Confessions of an Eco-Warrior

Successful inventing requires a tremendous amount of energy, time, and money. The big inventions are so rare that even the most brilliant geniuses think up only a few marketable inventions in their lifetimes. It may take thirty years to come up with an invention, but within a few years or months there can be a thousand innovations spawned from that

Fortunately, there was an alternative to pitons: aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out of cracks. British climbers had been using them on their crags, but because they were crude, they were little known and less trusted in the rest of Europe and the States.

Estimates vary, but even the low end of the spectrum suggests that a global switch to regenerative land husbandry would sequester our total annual emissions back underground.32 Which means we could reverse the trends of global warming simply by changing the way we farm and ranch.

What they all do share, as our organizational development consultant noted, is a passion for something outside themselves, whether for surfing or opera, climbing or gardening, skiing or community activism.

Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok. Once you design a monster, it tends to look like one too.

What we take, how and what we make, what we waste, is in fact a question of ethics. We have unlimited responsibility for the Total.

Recently a worldwide survey of customers found that only 14 percent of Americans were likely to contact a company about a problem. In Europe, the number was less than 8 percent, and in Japan only 4 percent. Correspondingly, other studies show that one-half to one-third of customers who have had problems will never purchase from that company again.

The ship’s carpenter on Shackleton’s lifeboat the James Caird took only three simple hand tools with him on the passage from Antarctica to South Georgia Island, knowing that, if he needed to, he could build another boat with only those tools. I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology w