In my little bubble, people are environmentally conscious. Your environmental mindset obviously depends on the people around you, and what measures your society and bureaucracy has set up to support you.As we are fast approaching certain tipping points in the global climate that will probably ruin our chances of getting through an apocalypse, no matter … Read more Should you care about climate change?
How to be an effective changemaker I see a changemaker as someone who shines with a light that ignites the dry tinder of our disillusioned spirits. But being a changemaker is difficult, taxing and a drain on the individual. Too many engaged activists burn out because of the resistance of the status quo or inattention … Read more To burn bright you need to be a fire.
It’s time for the next step in the evolution of our species. John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1930 entitled “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren“, in which he tried to explore what our economy could look like in a hundred years time. We are now 90 years after the first publication of this essay. … Read more Work less, live more
A brief history of environmentalism in Germany There are strict rules governing environmental protection in Germany. Natural areas are protected in different degrees of importance. For example, there are areas of international and national importance related to the value of the habitat, their value for (migrating) birds or just areas with a great landscape, which … Read more What environmental activism and fascism have in common
I previously talked about how to not get too depressed about climate change. But there are other responses in the face of the coming ecopocalypse. The climate emergency is not the first time in history that many people think the world will end soon. In 1954 a UFO cult around the Chigaco house wife Dorothy … Read more How to deal with impending climate disaster
Rule 1: Be critical I want to be happy and hopeful. That’s why I stopped looking at the “news”, basically don’t use social media (no facebook, no twitter, 15 minutes of youtube and instagram max.) and try and read good news. But when you are critical, you dig and you uncover things. And often, they … Read more How to try and not get climate change depression
Manuela Höfner is a decluttering coach. The many facets of her story are utterly fascinating. She started out as a tax advisor. After happily helping people with their tax for 25 years she noticed that those who had their documentation in order were MUCH happier than those with lots of bits of paper stuffed in … Read more Decluttering: Peace with your stuff
“Quality … you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. Some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes Poof! – Robert Pirsig, Zen and … Read more Beauty and value in the modern age
In the context of the lifetimes of trees or even the planet, human lives are very short. Even doubling our life expectancy in the last 100 years (world average 1900: 31y, 2014: 71.5y) has done little to change the role that the limitation of our time on this earth plays in our lives. Most of … Read more Designing with Time
I visited the German bee museum in Weimar last week. It was founded in 1910 by Ferdinand Gerstung. Gerstung was a big deal in the early twentieth century beekeeping world and introduced the concept of “the bien”. The “Bien” considered the whole hive-super-organism instead of focusing on the individual bees. While bees are totally amazing and I … Read more 5 lessons I learned from beehives