the venue walls, enabling the advocates, including those who organized a parallel Unsustainable Olympics Committee at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, to voice their concerns about the ‘economic and social harm’ impact of holding the Games.

The environmental destruction caused by Russia’s preparation to host the 2014 Sochi Olympics is staggering. Waste dumping and deforestation led to flooding, pollution, and loss of biodiversity, jeopardizing and even displacing locals. Though the government faced extensive opposition from environmentalists and concerns from Russian environmental engineers that deforestation would increase area flooding.

The most bizarre part is that the IOC approved this location in the first place, as Sochi lies on the Black Sea, has a subtropical climate, and completely lacked winter sports venues. Though Russia was, by far, the biggest single environmental offender, other host countries have undermined the IOC’s agenda for holding greener Games. Whether for clear-cutting an old-growth forest in PyeongChang to construct a ski slope for the 2018 Winter Games or importing tropical plywood from endangered rainforests for the 2020 Tokyo Games—the same country with the 1998 motto of ‘coexistence with nature’—balancing sustainability with development remains a challenge.

Hosting the Olympic Games is an expensive proposition. Even the cities that can support the mass influx of athletes and tourists and may have previously held Games, existing venues may need to be updated, and new venues will likely need to be constructed for the event. Some cities have fared better than others in their Olympic infrastructure investments. Though the Athens metro line was expanded and a direct rail built to connect the airport and city to accommodate the 11,110 athletes and million tourists converging on Athens in 2004, of the 33 venues built for the Games, one-third were not sufficiently repurposed after the Games, which led to six being demolished and three that remain, but are currently not used.

With concerns over climate change finally gaining traction, Great Britain and Olympic planners aimed to hold the ‘greenest Games ever’. Bringing on the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to develop a sustainability plan for the 2012 London Olympics. Though the athletes’ dormitories for the 1980 Lake Placid Games were designed (amid much controversy) to repurpose the building into a prison, and the Barcelona Olympic Park built for the 1992 Games is considered a sustainable urban regeneration wonder, these projects were less a result of concerns for climate change than the practicality of avoiding the white elephant Olympic venues plaguing other host cities. For London, ‘Greening-up the Games’ involved using recycled materials for building, reducing water usage, and implementing a zero-waste policy. City planning involved intentional repurposing of buildings to revitalize neighborhoods, which promotes economic sustainability by investing in the local community.

Venues constructed for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics were among those that also went unused, until it became the only city also to host Winter Games. This time around, China upgraded and repurposed existing sites with sustainability in mind for continued use after the Olympics. As part of the 2022 Winter Olympic Village, China transformed a defunct steel mill, considered an ‘industrial heritage site’, into Big Air Shougang. It hosts snowboarding and freestyle skiing, offers the world’s first permanent large ski jump facility, and is a setting for winter carnivals and green summer space. The Italians took a similar approach, redeveloping an abandoned railyard into the Milano Cortina Olympic Village. After the Games, the buildings will be converted into student and affordable housing, a self-sustaining neighborhood replete with terraced gardens.

The IOC Finally Commits

Despite mounting evidence of the impact of climate change, the IOC’s commitment to greener Games was not formalized until December 2014 in the Olympic Agenda 2020, making it one of the three ‘strategic pillars’ of the Olympic Movement. Its broader objective is to move beyond just being carbon-neutral, but to remove more carbon than the Games produce. Being ‘climate-positive’ by 2030 includes planting trees as part of Africa’s Great Green Wall project. Since 2018, the IOC has evaluated how well host countries have met specific goals, which include avoiding Olympic construction in protected natural sites, working with partners to monitor supply chains and construction, and promoting sustainable tourism. How well they execute this plan remains to be seen.

Every December 31^st, I find myself parked in front of my computer screen. Even with the built-in reminder of Giving Tuesday, tagged onto the tail end of the Thanksgiving sales events of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, I put it off. Despite my best effort to implement making charitable donations while paying monthly bills, I manage to put it off until the last day of the year.

As I clicked through the various URLs in my spreadsheet, I swore 2026 was going to be different. This will be the year I set up more than the few recurring donations I have. This approach helps charities budget more effectively, giving them a better sense of what income to expect for the year.

Nongovernmental institutions (NGOs, going by any number of names: Non-profits, charities, not-for-profit, etc.) rely on donations to varying degrees to function. Some receive more support from governments and businesses (Doctors without Borders, American Heart Association), while those wanting to minimize interference (Amnesty International, Greenpeace) depend almost entirely on individual contributions. The autonomy afforded to them by member dues and donations allows them to independently advocate for policies that challenge governments and push for corporate accountability.

Adopt a Bee or Manatee

Forming a connection with a cause inspires compassion. While I end up putting off many donations until the end of the year, in May, when the Cincinnati Art Museum reminder comes that it’s time to Adopt-a-Bee, I do it within a few days. They employ a similar tactic as WGUC by letting potential donors ‘name a honeybee’ by donating just $5—less than the cost of a ‘fru-fru’ drink from Starbucks. This strategy creates a personal connection. Giving $15 opens the possibility that ‘your Bee could become our Bee of the Month’. For the average Cincinnatian, that’s just .0003% of their yearly income.

Charity Navigator is a great resource for anyone looking to donate, but wanting to make sure the organization is worthwhile. Founded to assess organizations, using measures including accountability, transparency, and impact to rate NGOs, their research reveals how responsible and effective a charity is before contributing. One of my favorite organizations is Save the Manatees. When I came across Charity Navigator, which is also not-for-profit, I was happy to see that the NGO I’d been supporting for decades was rated a Four-Star Charity. For instance, Save the Manatees keeps administrative expenses to a minimum, so most of the funds they raise go toward their projects. For those looking to make a broader impact, I discovered that the Coral Reef Alliance is also an excellent organization, whose work helps marine NGOs, like Save the Manatees, to be more effective.

Every Dollar Counts

The easiest way for most people to support an organization is to click a ‘like’ button. Unfortunately, though it might help to increase exposure, it does little in the way of actual support. Still easy, yet far more effective, donating money has been simplified by advanced technology that allows us to do this in a few steps from virtually anywhere.

Our local Cincinnati-based WGUC classical station regularly reminds listeners that every contribution counts, because giving as little as $1 a month makes a difference. Big donations make the news, and rightly so. This cash infusion gives NGOs a deep pot of money and encourages smaller donors to follow suit, sometimes using a ‘matching grant’ incentive. Yet, charities would be lost without those whose contributions don’t make the headlines. In the U.S., around 60% of Americans give annually, averaging $2000-$3000 per household.

According to the World Population Review’s World Giving Index, Americans score just two points behind Singapore, the highest-ranked developed country. In the Top 10 list of countries of total donations by percentage of income, all 10 are developing countries. Of them, five are in sub-Saharan Africa, and their North African neighbor, Egypt, makes six.

Despite being the continent with comparatively the most poverty, having less disposable income has not stopped Africans from being the most generous donors in the world. They donate more money and time than anyone else. Nigerians lead, with 89% of the population giving money to charities and offering a larger share of their total income, even though almost 12% of the population lives in extreme poverty. They also volunteer, on average, 33% more of their time than their fellow Africans, while Africans collectively exceed the global average for time spent on charitable causes.

Turtle-Watching

Donating one’s time is certainly a bigger commitment than clicking a ‘like’ button while scrolling through social media or dropping a few bucks in a donation jar. For Carri, ‘Turtle Nest Patrol’ volunteer on Ramla Beach on Gozo, Malta, it’s a labor of love. Sea turtles face any number of hurdles before they even make it into the water. They are at risk of being eaten by predators. Poachers are out to steal their eggs. Some need to be helped out of their shells. The team keeps watch and, when they hatch, provide a safe lane to the sea.

In the spring of 2025, four loggerheads nested on the beach. Annually, the Nature Trust Malta organizes a ‘Turtle Nest Patrol’ to keep watch 24/7 until the last eggs hatch in early autumn. Though they have 135 volunteers, her patrol partner told me Carri is exceptionally dedicated, doing shifts almost daily. She brushed her off, responding that it’s very rewarding, waiting for the eggs to hatch. Their work attracts a lot of attention, helping their cause, as beach-goers check out the nesting areas, learn more at their educational tent, and offer up a few euro for support.

We Can’t Help One without Helping the Other

Discussions of sustainability are often limited to ecological issues, overlooking a key consideration. The less secure people are, the less able they are to protect the environment. I have little concern about access to a continuous supply of energy to heat the stove, run the HVAC system, and launder my clothes; a luxury many people in the world don’t have. For them, using whatever they can find for cooking fuel and washing clothes by hand in the nearest stream takes a backseat to worrying about deforestation and water pollution.

It took more than two decades before the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) realized this connection. In 1986, the WWF’s Korup National Park project was one of the first to include local people in its planning and conservation process. Appealing to the people most directly connected to the habitats the WWF was trying to protect required recognizable benefits to local economies. NGOs, including Heifer International and A Well-Fed World, take a different approach to promoting conservation by focusing on implementing sustainable agriculture practices that support people in need.

Building on the progress made with Korup National Park, the LIFE project in Namibia went a step further. In 1993, the LIFE project, a joint effort between WWF and USAID, was the first to establish community-based natural resource management. As a newly independent country with a wealth of natural resources, the LIFE project employed locals to actively manage conservation areas, thus providing the means to protect Namibia’s flora and fauna. The program has paid off in spades: In 2024, more than 1.2 million tourists flocked to Namibia for its deserts and dunes, beaches and canyons, national parks and wilderness safaris, bringing in $870 million, accounting for 7% of the country’s GDP.

Similar to Charity Navigator, Global Giving is a non-profit that supports NGOs by networking donors, businesses, and other not-for-profit charities. It’s a clearing house for charities looking to raise a set amount of funds for specific projects and shows how close they are to their goal. I like to give back to the places I’ve visited. I’m particularly grateful to Global Giving because it assesses organizations, allows donors to focus on a particular location, theme, and effectiveness quality, and provides the means to donate directly to the cause, which is great for someone who waits until the last minute.

Thanksgiving might present the single-biggest challenge of the year for anyone trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle. What started as a day to come together and give thanks has turned into a stress-inducing, feeding frenzy marking the start of buying season. Or, at least it used to, until Black Friday morphed into Black Friday Week, beginning the Friday before Thanksgiving, followed by Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday—also now a week-long affair, and, in an attempt to take advantage of open wallets, Giving Tuesday.

From Turkey Day to Sales Weeks

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln officially declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. By the 1920s, what had been more about feasts and parades shifted toward department stores and neighborhood businesses, marking the day after Thanksgiving as the start of Christmas shopping. The first Macy’s Day Parade in 1924 sealed the deal. By the late 1930s, retailers had become so dependent on sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas that President Roosevelt encouraged Congress to permanently make Thanksgiving Day the fourth Thursday in November.

In 2025, Black Friday online spending hit $11.8 billion, up 9.1% over last year—more than double compared to 2024—while in-store sales figures increased just 1.7%. What’s made online shopping even more appealing is the personal shoppers now provided ‘free’ of charge by artificial intelligence (AI). Compared to last year’s Thanksgiving-adjacent sales, AI-driven traffic for U.S. retail sites mushroomed 805% over last year, with Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky helping customers more quickly find what they’re looking for, along with lots they didn’t even know they needed.

Just as Big…but the Biggest Might Come as a Surprise

Amazon struck gold when it launched a new shopping ‘holiday’, Amazon Prime Day, in 2015. Other merchants, including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, now cash in on what Amazon began, offering competing sales. In 2025, they collectively raked in $7.9 billion in the first 24 hours. What also began as a one-day sales event expanded, ran from July 8- July 11 this year. Appropriately, Prime Day is considered the ‘Black Friday in summer’, as online sales totaled $24.1 billion, equaling combined spending for all Thanksgiving-related sales in 2024.

What many people don’t know—in fact, 69% of Americans—is that Singles’ Day is the biggest shopping event of the year. What began as a day encouraging single people who didn’t get to celebrate Valentine’s Day to treat themselves to something special was co-opted by Alibaba in 2009 to create the single largest shopping event in the world. Alibaba copied Black Friday retailers. Amazon copied Alibaba. Alibaba then copied the US model of stretching Singles’ Day into multiple weeks of deals. Along with Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce retailer, its main competitors, Pinduoduo and JD (the ‘Amazon of China’), expanded their marketing to reach single consumers globally. With the celebration beginning on November 11 (i.e., four lonely ones: 11-11, Singles’ Day posted sales of $240 billion, an astounding five times more than 2024’s Thanksgiving sales.

Enter Enshittification

I happened to hear an interview with Cory Doctorow not long before Thanksgiving, which made me think about how his take on capitalism applies to the holiday sales. He coined the term ‘enshittifitcation’ to describe what the Merriam-Webster dictionary now officially defines as “an informal word used to criticize the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time”. (FYI: A platform is a digital means to connect different users—buyers with sellers, content creators with readers and listeners, friends with friends, etc.). Doctorow noted in his interview that he opted for cursing because it “gets people’s attention”. Polite company opts for ‘crapification’ to describe how being bombarded on platforms pushes them to upgrade, invariably through subscriptions and fees, for a better experience.

Here’s how it works: When a company starts out, it attracts consumers by offering something that adds value to their lives: A weather forecast, a game, or a social media app. If enough people like it, the business knows they can make more money. When people are hooked, the company ‘enshittifies’ the user’s experience by adding pop-up advertisements and/or limiting access. Annoyed with more ads and firewalls, people opt to ‘upgrade’ for something that resembles their initial experience. In his book, Doctorow talks about how Facebook, Amazon, iPhone, and Twitter did exactly this to push customers to ‘buy up’ again and again, thus making them gazillions of dollars.

Clearly, what he’s talking about is how the Thanksgiving sales and Singles’ Day events exploded into the stratosphere. This scary evolution of how these companies use technology to push people to spend more, I realized, has moved beyond digital platforms. Appliances and devices assembled with sealed or proprietary parts and non-removable batteries mean replacing a washing machine more quickly because the drum bearings wear out, or a smartphone with a weak battery.

Businesses from Internet providers and financial institutions to gyms and clubs have adopted the same enshittification model. Drawing in customers with promotional rates or almost too good to believe terms, prices creep up while service quality stagnates or declines. However, the switching cost—whether it’s having to find a new yoga studio or navigating a phone tree, then spending a few hours comparing and renegotiating auto insurance rates—the effort, contract penalties, or loss of grandfathered rates keep people locked in.

The underlying mechanism is akin to that described by Doctorow. In the way that platforms entice new users with free content or nifty software apps, companies manufacturing hardware and those offering services latched onto the same model of locking in customers, only to change the rules of the game in their favor. Whether it’s through switching costs, brand loyalty, or inertia, it’s more visible and faster with platforms because the nature of digital capitalism allows for rapid, unilateral changes to terms and features.

Sustainability Implications

Just as Black Friday-inspired sales events are no longer limited to the United States, neither is credit card access—and debt. Credit cards make spending easy, whether it’s swiping a card, syncing a wallet, or setting up automatic payments. Though Americans top the list of credit card debt, averaging $6730 in 2025, those in developed countries are also overextended, from Canada at $4681 to Sweden at $2849 to Japan at $2900.

For many people, it’s more painful to hand over cash than tap a card. Not only do credit cards promote over-consumption, but the physical card is made from plastic, generating tons of additional plastic waste annually. Globally, there are 1.3 billion Visa and 1.1 billion Mastercard credit cards in circulation, along with another 71.5 million Discover and 141 million American Express cards. Since people are buying more stuff and replacing products more quickly, both in the US and internationally, humans generate far more waste, encouraged by these sales events and credit access.

Rising inflation and increased tariffs combine with commodity fetishism to increase credit spending. Even as fewer people are swiping their physical cards, online sales and growing reliance on AI for strategic shopping and ideal gift-giving tax the environment. In the US alone, increased Smartphone usage and growing reliance on AI contribute to rapidly increasing electricity consumption that is expected to more than double by 2030. We’re stuck in this buying trap that’s both material and virtual, and the virtual is facilitating increased material consumption. Convenience, gift expectations, entertainment product placement, sales deals, bulk-buying discounts, and enshittification encourage consumerism. Sorry to end on a downer, but it’s hard to see a way out of this sustainability conundrum we’ve created.

The easiest way to send someone hosting a dinner into a tailspin is to tell them I have a vegan diet. Even with reassurances from me ‘not to worry’, ‘don’t make anything special for me’, and ‘I won’t starve’, they are sent into panic mode. For our retirement party, our gracious host sat down with me to plan the menu, even though we’d been to her house and had plenty to eat.

Celebrations are often centered around meals, so food is culturally embedded with an emotional component. With the holidays approaching, because holiday meals are traditionally based around a meat centerpiece, most people are curious as to what I serve. It’s a legitimate question for a couple of reasons. I grew up with the traditions of Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas ham, and shrimp cocktail for New Year’s Eve, so I can relate to how odd it would seem to not have meat at holiday gatherings.

It was, admittedly, strange for the first few years. Even though I got used to just eating side dishes at holiday gatherings and making a meat dish for the omnivores when I was the host, I have to say I was pretty excited the first time I found a Tofurky. Yes, it’s a real thing, and pretty tasty, at that! I even have some omnivore friends who prefer it to turkey.

Since the most common question any vegan likely gets is ‘How do you get enough protein in your diet?’, it’s not surprising that hosting guests with a plant-based diet throws the cook for a loop. It was much easier to find a wide variety of options with a vegetarian diet—many appetizers and most of the side dishes and desserts—than when avoiding common ingredients like butter, eggs, and cheese. But unless the host goes out of their way to prepare a meat-alternative, I’d have to eat an entire cup of black beans to come close to the amount of protein in one serving of super firm tofu (14 grams) or tempeh (18 grams).

Protein is How Much, Exactly?

Thanks to social media, dietary misinformation, and government funding that supports the meat and dairy industry, most people think they don’t get enough of protein. Surveys reveal that 8 in 10 Americans don’t have an accurate idea of how much protein they should consume, so all the hype about protein gives people the impression that they need more. Yet, in the US, between 2017 and 2022, men consumed twice the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, and women exceeded the RDA by 50%. In most developed and higher-end developing countries, people are eating more protein than they need.

What’s more concerning is that over the last two years, a considerable percentage of adults in the US have intentionally increased their protein intake with 71% planning to consume even more in 2025. A meta study considered stereotypes associated with diet, confirming the view that real men eat meat (and don’t eat quiche) and those who eschew it encounter a variety of challenges, feeling that they either need to physically prove themselves or face emasculation. This cultural expectation contributes to the imbalance that 50% more men than women have high blood pressure, rising to 58% in black males.

The amount of protein needed is less straightforward than recommendations for most nutrients, as it’s based on grams per body weight. And since obesity rates have risen in the same countries where people already consume excess protein, a calculation based on body weight overestimates the recommended amount. Indeed, some people need to consume more protein. Lower-income populations, pregnant women, older adults, and those with dietary restrictions are at risk of not meeting their RDA. With the exception of endurance athletes who need twice as much protein, the recommended amount for a 150-pound adult is 54 grams a day. Speaking of endurance athletes, more than a few have not only proven that they can be successful while eating a plant-based diet, but have even improved their performance as a result of the change.

Along with carbohydrates and fat, protein is a macronutrient needed to keep a whole lot of systems functioning throughout the body. As I talked about in The Superstars: Sustainability Superfoods, plenty of complete plant-based proteins offer variety in a diet. Since most people, understandably, don’t want to commit to a vegan diet, thankfully for the body and planet, it’s not an all-or-nothing commitment. Instead, eliminating beef one meal a day, even in exchange for fish, offers more positive health benefits and is a plus for the environment.

Another common misconception about protein is that the body can store it for later. In actuality, excess proteins are either converted to energy or stored as fat. It boils down to overall calories. If someone consumes more calories than their body burns in a day, what goes unused will be stored as fat. This excess protein consumption contributes to a higher risk of heart disease. The statistics for Americans are astounding, particularly that 48.1% of adults are either taking medication for high blood pressure, or their rate is higher than 130/80. Coupled with obesity statistics, it’s not surprising that more adults in states south of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River also have the highest prevalence of high blood pressure.

Developed over 20 years ago, the Portfolio Diet has been rigorously tested, verifying its recommendation to lower cholesterol by introducing more plant-based proteins. A study tracking more than 200,000 participants over three decades found that, when choosing from a ‘portfolio’ of foods that swapped out some animal products for plant-based options, people had a 14% lower risk of heart disease. Their LCL (i.e., the bad kind) dropped as much as 30% along with lower levels of inflammatory substances that lead to plaque buildup in the arteries. The Portfolio Diet results show that, even though animal products have more protein, it’s possible to have a plant-centric diet that offers enough protein and helps the body in other ways.

Protein and the Planet

Harvard University has a simple food footprint calculator. Like most vegans, my impact falls well below the averages for the carbon emissions and resources used to feed me. As more Americans are consuming more protein, despite the shift to more poultry and fish over beef and pork, their footprint is still increasing.

The maximum upper limit necessary to avert climate disaster is 680 kilograms per year; my footprint is 534 kilograms. To compare my vegan diet to a basic omnivore diet, I added one serving a week of each of the seven animal products and decreased the number of legumes, grains, and nuts/seeds servings, keeping everything else the same. Adding just one animal product a day increased the carbon emissions to 689 kilograms and considerably increased the resources used, except for water.

Of course, these calculations are very general, since consuming avocados and almonds is far more taxing on the environment than opting for carrots and walnuts. Categorically, the World Economic Forum quantifies nuts as requiring more water than all animal products except for beef. But lumping all nuts together overstates the amount of water used in cultivation, especially when considering the source of water. For instance, cashews require a lot of water, but they’re mostly produced in water-rich tropical regions, unlike almonds and pistachios, which require heavy irrigation.

Breaking down the numbers, most nuts require less water than animal products, with the exception of chicken, eggs, and milk. Tofu, on the other hand, has the lowest water footprint of all, at just 76 gallons for a 4-ounce serving, requiring 84% less water than beef and 76% less than chicken. Peanuts (technically legumes) and seeds are rock stars, requiring just a fraction of what the cashews, the low nut on the totem pole, need.

There’s a big push to increase pulse consumption as a protein source. A staple food in developing countries, pulses (which are beans, lentils, chickpeas, and dried peas), are health and sustainability superstars. Due to increased protein consumption in the US, the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans Advisory Committee is pushing to revise its recommendations, listing pulses before animal products on its list of protein options.

However, like the stereotypes associated with meat, they have a battle ahead, as pulse consumption is associated with lower education and income levels. The irony is that the diets of healthier people in developed countries are more likely to mirror those of people in developing countries. Considered “poor man’s protein”, pulses, legumes, nuts, and seeds are staples in global south diets and, as income increases, so does meat consumption, thus undermining their health as they become more affluent.

Party Like You Mean It

Shifting away from meat products is a challenge both culturally and emotionally, but also economically and politically. For a variety of reasons, governments support unsustainable agricultural policies which are very difficult to amend. (If you really want to know more, check out From Jicama to Jackfruit: The Global Political Economy of Food.)

Seemingly, events focusing on climate change would be on board with exclusively serving plant-based fare. Prince William and Sir David Attenborough started the Earthshot Prize in 2019 to raise awareness about environmental issues and support people trying to make a difference. At its latest awards banquet held in Rio de Janeiro, organizers required a plant-based menu. The chef had intended to serve a local river fish that had been brought back from near extinction, but is now sustainably sourced. Quite reasonably, that objective is exactly what the Earthshot Prize is trying to accomplish.

Regardless, and also quite reasonably, the organizers wanted a fully vegan menu. However, the chef wasn’t able to come in under budget, which raises another myth about a plant-based diet. Short of indulging in a lot of specialty or processed foods, the weekly grocery bill for a vegan regimen is up to 33% less expensive than that of omnivores. Eating whole foods that are lower on the food chain invariably costs less.

At the recent COP30 United Nations Climate Change Summit, which also happened to be in Brazil this year, only 40% of the menu offerings were vegetarian or vegan. Sir Paul McCartney, a long-time vegetarian advocate, argued that the UN was being hypocritical, quoted as saying that “serving meat at a climate summit is like handing out cigarettes at a cancer-prevention conference”. Some might argue that he’s a hypocrite, since he doesn’t opt for a vegan diet. But that’s the trap of militant thinking, an all-or-nothing situation. Sustainability is about making choices we can live with. For some people, it’s a sacrifice to skip beef one meal a week; for others, giving up camembert, Ben & Jerry’s, and frittatas is off the table.

I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, where one of the most anticipated holidays was Thanksgiving—not because of the feast, but because the following Monday marked the start of Buck Hunting Season. It was such a big deal that we didn’t even have school that day. I did not come from a family of hunters, but I knew just as many people who hunted as had been involved in a car collision with a deer (which is to say, the majority of the population old enough for a hunting license).

With 1.5 million whitetail deer roaming around the commonwealth, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to State Farm, in 2024, the likelihood of an accident being the result of an animal collision in Pennsylvania was 1 in 61, topped by slightly higher chances only in Montana, West Virginia, and Michigan. Deer were the main culprit, involved in over 1.3 million accidents in the US. (Ironically, it wasn’t until I moved to Ohio (1 in 102) and was driving in Kentucky (1 in 98) in August at 9:30 in the morning that a deer collided with me.)

Only through willful ignorance was it possible to grow up without knowing that ‘bagging’ a 12-point rack buck qualified as an impressive hunting season; not shooting a single buck was a defeat. But the rack wasn’t the only benefit, as most hunters sent their deer to be butchered to fill their freezer. Many people I knew looked forward to making deer jerky and feasting on venison steaks. I never tasted venison until I was 19 and didn’t feel the need to have it again. (As expected, gamey.) Since 1991, Pennsylvania Hunters Sharing the Harvest has run a state-wide organization to process unwanted deer for distribution to food charities.

Even after 18 years living Cincinnati, it still seems odd to me that deer hunting is permitted in many sections of the Cincinnati Parks system as part of its deer management system. Wildlife encroachment due to loss of habitat, lack of natural predators, and gardens necessitates culling the herd for their own good. Wielding guns in the city isn’t such a great idea, so Cincinnati hunting is limited to bow-and-arrow only.

A ‘live and let live’ person to the core, I have never entertained the idea of hunting, but I became familiar with licensing requirements. For some years, the city limited hiking during the five-month hunting season, so I considered applying for a license to legitimately be out on the trails. I was happy to discover the rigorous qualifications bow-and-arrow hunters had to pass. Requiring such accuracy minimized the chance of leaving deer wounded, which had been a concern of mine. Having seen more than a few deer carcasses on my daily hikes, I knew starvation was a threat; I’d rather have someone humanely kill them than have them suffer.

I continued to hike daily, with everyone sporting orange vests, avoiding the times hunters would likely be out, in conscientious protest. Given the nature of the terrain and that I only saw hunters along the rim of the parking areas, I thought the policy was unfair, plus I wasn’t terribly concerned about our safety. Tracking a deer into the depths of the woods meant dragging it out. I couldn’t imagine how a lone hunter could drag a deer along the minimally-managed trails we hike. Thankfully, the city decided to make the more popular park areas ‘mixed conservation management’, which allows for regular access to the trail, with warnings posted and guidelines the hunters must follow. I was happy I didn’t have to become a proficient bow-and-arrow hunter.

I don’t know how much more challenging shooting a bow-and-arrow is than a rifle, considering most of the hunters ‘bait and wait’ for the deer to come to them. Hunters set up tree stands, camouflage shelters, and even cameras to track movement habits, so the odds seem to be stacked against the deer. Permitting baiting seems counterproductive, since overfed deer = overpopulation, which is the justification for hunting. Some wildlife management parks have been accused of feeding deer to ensure overpopulation.

The validity of that allegation is questionable. However, claims that wildlife policy overly favors conserving specific game species over non-hunted species to support hunting hold some water. State wildlife agencies have become dependent on income from license sales and excise taxes on hunting equipment to fund wildlife conservation, though interest in hunting is declining. Pennsylvania is fairly safe, however, selling about 1 million hunting licenses each year—second only to Texas in the number of hunting licenses sold—while much higher in per capita sales.

Enter the Swine

On the other hand, feral boar doesn’t need any help repopulating. Unlike deer, which are native to the Americas and have natural predators, wild boar was first brought to the US at the turn of the 20^th century for sport hunting. Population growth eventually burgeoned due to a combination of domestic cross-breeding, intentional release for hunting, and their Houdini-like ability to escape confinement. The impact of introducing a foreign species into a local ecosystem is unpredictable. More often than not, this strategy backfires, disrupting the natural balance.

Clearly, Americans had not thought through the implications of importing Eurasian wild boar, which, in this case, resulted in packs of feral hogs. Perhaps the New Englanders who first imported them weren’t aware of the domestic pigs that ‘went native’ in Hawaii. In 1900, the Hawaii Territorial Board of Agriculture and Forestry initiated a feral pig eradication program that lasted until 1958, removing over 170,000 pigs. Despite their efforts, wild boar continues to wreak havoc throughout the islands. Today, this invasive species has invaded at least 35 US states.

Stateside, feral boar has managed to infiltrate all or most counties in 11 states, concentrated across the southern Atlantic seaboard and Gulf states, along with California. The USDA first mapped Feral Swine Populations in 1982, but not again until 2004, since regularly publishing them. What’s most interesting in the series of maps is that some states, especially those with sparser populations, have made some progress in fending them off, while those with dense populations struggle to make a dent.

With over 3 million feral hogs running around the state, Texas A&M estimates the swine problem results in more than $500 million worth of damage annually to agrobusiness and private property. A long way to go to eradicate wild boar, Texans have implemented some interesting tactics beyond trapping, offering bounty rewards, and ‘hog-dogging’, which is using dogs to track and trap wild boar. The most drastic step was made by the state legislature in 2011. Enacting the Texas Hog Depredation Act (HB 716), this law approved the use of helicopters to hunt feral hogs or coyotes.

Numerous companies cropped up to offer removal service—by far the best named is HeliBacon. Because wild boar are fast, stealthy, and travel in packs, hunting by helicopter is more effective, though obviously much more expensive. Cashing in on the industry, entrepreneurial companies offer ‘helicopter hog hunting,’ which are helicopter safaris for hunters who pay big bucks to fly around in helicopters and shoot boar. The growing problem across the US, however, has led to sophisticated advancements in trapping the swine.

Like venison, wild boar (bork?) is a lean, nutritional meat. Unlike many organizations that accept game meat, such as Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry, few accept wild boar. Feral Hogs for the Hungry does, even paying a bounty. The nonprofit takes care of collecting the boar and, in conjunction with the USDA, which does the processing, delivers the meat to food banks. Considering the millions of feral hogs wandering the country, that’s a lot of potential food. Partly due to feral overpopulation and increased awareness, demand for boar meat is rising, but as the USDA noted in 2014, “We Can’t Barbeque Our Way Out”, but instead need feral swine management.

Hunters and fishers are among the biggest advocates for wildlife conservation. Theodore Roosevelt is one of the best cases in point. An active outdoorsman and hunter, he appreciated the need for regulating hunting and wildlife protection, backed by co-founding the Boone and Crockett Club and supporting national parks. While I have a different relationship with nature, I appreciate that wildlife conservation is driven by multiple interests. Though the reasons behind nature conservation might clash, everyone has a compelling interest to support wildlife conservation.

We have the Celts to thank for Halloween, who started celebrating over 2,000 years ago. Even though Christmas advertising and merchandise now appear as early as September, Halloween is still a big deal in the US. A multi-billion-dollar industry, Americans shelled out almost $12 billion for the holiday in 2024. And while the Celts populated Britain and Ireland, Halloween only recently started gaining in popularity in the UK and Western Europe, a €2 billion market in 2024, but a 20% increase over the previous year.

Top spending goes to candy, decorations, and costumes, though others are jockeying to get some candy in their bag. Entertainment tie-ins have long been a staple of fast-food chains, but Burger King’s Monster Menu is a first. Going beyond McDonald’s Shamrock Shake, its specially-designed Halloween items include bat-shaped nuggets, mummy mozzarella fingers, and a Jack-O-Lantern Whopper on an orange bun with black sesame seeds.

Candy

The best treat anyone could put in my Halloween bag was a full-sized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (I expect kids now hope for the Big Cup). Hershey’s now makes plant-based oat milk Peanut Butter Cups, though their chocolate still isn’t ethically sourced, and the treats are necessarily individually-wrapped. Ages ago, I developed my own recipe for Peanut Butter Cups (which quickly turned into easier-to-make bars), approved by many an omnivore palate. While being nutritionally more healthful and better for the planet, they’re not ideal for handing out to Trick-or-Treaters. Thanks to nefarious people, there’s no way around treats needing to be factory-sealed, individually-wrapped. But single-serving packaging is a nightmare for the planet, and Americans buy about 600 million pounds of candy just for Halloween, which means a whole lot of wrappers.

One way to offset this waste problem is to recycle the candy bags and wrappers. TerraCycle is a company that not only collects plastic wrappers and all sorts of bags (bread, snack, fresh and frozen produce, food storage, plastic mailers, candy and power bar wrappers), but over 100 additional waste products, including a wide variety of containers (bottles, tubes, coffee pods), clothing, shoes, and even cigarette butts. It’s easy to do and completely free. Just collect the items, box them up, print out a free shipping label, and drop it off at a shipping carrier, which I’ve done numerous times at the UPS store.

Another option in some cities is the Hefty ReNew Orange Bag Program. Cincinnati’s recycling contractor accepts these orange bags in the regular recycling stream bin. The same plastic packaging that TerraCycle accepts goes into the orange bags, but with the bonus of sticking it into the recycle bin and leaving it for curbside collection. The trial pack provided by Rumpke Recycling was free; thereafter, opting in means buying the bags. This program not only collects plastic wrappers, liners, and bags, but so much more can go into the orange bag; everything from packaging and plastic cutlery, Styrofoam and pill bottles, to yogurt containers and plant pots—even pool noodles!

Ethically-sourced ingredients are another challenge. Until corporations are mandated to exclusively buy ethically-sourced ingredients, they lack the incentive to shift their supply chain to fair trade farms. Paying more than the next multinational corporation (MNC) for cocoa beans, sugar, or nuts puts them at a comparative disadvantage. Increased public awareness about these issues has encouraged corporations to develop niche brands or specific versions of a product, as Hershey’s did with its vegan Peanut Butter Cups. It’s a win-win for the MNC for their public image and the fact that they retail these products a higher price (often unnecessarily exorbitantly so), to cash in on conscientious consumers.

Reese’s Plant-Based Peanut Butter Cups are a good example of inflated prices for a vegan product, though none of the ingredients are ethically sourced. The Oat Milk variety costs $1.66 for a two-pack versus 97¢ for the original version. I have yet to find a confectioner that offers fair-trade versions of their products in the US. In Europe, under pressure from both the EU and much more active sustainability NGOs, more corporations offer fair-trade versions, like Green & Black’s, but have resisted a whole-scale shift to ethically sourced ingredients.

Deciphering the supply chain for a corporation is a challenge. Most offer a convoluted account of how and where they source their ingredients. It’s easy enough to find all the keywords on their sites: Transparency, Sustainability, etc. One look at Ferrero’s website, for example, makes it seem that their ingredients are exclusively sustainably-sourced. This is misleading, especially when looking specifically checking out the candy brands they own (among the many, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Chunky, and Kinder) that clearly do not contain ethically-sourced ingredients. The best that most MNCs do is to set up some sort of program that purports to do great things for a group of farmers, but barely scratches the sustainability surface.

That leaves us with the small group of committed companies, notably Tony’s Chocoloney, Chocolate & Love, Alter Eco, and Endangered Species, that managed to break into the mainstream supermarket chains. Some are more expensive than others, depending on their certification (a complex abyss for another post), making them more or less competitive with their conventional counterparts. Still, I’m not sure how thrilled a kid will be to get a TCHO Oatally Awesome ‘Oat My Gawd’ 7-gram square in their bag instead of a Snickers bar. And those handing out candy might balk at the price: Each TCHO treat is 83¢ while a 34-gram Snickers Fun Size is 43¢. However, TCHO did have a BOGO Halloween sale, thus halving the price, making them more competitive per piece, but at just a fraction of the size.

What is more practical for most people is deciding which confections to support. Some chocolatiers are better than others, making it possible to opt for more sustainable treats. Chocolate Scorecard rates companies based on several factors, including traceability, fair income, and specific environmental impacts, so consumers decide what matters most to them and choose accordingly. For those more concerned about ethically-sourced palm oil, Ethical Consumer has that covered, along with many more products, revealing which corporations are more or less committed to sustainability.

Decorations

I was surprised to see that around 33% of Americans spend as much or more on Halloween decorations than Christmas decorations, but it makes sense, considering the perishable decorations only last one season. After Easter, there are not a lot of heavy-merchandise holidays, so stores set up for Halloween in the summer. In fact, Home Depot’s decorations hit their shelves on August 4^th.

More than 1.6 billion pounds of pumpkins were sold in the US in 2024. The top-producing state in 2023, Illinois, devoted over 15,400 acres to pumpkin patches, yielding 40,000 pounds per acre. Most of its crop is processed, landing on tables at Thanksgiving in pies. Indiana and California, on the other hand, exclusively grow pumpkins destined for carving, collectively producing 300 million pounds of these orange gourds. Most of the pumpkins grown in the other top producers—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Washington—are sold fresh, adding another 220 million pounds.

Pumpkin-growing is a crap shoot that can make or break a farmer. ‘Seasonal creep,’ causing shorter springs and autumns, makes it more challenging for farmers to time harvests in order for pumpkins to reach markets at the best time for the Halloween season. Temperatures and rainfall, along with the need for bees to pollinate and workers to hand-pick the fruit, determine how much farmers will earn from a crop valued at $274 million in 2024. The popularity of Halloween has risen in Western Europe, with demand leading to a record-breaking year for farmers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, as sales increased by 15% in 2024.

Pumpkins go from patch to porch to landfill. After All Hallows’ Eve ends, because they’re edible, gourds dumped in the trash count as food waste. If they weren’t carved and haven’t started decomposing on the front stoop, they’re still edible. While the denser, sweeter, less stringy pie pumpkins tend to get all the glory, great for baking and stews, Halloween ornamentals are excellent in soups and puddings. For both varieties, gutting them to roast the seeds is well worth the effort, as they’re very tasty, nutritionally dense, and a complete protein.

For those less inclined to cook, Pumpkins for Pigs is a nonprofit that organizes collections through their website. In addition to both whole and carved pumpkins, they accept other Halloween biodegradable decorations, including hay, corn stalks, and gourds. And for future reference, they also accept evergreen trees and wreaths, and a variety of food items. There are a lot of other options, as well, to put these discarded Halloween decorations to better use than lining a landfill.

Costumes

What’s Halloween for a kid without dressing up? Per household, American spending averaged $34 for costumes, which isn’t surprising, considering most basic outfit for a kid runs $20-$25. Costumes aren’t meant to last beyond one season, qualifying them as ultra-fast fashion, falling prey to the same laundry list of issues surrounding the clothing industry. Like pumpkins, 85% of costumes are destined for landfills, producing over 12 million pounds of textile waste.

When I checked out the latest costumes, it seemed to me that most of them could have been assembled with one visit to a Thrift Store for a fraction of the cost. The same costumes seem to be either perennially popular, like the superheroes, or have a good run, like animated characters; all likely to end up in a second-hand store after one Halloween, since few kids want to ‘go as’ the same character two years in a row. That’s on par with handing out a box of raisins to Trick-or-Treaters (i.e., likely to end with a TPed or egged house).

Keeping the Celts Happy

The Celts would be disappointed at the impact of their tradition. As animists and farmers, they had a deep connection with the Earth, believing that everything had a soul. Halloween presents the same challenges that humans, particularly in Global North and Emerging Economies, face on a daily basis, in terms of consumption and waste. The reality of the situation is that we need to do more to mitigate the increasing planetary temperature, which means making some compromises. Hopefully, my suggestions about how to indulge more sustainably can diminish our impact not only for Halloween, but also in our daily lives. The Celts would approve.

I always look forward to hiking. But after almost a month of travel in a time zone seven hours ahead, I especially appreciate getting back out on the trails since being outside helps to more quickly alleviate jet lag. Supposedly, jet lag is more severe when traveling from west to east—essentially skipping into the future—but for me, heading home from any direction does me in. I envy those who bounce from place to place with little effect. I don’t even like it when the clocks change!

Regular travelers report strategies to minimize the effect of being hurtled through the air in a tin can; something the body clearly was not designed to experience. Some fairly common sense tips are to most quickly adjust are staying well-hydrated, avoiding alcohol, and sleeping as much sleep as possible on the plane (i.e., skip the meal and immediately don a sleep mask and ear plugs). But one of the best ways to adjust upon arrival is to get outside, ideally in sunlight, and move around a bit. I’ve found that even with an evening arrival, some fresh air and stimulation in new surroundings help me to more quickly reacclimate and feel like bedtime is nigh, regardless of my body clock.

Forest Bathing

Good for more than time zone reacclimating, some years ago, I read about the practice of ‘forest bathing’ in Japan. The high-stress living of the 1990s encouraged the population to engage in what researchers describe as ‘ecotherapy’. Whether the government realized this was a potential selling point or tourists got wind of shinri-yoku and wanted more information, the National Tourism Organization of Japan dedicates a web page to how to forest-bathe, along with some of the best places to take advantage of the country’s wilderness. Clearly, more Japanese need to forest bathe, as they rank 55^th on the World Happiness Report, dropping from 51 in 2024.

The Scandinavians, on the other hand, enthusiastically immerse themselves in nature year-round. If you missed my extolment of friluftsliv, the Nordics embrace conditions that cause others to hole up until the spring thaw. Way up north, these countries continue to rank as having some of the happiest people in the world, and it’s not just due to their excellent social welfare systems.

There is no shortage of research backing up the health benefits of getting outside: Spend 120 Minutes a Week in Nature, Health Benefits of the Great Outdoors, and Time Spent in Nature are just a few. But this hypothesis can easily be tested by walking outside on a gloomy day. Invariably, it will be brighter outside than indoors, and just breathing in some fresh air (hoping it’s available) is likely to improve even the worst of moods.

Nature Exposure and Environmental Behavior

In addition to benefitting the mind, body, and soul, lots of studies have found that increased time outdoors encourages people to want to do more to conserve nature. Feeling at one with the ecosphere activates a psychological bond of ‘nature connectedness’, which leads to increased well-being. The more engaged with nature, the greater the likelihood a person will donate time and/or money to conservation efforts and make a point to lessen their environmental footprint.

Of course, the interest and opportunity to connect with nature are influenced by cultural factors and geography. The attitudes of those whose history is linked to forced labor or jobs that require manual and migrant laborers to work in the elements understandably differ when it comes to spending their leisure time outdoors. With so many people in the world working under these conditions, from small farmers to the battery of seafarers in the shipping and fishing industry, changing attitudes is an uphill battle.

Being trapped in concrete jungles, enduring increased incidences of extreme weather conditions without the benefit of enjoying green spaces, also affects one’s relationship with nature. As a result, eco-friendly behavior relies on positive experiences with the environment. A Harvard study found that for city dwellers, even getting outside for 15 minutes improves a person’s mental health. This exposure helps to create a positive feedback loop that encourages people to spend more time outdoors, which encourages them to be more invested in protecting natural spaces.

The fact that many people around the world don’t have this option is a compelling reason to encourage sustainability practices. It’s not just people in Delhi and Lahore suffering from poor air quality or Filipinos who are shuttered up, suffering from climate anxiety from the increasing frequency and severity of tropical storms like Super Typhoon Ragasa. Climate change affects everyone, everywhere, and the less money they have, the more likely they are to bear the brunt of the effects.

Raising awareness is imperative if humans are going to meet the challenge of mitigating rising global temperatures. I sound like a broken record mentioning that two simple changes—skipping beef one meal a week and reducing food waste—would have an enormous impact on alleviating the effects of climate change, but these aren’t big asks. I know it can be hard to be optimistic facing the doom and gloom reports about climate change, but if each person just did these two small things, it’d go a long way toward repairing the damage we’ve caused, so we can continue to find happiness in nature.

Supposedly, I retired in December 2023. I knew I wanted to start the podcast. After doing an episode about sustainable cities in May 2024, I had a lot of data I wanted to share comparing green space in cities, which prompted me to start this newsletter. My spouse says I now have two full-time jobs instead of just my previous university job. Perhaps he’s right. In fact, I wasn’t really aware until a few weeks ago that I’d been writing posts for well over a year. While I miss being in a classroom with students, I quite enjoy doing this and the podcast very much.

Why We Need to Consume

I also very much enjoy traveling. Much to my delight, it turns out that taking a break also helps to promote sustainability. We might not think of vacationing as a way to promote mindful consumption. Working without breaks—especially foregoing paid breaks—is hard-wired into us. Bear with me for a quick overview of commodity fetishism, what drives us to need to consume. (Or you can listen to our episode. Even if you don’t, there are some useful links at the bottom of the page about this, including Eric Pickersgill’s fascinating photo series about commodity fetishism.)

Love him or hate him, Karl Marx was dead on the money (quite an apt idiom) when it came to explaining how the Industrial Revolution changed our relationship with goods and the people who make them. He determined that the ‘fetishism of commodities’ evolved as consumers became physically distanced from those who mass-produced the goods they bought. In the process, any direct connections or vested interests between those buying and making the clothes, shoes, and furniture deteriorated.

As creativity and individuality suffered, consumers looked for ways to set themselves apart from others, particularly by buying objects with a higher ‘perceived’ value than the ‘real’ value. Basically, a polo shirt is a polo shirt, unless it’s a Ralph Lauren or Brunello Cucinelli polo shirt. Needing to out-Jones the Joneses, people worked more to earn more money to spend more money to acquire more stuff. (That’s commodity fetishism in a very tiny nutshell.)

Running the whole capitalist machine, businesses and investors needed to make more money, so they found ways to cut costs and get people to consume more. The advent of commercial advertising in the early 20^th century resulted in a constant bombardment of messages from every direction that we need this thing, more of this thing, or a newer version of this thing to make our lives more complete, happier, better. On top of that, life’s demands keep us on the hamster wheel, working to tick items off our never-ending ‘To Do’ list, no matter how many items we complete. We rarely take a breather because we need to keep up with social media, our friends, the news, pop culture, our calendars, out of FOMO, all of which feeds mindless overconsumption. Fast forward to the 21^st century, when we’re so entrenched in a capitalist system that exploits workers and the planet, that we’re facing serious climate change issues.

Why We Need a Vacation

An astonishing number of Americans forego paid vacation. While 88% of full-time employees have paid vacation days, a Pew survey found that about 50% don’t cash in on their accrued time. Europeans, on the other hand, are much better vacationers, with 30% opting for 25 or more days a year. A contributing factor is attitudes about vacation time, reflected in the fact that some of the most generous full-time benefits in the US and Canada only provide 10 days of paid vacation, as opposed to at least 20 days in many of the EU countries.

Opting out of taking vacation time is good for the mind, body, and, perhaps surprisingly, the environment. Even if it’s a staycation (which apparently 10% of Americans planned in 2025, though I expect for most people this involves housework or home improvement projects rather than something akin to a vacation), taking time off from work offers a reset. With over 75% of Americans reporting occasional burnout, using allotted vacation time could prevent at least some of the 63% of workers who are more likely to take a sick day, and the 23% more likely to visit the emergency room, to live healthier lives.

Yet the overarching issue, especially in the US, is changing attitudes about vacation time. Unlike the Europeans, Americans are apprehensive about using their earned hours, whether it’s from being made to feel guilty about taking time off, fear of not being as competitive as those who skip vacations, or having to return to an accumulated pile of work. Clearly, foregoing vacation time is a systemic issue. And what’s worse, potential business productivity decreases when employees are overtaxed. It’s actually in a company’s self-interest to encourage workers to use their vacation time. Until companies establish taking vacations as the norm, people will continue to skip out on this benefit.

Less is Actually More

In Our Ambiguous Relationship with Amazon’s Subscribe & Save episode, Jorden made the argument that being ‘intentional’ when using this service garners numerous rewards by saving time and money. Since that episode, I’ve been thinking about intentional choices and how they relate to my daily life and how I spend my time. For many people, taking time off from work often involves moving from one screen to another. Mindless social media scrolling or clicking on one of the daily deluges of sales offers masquerading as taking a break. Less screen time is better for the mind and body, as well as the planet, since electronic devices are powered by energy, and buying stuff consumes resources.

We are also literally surrounded by noise. On my to-read list is Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World—and How We Can Take It Back, a new release by science journalist Chris Berdik. He talks about the effects on humans and nature of chronic overexposure to noise. And yet, we humans, who are horrible at multitasking, attempt to do five things at once while surrounded by noise we’ve managed to consciously block out, but that is apparently undermining our well-being. Indeed, we definitely need to take vacations.

Getting a break gives us time to breathe and be more mindful. Time off from work might help to make us more aware of things we do out of habit without thinking about the impact on ourselves or the planet. When I’m busy, I find it’s easy to eat more than I realize as I’m chowing down on my go-to indulgence, chocolate, not thinking about how many squares I’ve put into my mouth. Not only do I end up oblivious to how much I’ve consumed, but also at what point I was satisfied, but not paying enough attention to realize it, essentially wasting good chocolate on a satiated palate. Studies back this up, showing that people are more satisfied with smaller portions of snacks and desserts than they expected.

Taking a vacation can also help us indulge in what studies show gives us more pleasure than adding to our cache of possessions. It turns out that people get more enjoyment out of experiences than material goods, and that anticipating these experiences adds to the overall pleasure. Essentially, planning a journey is like a shopping trip for the soul, but with bigger rewards.

I’m Out the Door

Nobody has ever needed to tell me twice to take a vacation; my insatiable wanderlust has taken care of that. But I have a quasi-retired spouse whom I practically have to drag out the door for him to take a real break. He’s attempted staycations numerous times over the years, but I’m sure that, like most people, he has found this difficult to pull off, given the daily responsibilities and household-related things that so easily invade the most well-laid plans to take a break. (I keep telling him there’s a reason that ‘vacate’ is an essential part of the word, ergo ‘stay-cating’ doesn’t even make sense—neither logically nor linguistically.)

Vacations can offer a reset—even for those with jam-packed travel itineraries—and help to avoid mental burnout. Taking time out to smell the roses breaks the cycle of constant productivity that can drive a person into the ground and encourage overconsumption. And since trading off buying material things for experiences has been proven to be more rewarding, taking a journey away from the daily rut is a win-win for people and the planet.

It’s not uncommon to hear people say they took a trip, felt like all they did was eat, but came home a few pounds lighter. Getting outside of the office and the house offers an opportunity to hit the beach, venture into the woods, or walk the city streets—a much better trade-off than an obligatory trip to the gym. Getting outdoors can also help people to cope with climate anxiety, but I’m heading off on vacation, so I’ll get to that in my next post : )

Why We Should Be Weather Literate

In 2007, Glenn Albrecht introduced the concept of ‘solastalgia’ in a psychiatry journal article. He’d been studying the effects of coping with persistent drought and the environmental scars caused by pit mining in rural Australia. In 2017, the American Psychological Association acknowledged that climate change causes mental health issues, defining it as ‘eco-anxiety’. The most devastating report came from a study done in 2018, linking increased suicide rates in the US and Mexico to an increase in average monthly temperatures, showing just how severely some people are affected by climate change. By 2021, the media caught on to these studies, hyping these feelings of distress that came to be most widely labeled ‘climate anxiety’.

Why I was asked to interview Thomas E. Weber about his new book made perfect sense to me. But when I talked to Tom, he mentioned how happy he was to talk to someone doing sustainability because most of the interviews about his new book, Cloud Warriors: Deadly Storms, Climate Chaos—and the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting, focused on weather reporting. He hadn’t had many opportunities to discuss a key concern for him, which is how climate change is impacting sustainability—particularly the human part of the equation. Tom mentioned he hadn’t set out to write a book about climate change, but rather to help educate people about how climate change causes extreme weather and why it’s important to understand how to use forecasting to their advantage.

Along with regular news about the increasing rise in global temperatures, climate anxiety has become part of our vernacular. In the process, people have also become more inured to climate concerns, feeling helpless about how to tackle what seems to be an insurmountable and ill-defined task to combat climate change. Tom feels that improving ‘weather literacy’ can help to ease a person’s mind, by knowing more about what to expect and how to prepare for the impact of the weather event. Tom wants the book to be “a kind of User's Manual for the weather forecast, whether a consumer, a community leader, or in a business,” since “what people should know about the weather is their best first line of defense”. His advice applies to everyone from school superintendents deciding whether to make kids happy with a snow day, to homeless shelter staff preparing for an influx of people seeking solace from sweltering or freezing temperatures, to homeowners knowing when to batten down the hatches for an impending hurricane or blizzard.

Climate Anxiety

Between 2020-2021 (not coincidentally during the height of the pandemic), Google data revealed that searches for ‘climate anxiety’ increased 565%. What’s more, the week after the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced expectations of global warming surpassing a 1.5 degree Celsius increase ‘in the next decades’ (which humans managed to accomplish in just three years), Googling for ‘what I can do about climate change’ increased 2600%. Clearly, people showed concern about climate change, unquestionably spurred by the concomitant increase in extreme weather events, from Hurricane Ida to wildfires that raged from California to Washington state.

Researchers from disciplines as diverse as psychology to communications increasingly report hearing climate change concerns from people. Climate anxiety was on people’s minds even before the Coronavirus spread, evidenced by a survey published by the American Psychiatric Association in February 2020, finding that 56% of US adults thought climate change was the most important issue facing the world today. The same study found that almost half of people between the ages of 18-34 felt stress over climate change issues.

When surveyed in 2022, people in 31 of 32 countries indicated that climate change is affecting their mental health, bringing them down, making them feel anything between more anxious to outright terrified. (Russians were the exception. The political scientist in me wants to explain why.) And while those in developing countries feel the effects of climate change much more directly and severely, many of them are unaware of the scientific causes of what’s happening around them.

A 2023 study noted that around two billion people—that’s 25% the entire global population—had never even heard of climate change. The Lancet surveyed young people in the Global South, who indicated that they are very concerned.. In the Philippines, 92% of Filipinos thought ‘the future is frightening’ versus 68% in the US. 77% of young people in Brazil felt their government was unresponsive compared to 58% worldwide. Nigerians were amongst the highest when responding to the question ‘climate change negatively affects my daily life and functioning’.

Even for those who were familiar with the problems associated with increasing global temperatures, most were not interested in making changes, despite expressing concern and being aware of the impact of their choices. Despite admitting increased concern, the Japanese reportedly weren’t willing to change their behavior, actively resisting some of the most basic eco-friendly changes, like avoiding food waste. They weren’t alone, as those surveyed in several other countries, particularly in Emerging Economies, expressed distress about the weather yet proved unwilling to make changes to reduce their impact.

Coping with Climate Change

Even with more accurate forecasting, climate anxiety is exacerbated by the inability, unwillingness, or lack of knowledge of how to deal with an impending event. Considering the consequences, Tom argues that more resources need to go into continued technological sophistication of modeling as well as communicating the results to the public to better prepare for ‘climate chaos’ and cope with climate-induced anxiety. Moreover, these factors contribute to increased weather-related destruction.

Our July 2024 Weathering Insurance Premiums episode highlighted how extreme events are making it difficult for middle and lower-income households to afford homeowner’s insurance, risking being dropped yet unable to relocate out of hurricane and wildfire zones. Even the wealthy are not spared from the impact of climate change. Countless celebrities made headlines as they evacuated their homes in the ritzy Pacific Palisades neighborhood during wildfires in January 2025 in Los Angeles. While they (presumably) had the means to find other accommodations, many of the people owning the 16,251 homes and businesses that were destroyed in fires, accounting for losses of approximately $100 billion, were not as fortunate.

Recent heatwaves in Europe have left many people who can afford air conditioning without access to it. Historically, they have had little need for cooling systems, but that’s changing. Between AC unit shortages, public measures limiting air conditioning, and higher energy prices, Europeans have increasingly suffered through longer, hotter summer months. When I visited Hong Kong during the exceptionally hot and humid month of July, I was stunned to walk by shops running their air conditioning while having their front doors propped open. I discovered this was both a sign of prestige, to be able to run the cooling system, and to entice customers out of the heat. In an Emerging Economy, while air conditioning is nearly ubiquitous in Hong Kong, only 5% of Brits and 3% of Germans have it installed.

In Keeping Freshwater Flowing, I mentioned that as part of its commitment to Zero Emissions, the EU is encouraging farmers to shift to drought-resistant crops and cutting-edge irrigation techniques to cope with increasingly erratic weather. Among the wealthiest countries in the world, they are better positioned to accomplish this. Making this adjustment in developing countries proves a bit more difficult, especially when conveying forecasts to farmers who are uneducated about the growing threats from climate change.

It’s astonishing to see how many people carry cell phones in even the most remote locations in the world. The difference, however, is that these are flip phones relying on data streaming rather than smartphones with Internet access. For farmers, weather forecasts can help them strategize about when to plant and use fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides. Tom was impressed to hear a Ghanaian woman describe how she tested traditional farming methods against advice from data-streamed agriculture service reports based on weather forecasts. “She can get text alerts on her phone. Basically, one a day. One of the keys to the program was to combine the short weather forecast with information about how it affects farming. And so the text wouldn't just say rain. Instead, it would say ‘Rain today. Don't apply fertilizer today or tomorrow’. She explained to me that she knows her finances. Fertilizer costs money, and if the rain washes it away, that is potentially financially devastating when you have a small farm like that.”

“She said, ‘When I started doing this, I wasn’t sure. I've been brought up to do farming the same way. The people in my family did it before me, and there's sort of cultural war about what to do and when. So, I decided to set aside a bit of land. I don't have a lot of land, but I'm going to set aside a little corner of it and do it. The traditional way that I would always do it. Then with everything else, I'm gonna raise the corn based on these instructions I'm getting through the text messages.’ She set up the experiment and the results of the experiment were that she more than doubled her yield of corn by following the forecast information, and that made her a believer.” She wasn’t able to read, Tom said, so if she got a message when her husband was at his job on another farmer, she would take her phone to him or a neighbor to relay the forecast information for that day to her.

Researching programs in Zimbabwe, Tom found that college radio is an essential means for conveying farming reports. “It's not just college students playing alternative music. There's a lot of programming that has faculty and experts delivering useful educational material to the audience, like potential drought situations, so it's a trusted source for people, telling them ‘Hey, this is serious. We need to talk about the dry weeks that are coming and what that means for your crops, and what we might be able to do about it.” Adapting to climate change is about “Meeting people where they’re at,” and for people in the Global South, it’s about finding ways to reach people in remote farming communities.

This fascinating graphic detailing where heat is stored shows how hot surfaces get. Extreme weather is pushing infrastructure beyond its previous capabilities, causing more destruction than ever. Just as I was finishing up this post, yet another report popped up about how extreme heat takes a toll on bridges. Governments face greater challenges to construct bridges, roads, pavements, and buildings to withstand what I now refer to as ‘weather whiplash’, demanding greener technologies to conserve resources and mitigate carbon emissions.

It seems like more daily records are being set than ever before for weather, from high and low temperatures, precipitation, days without precipitation, wind speeds, tornado warnings…the list goes on. As knowledge is power, Tom’s book can help individuals become more weather-literate and better cope with climate-induced anxiety. Cloud Warriors is well worth the read to discover what possibilities lie ahead for a hopeful future and what people around the world are doing in the face of extreme weather.

Upon hearing “I enjoyed reading your book, although I also sort of hated reading it,” Thomas E. Weber replied, “Everybody always wants to hear that about their book”. But he didn’t take this personally, not only because he’s a very nice person, but because my comment was prompted by my love-hate relationship with the weather. When I got the request to interview Tom about his new book, Cloud Warriors: Deadly Storms, Climate Chaos—and the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting, I immediately leapt at the opportunity, hoping he could shed some light on why weather predictions are so seemingly unpredictable. (To me, at least…)

Hitting the hiking trails most days, I’m admittedly obsessed with following the weather. Yet, consulting multiple forecast apps (and I recently discovered a meta-app that compiles all of these!), I am disheartened by their seeming lack of accuracy. Hard to believe I’m still stunned that these forecasts not only contradict one another, but seem to have less predictive power than rolling dice to guess whether to wear a raincoat or sunglasses.

Convincing the Population

Tom set me straight about what the reasonable expectations are for forecasts. It’s all about weather models. Although the technology forecasters have developed quite accurately tracks tornado and hurricane movement, determining the occasion and amount of precipitation is more challenging. It’s possible to predict hurricane patterns and intensity three to six days out, but predicting mixed precipitation of where the snow ends and rain begins, or, especially, where and when thunderstorms will pop up, is far more difficult. Tom observed, “If it moves 10 miles to the east, 10 miles to the west, it's the difference between some rain or enough snow to shut down a city.”

I think I just need to call Tom when I want to know what to expect. After all the time he has spent with forecasting modelers, he’s gotten “pretty good forecasting that myself. We go to a ball game. I'm kind of like sneaking a look at the radar to see if it's going to rain.” His experiences with meteorologists ranged from tornado tracking at the Storm Prediction Center and National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, to the green screen room at The Weather Channel in Atlanta, Georgia, where they demonstrate the impact of severe weather.

Tom described how The Weather Channel “produces these 3D graphic segments where they insert their meteorologists in the studio into this 3D world of an animation of bad weather, and it's kind of a crazy thing to see, because there's this one part of the studio that's like a couple of stories high, and it's just one giant green screen. The floor is green, the wall is green. It goes up to the ceiling. There's literally no actual stuff in this part of the studio to insert their meteorologist into a tornado and a car flies by. And you know it's ‘good television’, as they say. But I was struck by how effective some of these videos are. One example shows people how quickly a flash flood can become dangerous.”

Too Many Weather Reports?

With the increase in severe weather alerts due to the effects of climate change, it’s hard to know what to take seriously. Since May, in Cincinnati, we’ve had a bizarre array of weather conditions: Long stretches of daily rain and thunderstorms (the record was two weeks straight), interspersed with hot and exceptionally humid weather, with high overnight temperatures. (Anyone who gardens knows that tomatoes prefer cooler nights, which 75 degrees is not.) We’ve had more extreme weather warnings for flooding, excessive heat, severe thunderstorms, and tornadoes than ever. And I’m grateful I don’t live in a wildfire zone, though we have a growing number of air quality warnings, largely due to Canadian wildfires.

Part of the issue is that to entice people to ‘consume’ AccuWeather and stay glued to The Weather Channel, they need to dramatize their reports. A big theme through Climate Warriors is about communicating the weather and improving ‘weather literacy’ to help people understand the implications of the forecast and how to better prepare, especially with the increase in incidences of extreme conditions. One compelling story Tom recounts is the heat wave that struck the Pacific Northwest, where most people don’t even have air conditioners, never having needed them. The overwhelming number of heat stroke victims compelled EMTs to fill body bags with ice to cool the patients, lacking other means to quickly lower body temperatures during heat wave crises.

Getting people to understand weather conditions that are new to them means moving beyond the cleverly-named local forecaster, Dusty Gales, standing in front of a local map with raindrops, thunderbolts, and sunshines to get an audience to pay attention. There's a big difference between ignoring a tornado warning than debating on whether to take an umbrella when heading out the door. It’s also about needing to meet people where they’re at, from developing phone apps, warnings in multiple languages for non-English speakers, and radio reports for the Amish community and others without Internet connectivity.

In Climate Warriors, Tom recounts how a meteorologist at Penn State branded AccuWeather. building an entire empire around weather reports. To get people to pay attention, “If you look at it from a television perspective, a ratings perspective, or a clicks perspective, there's certainly a motive for playing up any possibility of bad weather, right? I mean, nobody stays riveted to their screen just to hear, ‘Hey, tomorrow will be mild and sunny.’ Nobody on TV will say that. The phrase is ‘what's good television’. A CNN person in a windbreaker getting storm-tossed or even standing before a storm makes good television. So, I think there are really important and legitimate concerns about weather media overplaying things.”

Why We Name Storms

As I talked about in a previous post about extreme weather, I’m still convinced that forecasters sensationalize weather reports, with ‘polar vortex’ right up there with ‘bomb cyclone’, to get as much mileage out of (little or big) screentime as possible. Tom agreed, noting that “You just need to feel that the people doing the naming are being responsible when they decide to elevate something to a named storm, just to get the audience. So that's just an example where I think there's healthy skepticism about the marketing motive. But there have also been some benefits.”

For instance, Tom said, “There was a lot of fuss when The Weather Channel started naming winter storms.” Hurricanes have been named since 1950 by the U.S. National Hurricane Center to both raise awareness and reduce confusion when multiple storms occur simultaneously. Initially, winter storm naming was met with skepticism. But for the same reasons naming hurricanes was effective, monikers for snowstorms made more people pay attention. And now there’s a push by other researchers and nonprofits in Europe to get in on the ‘name game’ for heat waves, so people realize the severity of them and can be prepared.

The increase in the number of wildfires isn’t likely to result in naming them, though they also deserve more attention. Even with better forecasting, Tom spoke with numerous frustrated firefighters who told him that “We have amazing tools for wildfire forecasting. But in some of these small towns, the fire chief is still kind of like, ‘Well, I don't know. So and so told me that it's probably gonna rain tomorrow, so I'm not so worried today.’ And the wildfire guys are like, ‘We're showing you a model of where wind is going to move through the valley, and what the relative humidity is going to be, so please don't use the Farmers’ Almanac.’”

Convincing the Money People

One of the things that surprised Tom when talking to first responders and disaster relief agencies is the long battle they’ve had with politicians about using forecasting models to determine the probability of weather events and the effects of climate change. This information can help determine how they prepare for everything from the likelihood of drought and flooding to impending tornadoes and hurricanes. Ample warning to evacuate people in danger zones or ferry in supplies when infrastructure is still intact affects the potential number of casualties, amount of damage, and adequate drinking water, food, and medical supplies.

They finally won over politicians by crunching the numbers, Tom said. “Only recently have the people who control the money been willing to say, ‘Oh, actually, you're right. That forecast is helpful. Let's not wait until the disaster happens. Let's activate some resources in advance.’ And you know, a lot of forecasting comes down to probabilities. Right? I mean there's no such thing as a hundred percent certainty. But the advocates for this were trying to explain to the money people ‘Look, let's take six different incidents. If our forecast pans out the way we think it will for four of them, and doesn't in two of them, you will still be way ahead of the game, because a dollar spent in preparation is worth so much more than a dollar that is spent in reaction.’”

In 2024, the US recorded 27 billion-dollar disasters. That same year, hurricane damage in the U.S. hit $500 billion, and Florida’s state insurer expected to pay out $525 billion. Meanwhile, damage to European Union countries exceeded €5 billion three years running, just from thunderstorms, with global estimates for 2024 due to hailstorms, strong winds, flooding, and tornadoes associated with convective storms hitting an estimated $58 billion in damage. Better forecasting and communicating predictions to the public can only help to decrease damage and save lives.

However, denying climate change prompted the current U.S. administration to slash the budgets of the two public weather service providers in 2025. Many people—both in the U.S. and worldwide—depend on information gathered by the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As Tom pointed out, “Obviously, tornadoes are a threat at any time of the day, but some of the social science research has found how dangerous nighttime tornadoes are because one of the signals that people act on, in addition to hearing a warning siren or hearing something on television, is basically looking out the window. Does it look scary out right now? People are asleep after a certain time, and if you don't have one of those handy little weather radios that will blast an alert when a warning is issued due to staff cuts creating the possibility that nobody would be on duty overnight, it's kind of like, “Hey? Well, we're going to cut some of the air traffic controllers. So maybe there'll be nobody in air traffic control from 6 AM to 8 AM, but they'll be there the rest of the time.”

The Money People are ultimately concerned with being reelected, quickly realizing their error. Cutting these services affected many of the same rural Red State voters who put them in office. Constituents relying on hurricane and tornado warnings started to fret—and understandably so—because Tom explained that “weather and climate are about public safety. They're about national security. They're about economic prosperity. And so, the hits to NOAA and NWS are just incredibly distressing, because the U.S. is a world leader in our ability to predict the weather. I mean, can you think of anything cooler than being able to foretell the future?”

Like the Scouts Say: Always Be Prepared

Foretelling the weather offers the difference between minimizing disaster and being utterly ill-prepared. One of the key points Tom reiterates throughout Cloud Warriors is weather preparedness. Indeed, getting the word out about extreme weather was the impetus for Tom’s book, wanting to provide a sort of ‘user’s manual’. “I think it's sort of an underreported and under-told story. I hope people read it and come away with a better understanding of different types of weather threats, but also how forecasting works and how to be a better consumer of the forecast, using it to think ahead and plan.” Weather phenomena is only going to become more erratic with climate change. Even though Tom admits he thinks he “drives his family a little bit crazy” with his preparedness, Tom’s not likely to get caught in a flash flood without knowing what to do during a tornado.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Thomas E. Weber is a veteran writer, editor, and newsroom executive with a lifelong interest in how science and technology shape society. He was The Wall Street Journal’s first internet columnist and later became a bureau chief for the paper. As executive editor of TIME, he supervised the magazine’s feature journalism. He has taught journalism and publishing at Columbia University and New York University, as well as at his alma mater, Princeton University.

Sustainable Grilling Options

While my last post, The Grilling Debate: Charcoal or Propane, compares the sustainability of grilling methods, Cookout Season considers some eco-friendly options for an enjoyable barbecue. For die-hard grillers, out barbequing in a parka, cookout time may be year-round. Increasingly, however, as climate change heats the planet, giving us longer seasons, more people will be grilling longer. A Northeasterner, Memorial Day marks the official start of cookout season for me.

Steaks, Burgers, Fish, & Dogs

I’m not going to try to convince a meat-lover that a plant-based alternative will offer the same satisfaction as eating a steak. However, with evidence stacking up that animal products are linked to a battery of diseases, discomforts, and disorders, even swapping out beef one meal a week can make a health difference, not to mention help out the planet. Though some might argue grilling isn’t worth the effort just for plants, I beg to differ. Even faux meats and certainly portobello mushrooms take on a whole new flavor over a fire. I challenge anyone who doesn’t abhor mushrooms to eat a well-prepared, grilled portobello mushroom and not come away satisfied. The key is marinating it.

Arguably, burgers are easier to substitute. For fungi haters and people looking for something more like a beef burger, loads of entrepreneurs have invested loads of money on research to develop the perfect analog veggie burger, designed to fool even the most cultivated beef-lover’s palate. In a blind taste test of 175, burger eaters preferred the Impossible Burger over beef burgers. The researchers noted that while the participants could distinguish the beef from the analog burger, they ranked the Impossible Burger higher. Based on these results, it’s no coincidence that this is the burger my ethically-vegan spouse prefers.

As companies seek to cash in on consumers avoiding animal products—the #1 reason being health—corporations have (I’ll say) formulated plant-based versions of countless foods. I’m not a big fan of analog products, so I’m quite happy with a portobello. My rule of thumb for judging how processed a product is depends on whether I can replicate a reasonable facsimile from scratch.

We regularly have Fish Taco Friday. I make tofu ‘fish’ for myself and Gardein’s F’sh Filets for my spouse. My portion is basically tofu coated in Old Bay seasoning and fried in a pan. Thankfully, canola oil is good stuff for the body, and not just according to the Canadian Canola Council. What a great marketing ploy by the Canadians, eh? Combining Canada and ola (i.e., oil) to rebrand rapeseed oil in the 1970s.

I recently started adding a sheet of nori, which adds a bit of the sea to it. Though my spouse eats tofu (I feel the need to add willingly, and that he enjoys it), he still prefers analog foods. He regularly mentions his impatience for the day to come when sustainably, humanely grown lab meat becomes a palatable, affordable reality.

At first glance, the long list of ingredients on the package makes it appear that Gardein’s F’sh Filets are a pretty junky food. On their website, however, Gardein provides the SmartLabel nutritional breakdown for each ingredient and specifically explains its purpose. As it turns out, I could make a similar batter-dipped filet of textured vegetable protein (what used to be called TVP—simply defatted soy flour), but the trade-off is too time-consuming. While F’sh Filets are processed and aren’t as nutritionally redeeming as tofu ‘fish’, they are not the ultra-processed foods (UPF) getting all the bad press (and for good reason).

As companies seek to expand their market reach while appealing to consumer palates accustomed to ultra-processed foods, they necessarily formulate plant-based foods to match their analog mates. I can make faux turkey lunch meat, but Tofurky, widely available and around since 1980, will satisfy a lot more people than what I can make—not surprising, given their list of ingredients. Still, that’s far less junky than Lightlife’s Smart Dogs, which I couldn’t come close to replicating in my kitchen. I occasionally serve them, and they are a protein-packed change of pace, great with homemade sauerkraut, but without question, they are ultra-processed.

The Sides

Every grill master is happy to provide me with faux meat options at their cookout, but I’ve missed out terribly on potato salad, coleslaw, and macaroni salad at picnics. The culprit is mayonnaise. There are plenty of vegan mayonnaise options—even the big names (think Hellmann’s and Kraft) have gotten in on the growing demand for plant-based mayo. My favorite remains Follow Your Heart’s Original Veganaise, one of the first arguably indistinguishable replacements. I have anonymously served this to many an unwitting guest at covered dishes, only to come back with an empty container.

Egg-free, vegan mayo is a better environmental choice. But it’s also a more healthful option. Comparatively, its saturated fat is linked to bad cholesterol (LDL), while poly- and monounsaturated fats help to improve HDL cholesterol levels. Hidden in so many foods, the US Dietary Guidelines found that only 23% of Americans consume the recommended limit of saturated fat (<10% of all calories). Most people stick to what they like and don’t necessarily think about making this easy swap.

I’ve also missed deviled eggs, but that’s a tougher one. Yet, some very clever, culinarily creative cooks have developed vegan deviled eggs. The earliest versions substituted new potatoes for the whites, though others have gone all out, concocting much closer facsimiles, using any variety of ingredients to mimic the solid egg whites.

I have never gotten around to making any of these, as they’re fairly labor-intensive, and possibly never will, now that the WunderEgg has hit the market. Available at Whole Foods nationwide, this analog hard-cooked egg apparently makes fantastic deviled eggs. It’s currently on my list to see whether they live up to all the rave reviews.

Watermelon

Watermelon salad is a common starter in many sub/tropical countries. And grilled watermelon apparently became trendy in 2018, when a NYC restaurant’s prepared smoked watermelon ham went viral. Grilled watermelon steaks were soon to follow. To me, a BBQ isn’t a BBQ unless it ends with watermelon.

Some think seedless watermelon is the best thing since sliced bread; plenty of people around the globe would beg to differ. Indonesians call them kuaci. In Iran, they’re tokhmeh. The Egyptians eat battikh, while in India, they’re magaz. Roasted and salted, some cultures value watermelon seeds even more than the fruit. Evidenced by the growing market for watermelon seeds, valued at $3 billion in 2023 and projected to more than double in a decade (one projection expects the market to quadruple!), companies are starting to cash in on what local vendors have been purveying for a long time.

The biggest gains are likely to be in the US, Canada, and Europe, due to our love of snacking. Watermelon seeds are densely nutritious, offering a wide variety of health benefits. Because companies want to cash in on upward trends, they’re moving beyond the snack market to milling flour for use in everything from bread and cakes to soups and sauces, tapping into the gluten-free market.

Even in our household, where we devour watermelon in the summer, two people cannot finish off even the smallest seeded watermelon before it goes off. To avoid food waste, we buy the small guys, which are seedless. Not the biggest fan of seeding the melon (and my spouse gets grumpy when even the immature ‘seedless seeds’ pollute his ‘seedless’ watermelon), this has been a win-win for me. I would like to try roasting the seeds. I encourage anyone who tosses the seeds from squash to roast in a bit of oil and salt—they are so good.

I recall the first analog hot dogs I had, and not fondly. Tofu Pups were horrible! Without question, fake meat has come a long way, improving considerably over the years: Case in point, Tofu Pups are the rebranded Lightlife Smart Dogs we have in our fridge. And though the Impossible Burger wins in taste tests and analogs Smart Dogs are far better for the body and planet, everyone would be better off without either, but a cookout just wouldn’t be the same.

Livestock farming is one of the biggest CO2 emitters. As scientific study after study reinforces how bad meat and dairy are for our health, not to mention the latest egg crisis, omnivores have more reasons than ever to try plant-based alternatives. These changes don’t have to be all-or-nothing to be effective, and gradual changes are more likely to result in developing better habits. The easiest change to make, arguably, is swapping mayo for Veganaise. And some, like my steak-loving spouse, will even appreciate what a good portobello has to offer.

Memorial Day marked the start of cookout season, at least for those of us from the Northeast. By the Fourth of July, barbequing is in full swing. Arguably, charcoal imparts a far better flavor than propane, but is a bit more of a hassle. And who can resist toasting marshmallows over a campfire?

Wood smoke is terrible. From bonfires to fireplaces, the EPA basically equates this with a death sentence for the humans inhaling the noxious gases and particles and toxic pollution spewing into the environment. Add to that medical warnings that cooking over an open flame increases exposure to cancer-causing carcinogens, and it’s amazing anyone grills. But we do, and will continue to enjoy barbeques, which made me wonder whether one fuel option is more eco-friendly than the other.

Charcoal

The origin of charcoal dates back to 30,000 BC. To make charcoal, wood cutters supply trees that are burned in earth kilns at low temperatures for around 10 days, emitting the gases and particulates that cause the EPA to give health warnings. After 10 days of cooling, the wood is broken up into chunks and packaged for sale—or when feeding industrial furnaces—carted directly to the factories.

Given the limited land and great demand for fuel to power England’s Industrial Revolution, it’s no wonder the country was deforested and polluted. Making charcoal is a dirty business. It’s a resource- and labor-intensive process, but it’s an efficient source of energy. To this day, charcoal is still the go-to heat source for iron-forging.

A National Park Historic Site, the Hopewell Furnace supplied iron to southeastern Pennsylvania for over 100 years. Records indicate that 4o percent of the workers on the payroll were wood-cutters, employed to supply wood to make charcoal. To keep the furnace operating, it burned 800 bushels of charcoal a day—the equivalent of one acre of hardwood trees (or by one of my favorite measures, the weight of 1.25 African elephants). The farmers, decidedly harvesting to keep themselves in business (unlike the Once-ler in The Lorax), sustainably sourced trees. They rotated cutting areas while protecting new tree shoots to ensure they would have a constant supply.

In developed countries, this process remains resource-intensive, but environmental concerns regulate air quality, and reputation encourages producers to adopt sustainable practices. One of the top sellers, Kingsford, was founded as a way to convert wood waste into a useful fuel by making briquets; a practice it continues to this day. The company is over halfway to having its plants Zero Waste-to-Landfill certified. Charcoal-making in developing countries is an entirely different story.

People in the Global South heavily rely on charcoal as a primary fuel source in areas where wood is available to make it, as it’s far more efficient in comparison to burning firewood and dung. As of 2022, over two billion people rely on biomass for cooking fuel, mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and India. Its use is not even limited to rural areas. Poorer people in urban areas also rely on charcoal for cooking, despite the open flames in enclosed areas. With population growth projections, 60 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa will lack access to clean cooking fuels by 2030, putting more pressure on demand for charcoal.

Charcoal-burning is not limited to households. I have come across any number of businesses relying on charcoal, from the Cedi Bead Factory in Ghana, to the road-side corn vendor in Sri Lanka, to the tool-maker shop in the outer-reaches of Madagascar. Alternatives are less affordable and harder to come by in rural areas.

Demand for the high-quality acacia wood charcoal that Somalia produces has been under scrutiny for well over a decade. Illegal smuggling into the Gulf States to supply hookah lounges has made it difficult for the United Nations to cut off funding to al Shabab, the terrorist organization that continues to undermine UN attempts to stabilize Somalia. Poverty drives Somalis to deforest the country far faster than the acacia trees can grow, with the UN estimating that even after a trade ban was put in place in 2012, over eight million additional trees were felled to make charcoal.

Propane

Despite the typical shorthand reference to ‘propane’, the stuff that comes in a tank (fondly referred to in the industry as ‘pigs’, due to their shape) isn’t just propane, but a mix of propane and butane, or Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG). Technicalities out of the way, propane was synthesized in the mid-19^th century by Pierre-Eugene Marcellin Berthelot, a chemist so popular that he became a household name in France.

Building on Berthelot’s work, while working in Pennsylvania when crude oil was discovered, industrial chemist Edmund Rolands discovered that propane is a by-product of processing crude oil. By the turn of the century, Walter Snelling determined propane could be used for fuel, proving quite useful, due to its high level of ‘complete combustion’. A concentrated, efficient fuel source, propane is excellent for applications like metal-cutting and welding. Within two years of Snelling’s discovery, propane started fueling houses, and 15 years later, powering appliances.

To decrease pollution in India, in 2016, the government launched a campaign to shift reliance from biomass to LPG. The government subsidized propane to encourage households to switch to this cleaner fuel option. Within 10 years, consumption almost doubled, especially in rural areas. However, while LPG is better for air quality, too many Indians still need to supplement LPG with cheaper—or even free biomass fuel, in the case of readily available dung from the many sacred cows roaming through the country. The problem was so bad that the government banned dung-burning in 2015 due to the residue accumulating on the Taj Mahal. While India is making progress, ultimately, electric stoves are the least polluting but currently most expensive option. And with the current threat of the government removing subsidies, more people will return to burning biomass fuels.

The Bottom Line

Deciding between charcoal or propane is a choice people in developed countries take for granted. Many people in the world necessarily opt for whatever is most readily available and least expensive, rather than using charcoal for flavor than out of necessity. Whether grilling with charcoal or propane is the more sustainable choice for backyard grilling, the answer is...more complicated.

Up against unsustainably-sourced wood, propane is the hands-down winner. However, if sustainably-sourced, charcoal becomes more competitive, evening the race. When made from FSC-certified wood, sawdust, and scraps or agriculture waste, briquets come from a renewable resource. Propane, on the other hand, depends on fossil fuel extraction and processing, which negatively impact humans and the environment in countless ways.

Relying on sustainably-produced charcoal using wood from managed forests also off-sets carbon emissions. Young trees capture carbon at faster rates than mature trees, so the cycle of growing to harvest, use for charcoal, and replant is a sustainable cycle. Old-growth forests are incredibly valuable carbon sinks and conserve biodiversity, so making charcoal from these trees spells triple environmental disaster.

Resource usage, however, isn’t the only factor. Propane burns cleaner, by a landslide. In addition to emissions produced when processing wood into charcoal—particularly in unregulated conditions—burning charcoal releases far more particulate matter, higher levels of noxious gases, and almost three times as many CO2 emissions as LPG. Propane is also a more efficient fuel source and doesn’t require the fire starters grillers typically use to get briquets burning.

When it comes to rethinking our own sustainability impact, choosing between charcoal and propane poses a dilemma. Neither is better than using an electric source, but not grilling is off the table for many people. As with other sustainability topics, this impasse makes it difficult to offer easy ways to reconsider things we do out of habit without thinking about the impact, easy changes we haven’t even considered, and easy things we know we should do but haven’t gotten around to doing or doing consistently.

One factor that makes a difference is to regularly clean the grill because it will heat faster. When grilling with propane, make sure it’s only burning as long as necessary to grill. Fire it up and use it when it hits the desired temperature. This is an easy change I can make, avoiding over-preheating.

For charcoal users, avoid lighter fluid and use an electric or chimney starter, which actually produces a better flavor, while also being better for the environment. Another way to reduce carbon emissions is to close the grill vents rather than let the coals burn out. Stifling the charcoal cuts back on emissions.

One adjacent change to consider is whether to replace our gas stove. When we moved in 2008, I insisted on installing a gas stove, convinced it is a much better way to cook. This, however, was before I became aware of how much worse burning gas was for our health and the environment than electricity. Now I’m faced with the quandary of whether keeping the functioning gas appliance has less of an overall sustainability impact than buying a new electric stove. At this point, I clearly have not decided, but should invest some time in researching the trade-off.

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In my last post, considering the trade-off of cotton for hemp, I mentioned that both are edible. At the time, I was only familiar with cotton seeds being pressed into oil, but as people who grew up around cotton fields probably know, in fact, the seeds, leaves, and flowers are edible. Few have missed the hype that hemp seed gets as a ‘superfood’. It’s a well-deserved title, as few plants provide all nine essential amino acids, making them complete proteins.

Hemp is in the company of the pseudo grains quinoa, amaranth, and buckwheat, spirulina (an algae), and soybeans. Pepitas (pumpkin seeds), pistachios, and chia seeds are also considered complete proteins, though slightly lower than the others in one essential amino acid, lysine. These superfoods provide the nutritional benefits of animal products, but with the added bonus of being free of saturated fat and cholesterol. Swapping out meat for any of these superfoods means it’s still possible to consume essential nutrients, countering the myth that someone with a plant-based diet cannot get enough protein. Plus, they’re not only better for the body, but they’re also sustainability superstars.

The Ancient Fuel Sources

The ancient pseudo grains are all highly adaptable crops, require a negligible number of inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), and need little water. Buckwheat sustained the Mongol Empire and amaranth powered the Aztecs, while quinoa fueled the Incan Empire, considered its ‘Mother Grain’. The Aztecs were also the first known to consume spirulina, harvested from Lake Texcoco and dried into cakes. (On a side note, I came across this unexpected 2023 publication, “Spirulina and its Residual Biomass as Alternative Sustainable Ingredients: Impact on the Rheological and Nutritional Features of Wheat Bread Manufacture”, by a team of scientists in Brazil, researching ways to improve the nutritional profile of bread without compromising its texture, while doing it sustainably.)

‘Should Be’ Superstar

Soybeans have been a staple food since the Chinese first pressed the beans into tofu blocks 2,000 years ago. In the 17^th century, Javanese Indonesians created tempeh, this fermented soybean cake not only provides complete protein but also healthy gut bacteria. The most culinarily useful quality of each is that they absorb flavors well, making them excellent candidates for marinating. Once a rare find, mainstream supermarkets carry edamame, green soybeans that are steamed in their pods, thanks to the rise in popularity of Japanese cuisine. The myth persists that soy can cause adverse hormone effects in men, but research has repeatedly debunked that misinformation.

Soybeans have long been used in crop rotation for corn and wheat to fix nitrogen back into the depleted soil. Like the pseudo grains, most parts of the soybean plant can be used. Unfortunately, the livestock industry’s reliance on soybeans for animal feed undermines the fact that a crop that should be a sustainability superstar is instead contributing to climate change. But soybean production for plant-based foods is not the problem and, in fact, more people opting for soy products over animal products will help to mitigate climate change.

The Seeds

Like hemp seeds, pepitas (the hulled inner seed of a variety of pumpkins and squash) are far more water efficient than tree nuts (none of which are complete proteins) and are a ‘two-fors’, since they are the seeds of an edible plant. On Sustainable Planet, Jorden and I talked about integrating a Circular Economy, which aims to minimize wasting resources in the lifecycle of a product—whether it’s a cacao pod, an airplane, or a building. Hemp and pepitas, along with the pseudo grains and soybeans are born circular economy crops, as growing them enriches the soil rather than depleting it, and most parts of each plant can be used. Spirulina is similar in that it grows underwater, acting as a blue carbon sink while removing pollutants, and can be harvested without uprooting the algae.

Conquering Unfamiliar Foods

In addition to getting a bad reputation for altering male hormones, tofu is the butt of many bad food stories. That certainly was my experience after my first attempt at stir-frying tofu and broccoli. At that time, tofu was only available in natural food stores, and there was no Internet to search for recipes, so I was flying blind on this. The result was so bad that it was years before I tried to make it again. What I didn’t know at the time was that tofu had to be pressed to drain, or it’d end up as a mushy mess that didn’t taste like anything.

Fast forward to today, when I eat tofu most days. My favorite is a super firm, high protein block that’s not packed in a tub of water, so it doesn’t need to be drained. It’s still practically unbelievable even to me that I enjoy eating it straight out of the package, tossed into salads.

A more recent mainstreamer is tempeh. The best tempeh I ever had, unsurprisingly, was in Indonesia. Short of going back or eating at an authentic Indonesian restaurant (like the one I visited in Portland, Oregon), I’ll never have tempeh that good again. Since it’s fermented, it’s the difference between eating freshly-made sauerkraut versus canned sauerkraut.

Speaking of Indonesia, rice grown in subaks, as I mentioned in Keeping Freshwater Flowing, can help to filter water in an aquaculture ecosystem. But much rice production is for commercial export, pushing farmers to increase cash crop earnings by relying on less sustainable means of production. Like any product that quickly rises to fame, demand can jeopardize its positive sustainability contributions. In addition to the temptation to monocrop affecting the environment, the rise to superfood status also affects producers. In Green Gold or Rotten Fruit, we discussed how the rise in demand for avocados turned into a nightmare for Mexican growers as cartels moved in to control the trade using violence and undercutting their income.

An article by the New York Times in 2011 reported that rising quinoa exports from the Andes were robbing Bolivian farmers of this nutritious staple food. This single story was repeatedly cited, leading the public to believe these farmers faced a plight similar to Mexican avocado growers. Instead, however, their buying power increased, allowing them to diversify their diets, which was the reason why they were consuming less quinoa.

It's easy to get into a ‘food rut’, falling into the habit of eating the same things over and over. Research indicates that changing it up is nutritionally beneficial. These superstar superfoods offer a way to try something different, making easy changes we haven’t previously considered. Quinoa is a good alternative to rice. Readily available in mainstream supermarkets, even prepared and ready-to-eat, quinoa is versatile. It substitutes well for grains in most dishes, hot or cold, sweet or savory. It can be toasted in a pan to top a salad or soup, or be the base for salads and soups. I add it to bread and cookie dough for some crunch. Quinoa is easy to prepare, just requiring a thorough rinse to remove the outer coating of saponin, its natural insecticide.

In Peru, quinoa stew is served everywhere, it’s vegan, and it’s awfully tasty. As with any staple food, every cook has their own way of making it, but I like this recipe spiced up a bit. I also really enjoyed puffed quinoa cereal and it turns out it’s quite easy to make.

There’s much more to buckwheat than pancakes. I’d been using buckwheat for some time before I realized it was a complete protein. Misleading by name, buckwheat isn’t wheat at all. So, as demand increased for gluten-free products, buckwheat became widely available. I first used buckwheat flour in a mix with oat and almond flours, along with pea protein for more healthful baked goods. Initially, I bought the flour, but realized I could buy the whole groats to grind, which made me want to try the groats. Like quinoa, buckwheat works well in pilaf, salad, and soup, and add raw groats to my protein recipe for multi- (pseudo) grain bread.

For anyone who’s had a Chia Pet, chia seeds need no introduction. Turns out, these are still around and so popular that the company takes pre-sale orders for new releases. What the fad of the 1980s obscured for most was the fact that chia seeds are far more than just a decoration. (Hobby? Collector’s item?) This complete protein can be used as an egg-substitute binder, a base to set puddings and jams, and a crunchy topping for yogurt, cereal, and salads.

Other than technically being seeds, I expect pistachios otherwise need no explanation. The southern Europeans make the best use of pistachios, producing delectable gelato and pistachio cream spread. Pepitas are also common, but I particularly like to use them as a base in sauces and dips. I can’t imagine eating hemp seeds on their own, though they are a great addition to salads and a mock Caesar salad dressing. I’m not into smoothies, but they are also a common ingredient, likely because just one teaspoon adds one gram of complete protein. Another common smoothie ingredient is spirulina. The most recent addition to my staples, I haven’t ventured far with it, mainly using it to make vegan blue cheese dressing and adding it to anything that I don’t mind having turn bright bluish-green.

These unfamiliar foods might discourage people from venturing into this new dietary territory, but they are all worth a try. Anyone can live a bit healthier and certainly a more sustainable life by trading out beef just one meal a week without having to give it up forever. A shift to these superfood sustainability superstars helps take pressure off the planet, and even helps out farmers—particularly in developing countries—by decreasing demand for animal-based proteins and encouraging growing native plants like the ancient pseudo grains instead of the resource-intensive cash crops wheat, maize, and rice for export.

Over the years, each one of these sustainability superfoods has become a staple in my kitchen, except amaranth. The grains are quite tiny, so I tend to opt for quinoa. As it has one more gram of protein per serving, it’s worth giving it a fair chance. Trying amaranth would add another complete protein alternative that’s an easy thing to try, that I intend to get around to doing.

I (obviously) spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability, doing a weekly podcast and writing twice-monthly newsletters for Sustainable Planet. That being said, making sustainable choices and adopting planet-friendly habits didn’t happen overnight. But considering implementing any of these superstar superfoods at least opens up the possibility of sustainable changes.

My spouse has always felt several steps behind me, though I feel he considerably narrowed the gap when he opted for a vegan diet. (I never pressured him, even preparing meat for him for almost a decade. Apparently, I make an excellent pot roast.) But I had a huge head start on him, introduced to vegetarianism 35 years ago, which put a whole lot of issues on my radar that he’d never considered. It took decades to get where I am, yet there are so many more changes I can make. The important thing is to find the balance that allows me to remain sane while trying to make a difference.

Many books have been written about cotton (and printed on cotton pages), so significant is the plant to world and U.S. history. Though accounts of where it was first domesticated around 5000 BC vary—from the Indus delta region of modern-day India and Pakistan to eastern Sudan, Mexico to Peru—cotton has the British Empire to thank for its rise to global fame. Hemp has been around just as long, originating in East Asia, just as significant to world and U.S. history (as the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper). But hemp suffered a serious blow in 1937 when the U.S. passed the Marijuana Tax Act, effectively quashing global production and the use of hemp products.

Cotton and hemp are similar in more ways than not. Both are edible, have a wide range of uses, and most parts of each plant have a use. Both cotton and hemp are labor-intensive plants to harvest. But comparatively, cotton production—and especially the organic variety—is environmentally taxing. Cotton requires a lot of water and takes longer to grow. Hemp, on the other hand, is an environmental superstar. This drought-resistant, deeply-rooted plant helps to lock soil in place during flooding, and is a faster-growing bioremediator, absorbing heavy metals and pollutants from the soil. Its biggest deterrent is that harvesting high-quality fibers is labor-intensive, due to the retting process, though not much more grueling than small-scale farmers hand-picking cotton.

Recording Cotton Reigns King but Hemp is Staging a Comeback, I was reminded that sustainability isn’t an all-or-nothing pursuit, which is what led me to write about different approaches to making sustainable changes. Considering the impact of the cotton industry, I thought about what trade-offs I was willing to make.

I know that hemp is the more sustainable choice, but I also know that I’m not giving up cotton bath towels or cotton and flannel sheets. Caring about sustainability, I want to love hemp more than I do. With a vegan diet, hemp seed is a great addition to salads and bowls because it is a complete protein (more on this in an upcoming post). Given the need and opportunity, I would choose hempcrete in a heartbeat if I were building a new house. But I’m never giving up flannel sheets. I even hate when the weather changes, sending our flannel sheets into the linen closet until the crisp autumn nights return.

I’m also a fan of cotton clothing. I did, however, buy a hemp shirt. I was skeptical when I tried it on. Though the fabric isn’t soft like cotton, and since it’s fairly fitted, I wasn’t sure about it. I decided to keep it to give it a fair chance. Turned out, the different feel of it isn’t unpleasant. Clearly designed for summer, short-sleeved with a scoop neck, I thought that the fabric might be too heavy, but it’s quite comfortable. Apparently, it also offers some natural UV protection, wicks moisture, and is anti-bacterial. I would definitely consider trying out more hemp clothing.

At least cotton is in league with hemp when it comes to disposal. Both can be recycled and are naturally compostable. The latter comes with more than a few caveats, the biggest being that the cotton or hemp garment has to be naturally dyed and have 100% natural fiber content. This condition considerably diminishes what makes the cut, as most fabrics are designed using multiple fibers, not to mention that the stitching could be synthetic, and all the accessories need to be removed. But with more clothing made with mixed fibers, not only are fewer clothes compostable, but also difficult to recycle.

Consider denim jeans. Traditionally, they were made from cotton, a few bits of metal, and built to last. Now, most jeans have spandex or elastane in them to make them stretchy, shortening their lifespan. I want to blame the ‘skinny jeans’ fad. (I mean, how else could someone practically be poured into a pair of jeans without spandex?) But before that trend, stretchy jeans had long been on racks. To make denim more immediately ‘worn in’, manufacturers added elastic fabric strands. The trade-off for comfort, however, requires adding plastic to the mix.

The biggest issue with synthetic fibers is that during washing, microplastics are released into the water stream. And the recent shift to cope with single-use plastic bottles by turning them into fabric is paradoxical, at best. According to the European Environment Agency, plastics in clothing accounts for 16-35% of microplastics heading into the global water supply, contributing to the 23 million tons of plastic waste that enter the water stream every year.

A new process to more easily break down blended fabrics is promising. And research by the American Chemical Society found that, depending on the type of treatment, the amount of microplastic entering the water supply can be minimized. Unfortunately, redirecting clothing into recycling bins will meet the same uphill battle municipalities have faced for decades to collect (much more easily) reusable glass bottles, cans, and paper. Overall, only 21% of all municipal waste in the U.S. is recycled and of that, only 5-6% of plastic waste generated was recycled. With growing demand for fast and ultra-fast fashion, and a lack of measures to stop ‘plasticization’, the problem is only going to get worse.

I (obviously) spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability, doing a weekly podcast and writing twice-monthly newsletters for Sustainable Planet. It’s tough when I confront an issue and know that making a different choice would be better for the planet, but that I’m just not willing to budge on, like giving up cotton flannel sheets. That’s when I need to remind myself that the important thing when trying to be greener is to find a balance that allows me to remain sane. Opting for more sustainable apparel and linens is one of these issues for me. As hemp clothing shifts from being a niche product, mainstream clothing companies are making a wider variety of affordable designs. Swapping in more hemp clothing for cotton is a reasonable change, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I sleep on hemp sheets.

A trip to the Greater Cincinnati Water Works might not sound like the most riveting experience, but each time I took students, they were surprised by just how interesting a water treatment facility could be. Piped in from the Ohio River, the water goes through six separate tanks, using sand, two types of carbon to filter out sediment, lime and sulfuric acid to adjust the pH level, chlorine, and ultraviolet light. The latter was introduced after a cryptosporidium outbreak in early 1990s, when scientists found that chlorine—which is highly effective at killing off bacteria, viruses, and parasites—wasn’t enough to neutralize the buggers. Having visited St. Petersburg, Russia, at a time when it was struggling to eliminate cryptosporidium from its freshwater supply, I appreciate showering in water that doesn’t require squeezing my eyes and mouth shut to avoid infection.

What always strikes me when visiting the plant is that high-quality treated water goes back into the Ohio River, rather than being piped into city lines. Because the public ‘ick’ response to the idea of ‘toilet-to-tap’—treated sewage waste returned for household use, perfectly potable water goes back into the freshwater stream. Singapore, a minuscule dot of a country, decided it was going to change people’s minds. In 2003, the government initiated its NEWater campaign to get the public on board with drinking ‘reclaimed’ water (much less aversion-inducing).

Concerned with maintaining reliable water supplies, the government set out in the 1970s to develop a reclaimed wastewater facility. In addition, Singapore also engineered rainwater collection, which now accounts for 20% of its freshwater supply, with two-thirds of its land used for ‘catchment’. (I highly recommend watching this video about the process.) A controversial process (which I’ll save for another post), 10% of its freshwater supply comes from desalinating ocean water.

After three decades, scientists advanced membrane technology enough to put the reclaimed wastewater production plant online in 2002. Now with five plants, NEWater provides 30% of the country’s freshwater supply. Despite the huge success of Singapore’s NEWater PR campaign, conquering the public’s repugnant response to toilet-to-tap water, the government doesn’t pipe this water back into homes. Instead, because the quality is so high, the government reserves it for commercial air conditioning and the semiconductor industry, which needs exceptionally pure water to make such tiny chips.

Singapore was uniquely positioned to fund these freshwater projects due to its rapid economic development. Implementing the necessary infrastructure for such sophisticated water treatment technology, rainwater collection, and desalination plants is out of reach of most countries, rich or poor. Water-stressed areas, however, can encourage greywater resourcing. Pressure on freshwater supplies encouraged Hawaii to adopt its Onsite Non-Potable Water Reuse policy in 2009. The state estimated that 50-80% of residential wastewater was greywater.

Collecting greywater requires installing dual-collection pipes that send sewage to the processing plant and water from sinks, showers, tubs, and washing machines to a separate tank to water gardens and yards. Harvesting this water directly for irrigation allows it to bypass the sewage treatment plant, saving a lot of energy and resources to treat water that doesn’t need to be potable. Homeowners have an incentive to capture greywater because freshwater is relatively expensive and some counties offer rebates.

For freshwater conservation, long ago, farmers in Bali created the subak integrated aquaculture system. So integral is this practice to Balinese culture that UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage site in 2012. Dependent on agriculture, farmers protect freshwater sources as they grow rice in water where they raise fish, use ducks to control insects, and string coconut shells along native plant borders to scare away birds. This holistic aquaculture system naturally conserves their water supply, minimizing the need for agricultural chemicals and fish feed that could contaminate the water.

Our Habits

In October (oddly, instead of March 22, on World Water Day), Imagine a Day without Water encourages privileged people to get a sense of how much they rely on-and often take for granted—clean, readily available water. Over 80% of countries in the world struggle to provide reliable sources of potable water. Several areas are amongst the highest water-stressed areas, including the Indian subcontinent, southern Africa, and the band of countries that runs across North Africa and the Middle East.

One of the wealthiest parts of South Africa, Cape Town faced unprecedented freshwater shortages in 2021. Reserves were so depleted that the Western Cape region verged on ‘Day Zero’ when it would have to shut off taps due to dried-up reservoirs. Barely averting total shutdown, policies put into place during the crisis continue. Public taps are turned down to a trickle and signs abound in restaurants, hotels, and homes, reminding users of the premium of this resource.

Traveling in developing countries has made me much more aware of my personal water usage. I’m always delighted when I visit a country where it’s possible to drink the water from the tap, or at least use it to brush my teeth, but that’s rare. I hate buying bottled water, producing more plastic waste in countries already struggling with waste management. Upon returning home, for a few days, I find myself reaching for the bottle of water to rinse, as I’m so conditioned to reach for the water bottle to rinse after I brush my teeth.

Talking about water issues with my students, I surveyed them on whether they turn off the water while they brush their teeth. Most people said they did, a few would bashfully admit that they did not, and others probably said they did, not wanting to admit they didn’t. Then I would show them the stats: Water typically runs at 1.32 gallons per minute, so leaving the tap run for two minutes during tooth brushing would use the equivalent of five 2-liter bottles of soda. Turning off the water while brushing is an easy thing to do to save water.

Easy Things To Do We Might Not Have Considered

Similarly, I asked how many people bought bottled water. I’ve witnessed many-a-student with a single-use bottle sitting on their desktop visibly shrink at this question. Some would protest in self-defense that they refilled the bottle throughout the day, prompting other students to boldly point out that they could buy a reusable bottle to the same end. Over the years, however, the reusable bottles increasingly appeared on desks.

Setting aside the fact that single-use plastic bottles are the second only to cigarette butts as the biggest contributor to plastics polluting the ocean, short of outdated pipes (Flint, Michigan), contaminated freshwater supplies (coal mining areas), or a natural disaster, water directly from a tap in a developed country will invariably be cleaner than water out of a plastic bottle. The obvious pollutant is microplastic particles. The likelihood of additional contaminants is also higher. Since bottled water falls under the purview of the beverage industry, testing is less rigorous than for public water supplies. Overall, tap water is not only purer than bottled water, but also a lot less expensive.

Changes That Would Pay Off, but…

This quick questionnaire calculates water usage. I was delighted to see that our household water usage was considered low. In fact, the biggest hit we took was on dog food! At the same time, I was a bit bummed because there aren’t really any additional simple things I can do to conserve water. However, one thing I really should do that would make a difference is to install a rain barrel for summer watering.

For some people, shorter showers might be non-negotiable. For others, it’s the joy of washing the car in the driveway rather than taking it through the Wash-o-Mat. For me, it’s the rainwater barrel. It isn’t prohibitively expensive and literally refills itself. It should be an easy thing to do. I feel like I should do it. But the logistics of it persistently dog me, so I put it off. Maybe next season.

Even though it’s easy to feel like one person alone cannot make a sustainability difference, I noted in my last post that this is most definitely not the case. Instead, each of us can live more sustainability-friendly lives with minimum sacrifice or expense. Arguably, this ‘low-hanging fruit’ seems to fall into one of four categories—and making any of these changes helps to mitigate our collective impact on the planet.

1) Things we do out of habit without thinking about the impact. The first example that comes to mind is not just leaving lights on in an unoccupied room, but turning on lights unnecessarily. I realized I often walk into a room and turn on the light out of habit, especially when I’ve come from a brighter room. But if I wait a moment, at times I find I don’t actually need additional light.

I used to be terrible about leaving the refrigerator door open for stretches of time while I decided, just ‘grabbing’ something out of a container, or while putting away the groceries. Some time ago Ed Begley, Jr., an avid environmentalist, had a TV show, Living with Ed, that highlighted his family’s sustainability challenges and remedies. When I realized how bad I was about leaving the fridge door open, my spouse would joke that he could hear Ed crying all the way in California. Since then, I have made a conscious effort to sort out what I need before opening the door. When putting away groceries, I try to limit the number of times I open it and put a bunch of stuff in at one go. Not only is it better for the planet, but it saves money and helps keep the food better preserved.

2) Easy changes we haven’t even considered. Quite possibly, most people would be willing to make changes if the issues were on their radar. For instance, changing out incandescent bulbs for LED lights will save about $225 a year. I put thought into buying new light bulbs, but I’m willing to bet that many other homeowners in developed countries are like us and have a stash of extra light bulbs.

Some months ago, I almost fainted when I discovered a lamp in my office was (somehow!?!) still outfitted with an incandescent light bulb, because they’re really that bad. I couldn’t believe I missed the desk lamp, though rise in room temperature should have been a hint (far more useful in winter than summer…). I wondered how many other incandescent bulbs were still hanging around—sometimes quite literally—in ceiling light fixtures.

The U.S. Department of Energy determined that lighting accounts for 15% of electricity usage in the average home. Considering the $225 cost of lighting with incandescent bulbs, this statistic translates to a lot of unnecessarily burned energy. Even knowing how much better CFL and especially LED bulbs are, throwing away perfectly good incandescent bulbs was difficult for me. I found we still had any number of them in our drawer. They can’t be repurposed or recycled, so into the trash bag they went. The trade-off, however, of ditching the old bulbs is a win-win for the planet and the pocketbook.

3) Those things we know we should do but haven’t gotten around to doing or doing consistently. I often wonder how many people in check-out lines have reusable bags sitting in their car, waiting to be filled? I also wonder how many people have considered saying they don’t need a bag for the one or two items they’re buying.

I have been reusing shopping bags at the grocery store and Target-type stores for so long, I cannot remember a time that I didn’t use them. I do remember times when I didn’t have enough reusable bags for my order and accepted plastic bags, but those days are long gone. Around the same time, I realized that I didn’t need to accept bags at any store. It was a bit disconcerting at first, as check-out clerks would look at me like I had three heads when I said I didn’t need a bag for the clothes, shoes, house goods, etc. They’re often on autopilot and, even if I say I don’t need a bag, they’ll start to bag, so I politely remind them.

I’m less of an oddball these days, with more stores adopting ‘no bag’ policies. IKEA was one of the first stores in the U.S., in 2008, to discontinue offering single-use bags at check-out. For some time, big-box stores including Costco, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club haven’t provided free bags. The first major grocery to eliminate bags was Aldi, which decided not to offer bags in the U.S. after years of making them available, but charging a fee.

REI is one of the first places I have shopped that no longer offers bags, and have since seen signs in other stores that they have phased out single-use bags. Walmart has also moved in this direction, forgoing check-out bags in six U.S. states (the list, of which, is not surprising). Soon, this change should be easier for a lot of people to make, since the decision is being made for shoppers. As with the first two sustainability points I made, eliminating bags is good for the planet, and, though the savings likely won’t be passed directly on to the consumer (though some stores offer bag credits), it saves money by reducing competing demand for the resources used to make the bags.

4) Changes that might be possible. I realized I needed to add this one to my list after recording Cotton Reigns King but Hemp is Staging a Comeback because two points occurred to me. First, life and sustainability aren’t about all-or-nothing, so it was a good reminder for me to consider what changes I’m willing to make for the cause. And following on that, trade-offs matter because anyone can live a more sustainable life by trading out beef just one meal a week without having to give it up forever.

Second, this point reminded me of how I ultimately shifted to vegan diet. Instead of making a firm commitment to a change, test it out. The worst outcome is that it proves non-negotiable. Having grown up in a meat and potatoes household, after someone mentioned ‘going vegetarian’ to me, I decided to try it out. Starting January 1, 1991, I stopped eating everything except poultry, which I quit a few months later, followed several months later by seafood. It took another 18 years to make it to a fully plant-based diet. Like my resistance to give up crustaceans and shellfish, I loved cheese and thought this was a non-negotiable trade-off for me.

I gradually substituted non-animal-based dairy and egg products, which turned out to be a far easier transition than quitting meat while living in a small, fairly rural town in Pennsylvania. Once again ahead, however, I was ahead of the curve, as years passed before plant-based dairy and egg alternatives became ubiquitous. Nowadays, mainstream grocers carry a wide array of palatable vegan products. I’d challenge anyone to tell the difference between Follow Your Heart mayonnaise and Hellmann’s (the original variety, since it now makes a plant-based version).

I thought cheese would be my Achilles’ Heel. I read that cheese contains addictive properties, supported by study results out of the Mount Sinai medical school, triggering cravings for the casein that releases dopamine. The trick was to outlast the approximately two-week cycle of cravings, which worked. Artisan plant-based cheesemakers are popping up all over the U.S. and beyond. I have had exceptional camembert in France and a delectable cheese platter in London. I live in hope that someone, somewhere, will develop a plant-based Swiss cheese. (Having recently been to Switzerland and not finding any, I think that’s some time off…) With countless medical studies that verify diseases exacerbated by animal product consumption, a plant-based diet is better for the body and for anyone willing to learn to make a few staple foods, far less expensive. (Don’t believe Cosmo? How about Oxford University research?)

I’m willing to bet that reading this post induced an ‘aha’ moment, some point that sparked the realization of some change that might just be possible. The great thing about the changes I made is that they were not only better for me—my wallet and my health—but also better for the planet. Even the most vehement anti-environmentalist (which exists, according to The Internet) would be hard-pressed to argue these changes lack self-interested rewards. So even if someone doesn’t care about the sustainable end of rethinking habits, recognizing easy changes, making easy practices routine, or considering possibilities, the material benefits await.