A few years back I interviewed an architect for my podcast. He spent an hour on something that should be obvious and somehow isn’t anymore, a building can heat and cool itself just by facing the right way.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
We build homes that ignore where the sun rises, block the wind, and wrap them in glass that lets the sun in all day with no way to let the heat back out. Then we spend fifty years paying to undo it. Air conditioning in summer and heating in winter have both become so normal we forgot they’re solving a problem the building created for itself.
That energy has to come from somewhere, coal, gas, nuclear. Nuclear seemed like the cleanest way to produce electricity until the heat started warming the rivers it depends on. In France, several plants had to cut output during heatwaves this year because the river water was too warm to cool the reactors properly. Grids buckle under demand spikes exactly when everyone switches their AC on at once. The machine we built to save us from bad design turns out to have its own limits too, and those limits are only going to show up more often as summers get worse.
None of this is abstract for the people paying for it. In Albi, a 36 year old named Pauline Paredes describes her own apartment as a kettle after weeks of 40 degree heat, and says flatly she has to be out of it before next summer. She’s one of hundreds of people a French outlet interviewed this year alone about heat pushing them out of the places they live.
A geographer in Lyon estimates around 100000 people already leave French cities every year for the outskirts and the countryside because of it, and expects that number to double as the heatwaves keep stacking up.
Winter runs the same script in reverse. More than five million French households live in fuel poverty, a third of the country couldn’t properly heat their home this past winter, and three out of four households are now rationing their heating just to keep the bill within reach. None of that is a footnote to a design conversation. It’s what happens when a building depends entirely on a machine, and the machine gets too expensive to run or the grid buckles at the exact moment everyone needs it most.
Passive solar design isn’t futuristic. It’s ancient. For most of human history people built with the climate instead of against it, thick walls, shaded courtyards, windows placed on purpose, trees that dropped their leaves right when you needed the sun back. None of that was decoration.
We gave that up the moment cheap energy got easier than good design.
The shift has a start date. In 1952 the United Nations Secretariat went up in Manhattan as the first tower wrapped entirely in glass and cooled entirely by machine, followed a few years later by Lever House a few blocks down. Neither building was designed around the sun. Both were designed to look like the future, and cheap postwar energy is the only reason either one got away with it. Every glass tower built since has copied that template. Offices cooled that way now run about 60% higher in carbon emissions than ones that use natural or mechanical ventilation properly. We didn’t inherit bad buildings. We inherited a look, and we’re still paying the electric bill for it.
Every architect knows where the sun rises and sets. Yet, somehow most buildings are still designed like it doesn’t matter. In the northern hemisphere, your longest wall generally wants to face south. That one decision decides how much free heat you get in winter and how easily you can block it in summer, before a single brick goes down.
In winter the sun sits low. It travels under the roof overhang and warms the floor and the walls, which quietly hold onto that heat all day. Six months later the same window behaves completely differently. The summer sun sits high, the same overhang blocks it, the room stays bright without turning into an oven. Nothing moved. Nothing plugged in. The only technology was geometry.
Get the geometry wrong and inefficient turns into dangerous. London’s 20 Fenchurch Street tower, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie, curves its south face inward like a satellite dish. In 2013 that curve did exactly what a concave mirror does, it focused the sun into a single point on the street below. The hot spot passed 90 degrees Celsius. It melted panels on a parked Jaguar, warped a bike saddle, and set a doormat on fire outside a barbershop. The developers ended up bolting a permanent sunshade onto the building afterward, aluminum fins running from the third floor to the thirty fourth, a fix that cost millions of pounds because nobody modeled where the sun would actually land before they built it.
Cooling didn’t start with a compressor. It started with a window across from another window. Cross ventilation works on one idea, put openings on opposite sides of a space so air has somewhere to go. Wind comes in one side, pushes the stale heat out the other, and the building breathes on its own.
Older buildings understood this without needing to be told. Doors lined up with courtyards. Vents sat high to let hot air escape. Floor plans stayed narrow so every room caught moving air. A lot of modern apartments do the opposite, one glass wall and nowhere for heat to go. So we swap airflow for machinery and act surprised when cities burn through electricity every summer.
Thermal mass sounds technical. It’s actually closer to cooking. A cast iron pan stays hot long after it leaves the stove because it holds heat. Stone, brick, and concrete do the same job inside a building, soaking up warmth slowly, holding onto it for hours, letting it go once the temperature drops.
That’s why old stone houses stay cool through a scorching afternoon. The walls delay the heat instead of handing it straight to the room, then let it go outward once night air drops below the temperature of the stone, which is also why throwing every window open after dark was never superstition, just the last step of the same system.
A light building reacts to the weather. A heavy one negotiates with it. The difference is a few degrees you never had to pay for.
Somewhere along the way we split architecture from the landscape around it. That was the mistake. A mature deciduous tree, the kind that drops its leaves every winter, is one of the oldest climate technologies we have. In summer its leaves catch the sun before it reaches your roof. In winter those same leaves drop and let the light back in, right when you need it.
Compare that to a parking lot, which soaks up heat all day and radiates it back into the block long after dark. Trees do the opposite, they cool the air around them while they’re at it. During a heatwave, tree canopy runs eight to twelve degrees Celsius cooler than bare pavement, and a shaded sidewalk can feel up to 14 degrees cooler than one with nothing overhead. We keep shopping for smarter cooling systems while we cut down the oldest and most efficient ones.
None of this needs a backyard. A fifteen story block can face the right way and breathe on two sides just as easily as a bungalow, because the physics doesn’t care how many units are stacked on it. Sprawl is the real opposite of passive design, not density. Sprawl is what happens when a city spreads instead of stacks, and it only survives on a car in the driveway and a compressor on the wall.
People ask if insulation is the most important feature of an efficient building. Insulation matters, but it comes after the fundamentals. A well designed passive building stacks orientation, shading, ventilation, thermal mass, and insulation into one system where each part is quietly doing the others’ job too. Orientation catches the winter light. Overhangs block the summer sun. Trees add seasonal shade. Windows catch the wind. Walls bank the day’s heat. Insulation keeps all of it from leaking back out. None of this is new. It’s just been sitting there unused for about a century.
Climate change keeps exposing how badly we build. Our answer is always the same, a bigger unit, a stronger system, more electricity. We rarely ask if the building was ever designed with any of this in mind to begin with. Passive design offers something else, comfort you get from understanding a place instead of comfort you buy every month. Latitude, wind, trees, sunlight, seasons.
A building shouldn’t have to fight the place it’s standing in every single day, and for most of human history none of them did. Architecture was an extension of the land before it became a product line.
Pauline Paredes shouldn’t have to leave Albi to stop living in a kettle. The five million households rationing their own heat this winter shouldn’t have to choose between warmth and food. None of that is the weather’s fault alone. It’s the bill for a hundred years of buildings that were never asked to do their share of the work.
The most sustainable energy was never going to be the one we invent next. It was always the one we stopped needing the day we designed the building right the first time. We just built our way out of remembering that, one glass tower at a time.
People ask me why I’m vegan more than almost any other question.
They expect a simple answer, one reason. The animals. The climate. Health.
The truth is less convenient.
A documentary started it. I watched Cowspiracy expecting to feel informed for an evening and come out the other side unchanged. That’s not what happened. Something in me actually shifted, and it didn’t shift back. It’s not a perfect film, a few of its numbers got oversimplified to the point of losing context, but the core of what it lays out is factual and well researched, and it did enough to make me curious.
It was the door. I went down the rabbit hole, and every subject I cared enough to study kept leading me to the same place. Climate change, ocean conservation, water scarcity, public health, colonial exploitation, every one of them led there.
The more I learned, the harder it became to justify participating in an industry that sits at the center of so many crises at once.
Sentience isn’t a seasoning
Everything else comes second.
A cow doesn’t want to be slaughtered. A pig fights for its life. Chickens recognize dozens of individuals and form complex social hierarchies. Octopuses solve puzzles. Fish remember routes, cooperate, and avoid painful experiences. The scientific debate is no longer whether many animals are sentient. It’s how rich their inner lives actually are.
An estimated 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for food. That number doesn’t include fish, whose deaths are measured in the trillions because they’re counted by weight rather than as individuals.
Modern language hides this. We say beef instead of cow, pork instead of pig, seafood instead of animals. We call slaughterhouses processing plants and carcasses products. The vocabulary exists to make violence feel industrial instead of personal.
If another being can suffer, the burden of proof should never sit on compassion. It should sit on exploitation.
The net effect
The ocean made me rethink everything.
I dive, and most of the people I dived with aren’t vegan. Ask them and they’ll tell you they love the ocean, and I don’t doubt they mean it. But loving an ecosystem while still funding the industries gutting it is a contradiction worth sitting with, not a small one, and it’s one very few divers ever examine.
We often imagine plastic bottles floating on the surface as the defining image of marine pollution. They matter, but they’re not the whole story. A large share of the plastic mass in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, by most estimates close to half, is abandoned or discarded fishing gear. Nets keep killing animals for years after being lost, a phenomenon known as ghost fishing.
Then there’s bottom trawling.
Imagine dragging a weighted net across an ancient forest, flattening everything in its path, then throwing most of the wildlife back dead because it has no commercial value. That’s essentially what industrial trawling does to the seabed. Coral gardens, sponges, and countless species disappear beneath steel chains because efficiency demands it.
Every year, an estimated hundreds of thousands of dolphins, turtles, sharks, and seabirds die as bycatch. They were never the target. They’re collateral damage.
The ocean isn’t being emptied because billions of ordinary people fish with small boats. It’s being emptied because industrial fleets have turned living ecosystems into extraction zones.
Catch of the day
Fishing is also a story about power.
Countries with enormous industrial fleets don’t limit themselves to their own waters. They travel thousands of kilometers into the waters of poorer nations through unequal agreements, weak enforcement or outright illegal fishing.
In Senegal, fish has long been the foundation of both culture and nutrition. Yet many local fishers return with smaller catches than previous generations because industrial vessels remove fish on an entirely different scale. The result isn’t simply environmental decline. It’s food insecurity, unemployment, and ultimately migration.
When communities that have fished sustainably for centuries start struggling to feed themselves while foreign ships export their catch across continents, it’s hard to call that free trade. It looks much closer to colonial extraction wearing a modern suit.
The ocean belongs to no empire.
Empire and industry run on the same logic. Whoever holds power decides which lives count as resources and which don’t. That logic doesn’t start with the ocean. It starts with the animal on the plate, the first life reduced to a commodity, the template every later extraction gets copied from. Stop treating animals as property and the whole chain of domination loses the argument it was built on.
But soy
People still blame vegans for soy.
It’s one of the most successful and ridiculous myths ever created.
Every estimate lands well north of three quarters of the world’s soy grown to feed livestock, not people eating tofu or soy milk.
Chickens, pigs, and cattle consume astonishing quantities of crops before becoming meat. We don’t destroy forests because humans suddenly developed a love for edamame. We destroy them because billions of farmed animals need feeding.
The Amazon illustrates this perfectly.
Cattle ranching remains the largest driver of deforestation there. Forests are cleared for pasture, while surrounding land increasingly becomes monoculture growing feed for animals. Fire is often the cheapest way to erase thousands of years of biodiversity in a matter of hours.
The images are almost unbearable. Trees burning. Birds unable to escape. Mammals trapped by flames moving faster than they can run. Entire ecosystems reduced to ash so empty grass can replace living forest.
We call it development.
I call it extinction.
Green algae
People often argue over percentages. Was livestock responsible for 14 percent of emissions or 18 percent?
Here’s what the argument over the exact number misses. Whichever figure turns out to be more accurate, both put livestock among the two largest contributors to global emissions, alongside fossil fuels. Fighting over four percentage points doesn’t change which industries need to shrink.
Food systems account for roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock is one of the largest pieces of that share through methane, deforestation, feed production and land use. Methane matters especially because it traps heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide in the short term.
The damage doesn’t stop at the atmosphere. It ends up in the water too.
Industrial farms produce mountains of manure. When nitrogen and phosphorus run into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, algae multiply out of control. As they decompose, oxygen disappears and aquatic life suffocates.
Few places show this as clearly as Brittany, in France. Every summer, vast blooms of green algae cover its beaches. As the algae rot, they release hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas that has been linked to the deaths of wild animals and, in a small number of documented cases, humans. This isn’t a natural disaster. It’s the predictable consequence of decades of intensive livestock farming and fertilizer runoff.
And the warming comes back around to the animals themselves. During recent heatwaves across Europe, thousands of farm animals died trapped inside industrial sheds and trucks before reaching slaughter. They survived neither nature nor the system built to profit from them.
The victims of climate change increasingly include those forced to produce it.
The side effects
I didn’t become vegan for my health.
It became an unexpected consequence.
The strongest scientific evidence is remarkably consistent. Diets centered on legumes, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds are associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. Consumption of processed meat increases the risk of several cancers.
That doesn’t mean every vegan is healthy. French fries are vegan. Some donuts are vegan. Ethics and nutrition are different conversations.
The point isn’t that plants are magic. It’s that our healthiest dietary patterns consistently lean more on them and less on animals.
The next pandemic has a farm address
Humanity keeps building the perfect laboratory for new diseases.
When thousands of genetically similar animals are confined together, viruses evolve more easily. The closer the contact between stressed animals and humans, the greater the chance for pathogens to jump species.
Many of history’s most significant infectious diseases are zoonotic. They originated through animal to human transmission, even if each followed a different path.
Alongside this sits a quieter crisis. Antibiotics are routinely used in livestock around the world, not only to treat disease but often to prevent it in intensive systems. This accelerates antimicrobial resistance, letting bacteria evolve past medicines that once saved millions of lives.
We talk about the next pandemic as if it will arrive from nowhere. Often, we’re building it ourselves.
Burning calories to make calories
Perhaps the strangest part of all this is how inefficient it is.
We grow enormous quantities of edible crops, feed them to animals, lose most of the calories and protein during that biological conversion, then wonder why feeding humanity keeps getting harder.
Animal protein is one of the least efficient ways to produce food from land, water and crops. Producing protein directly from plants generally takes dramatically fewer resources while leaving more room for forests, wildlife and carbon storage.
Hunger has never been purely an agricultural problem. It’s always been a political one.
Life, itemized
The deeper I looked, the more one pattern kept repeating.
A forest became timber.
An ocean became a resource.
A river became a waste channel.
A cow became a machine for milk.
A chicken became a production unit.
A fish became tonnage.
Capitalism has an extraordinary ability to rename living beings until they sound like inventory. Once something becomes a commodity, its suffering disappears behind spreadsheets, shipping containers and quarterly profits. Dead bodies cross continents refrigerated inside trucks and cargo ships while consumers rarely think about the individual lives those numbers once represented.
The system depends on distance.
Distance between the slaughterhouse and the supermarket.
Distance between the fishing fleet and the village it impoverishes.
Distance between the burning forest and the burger.
Distance makes almost anything feel normal.
All roads lead to veganism
People still ask why I’m vegan.
I could say it’s for the animals, and that would be true.
I could say it’s for the climate, and that would also be true.
I could say it’s for cleaner rivers, living oceans, public health, or the communities losing their fisheries to industrial extraction. Every answer would be incomplete on its own.
Because veganism was never one road.
It was the destination where all the roads met.
The more I learned about suffering, the more impossible it became to justify taking part in it when another choice existed.
The greatest tragedy of global warming is not that the planet is getting hotter.
It’s that humanity is slowly abandoning the outdoors.
We’re sleepwalking into an indoor civilization where the sun becomes something we look at through glass, fresh air is replaced by recycled air, and daily life happens inside sealed boxes connected by roads built for machines instead of people.
We call this adaptation.
I call it surrender.
For most of human history, we survived heat and cold without turning the atmosphere into an appliance. Homes had thick walls and were oriented for natural cooling and heating. Streets were narrow and shaded. Courtyards created airflow. Trees cooled entire neighborhoods.
In the Sonoran desert, on the Arabian peninsula, across the Arctic circle, people lived for thousands of years in the harshest climates on earth, not by avoiding them but by designing for them. Architecture responded to climate because it had to.
Then something changed. Construction stopped answering to climate and started answering to speed and margin. Cheap materials, fast timelines, glass towers that look identical from Dubai to Shanghai to New York City.
This happens under different economic systems in different ways, but under capitalism specifically, the incentive is sharpest and the scale is biggest. We paved cities with concrete, cut down trees, covered skylines with heat trapping glass, and filled streets with cars that turn neighborhoods into furnaces.
Instead of questioning the design, we invented a product to survive it. Every summer gets hotter. Every building gets another compressor. Every apartment becomes another sealed container.
The machine that promises relief quietly becomes part of the world that made relief necessary.
That machine is air conditioning, and naming it here isn’t a knock against it. In 1936, before home AC existed anywhere in the US, a heat wave killed close to five thousand people across the country, most of them in homes with no insulation, no shade, no relief.
That death toll wasn’t inevitable and it wasn’t just bad luck. It happened in the middle of the Dust Bowl, and the Dust Bowl was manufactured. Farmers had stripped the deep rooted native prairie grass, the kind that held moisture and cooled the ground through the plants themselves, and replaced it with shallow rooted wheat grown for profit.
When the drought came, there was nothing left to hold the land together and nothing left to cool it. Indigenous communities had farmed those same plains for centuries without triggering that collapse. The 1936 death toll wasn’t proof that hot places are hostile to humans. It was proof of what happens when land and housing get built for yield instead of for the climate they sit in.
AC didn’t create that problem. It arrived as a patch for a problem that profit driven land use and profit driven construction had manufactured, and it’s remained a patch ever since, papering over bad design instead of fixing it.
That’s the honest version of the argument. Not that AC invented the crisis, but that we reached for the machine instead of reaching for the wall thickness, the window placement, the shade, the airflow that would have made the machine unnecessary in the first place.
Spend time in many hot, humid cities today and you notice something unsettling. The day disappears. Life retreats to dawn and returns after sunset.
Office workers leave an air conditioned apartment, enter an elevator, board an air conditioned train, spend nine hours in an air conditioned office or mall, and return home after dark. Entire days pass without sunlight touching their skin.
Not because they hate nature. Because the city has made nature hostile.
Outside is heat that exhausts you within minutes. Humidity that clings to your lungs. Mosquitoes thriving in a warming climate, carrying diseases that turn an open window into a calculation of risk. Pollution hanging over traffic. The safest option becomes staying inside.
Home stops being shelter. It becomes life support.
The cost is much larger than vitamin D deficiency, though that’s where it starts. Less sun on skin means less vitamin D produced, and vitamin D deficiency is tied to low energy, low mood, and a weaker immune system, which is why people who spend their days sealed away from sunlight tend to get sick more often, not less.
Our bodies evolved with morning light, changing temperatures, wind on our skin, fresh moving air. Circadian rhythms sync to dawn, not to LED panels, and when that sync breaks down, sleep breaks down with it, and disrupted sleep drags hormonal cycles, mood, and energy down with it.
Recycled indoor air adds another layer on top. Research on indoor air quality has linked poor ventilation and recirculated air to worse asthma symptoms and higher rates of respiratory illness, especially in buildings that trade fresh air exchange for sealed, climate controlled comfort.
Even our eyeballs are stretching out of shape. Children who spend most of their days indoors under artificial light are developing myopia at rates that have doubled in some countries in a generation, while the ones who spend two hours a day outdoors are far less likely to need glasses at all.
There’s a crueler twist hiding underneath all of it. Studies comparing people who live in constantly air conditioned spaces to people who live with natural ventilation find that the AC group’s bodies lose the ability to handle heat at all, weaker sweat response, less tolerance, more discomfort at the same temperature a naturally ventilated body handles with ease.
The machine doesn’t just fail to fix our relationship with heat, it erodes our own built in defenses against it, so we need the machine more, not less, the longer we rely on it.
And a life spent moving between sealed rooms is a life spent sitting down. Outdoor space invites movement in a way four walls never will, and the sedentary indoor hours we’ve traded for it are independently linked to weight gain and rising obesity, on top of anything diet explains.
Sleep, mood, hormonal cycles, the air in our lungs, the shape of our eyeballs, our own tolerance for the climate we live in, our own bodies at rest, all bent out of shape by a relationship with the natural world that modern urban life steadily erases.
We’ve normalized breathing recycled air more often than fresh air. That should horrify us.
The cruelest part is the loop that follows. The hotter cities become, the more air conditioners we install. The more compressors run, the more waste heat gets dumped straight back into the streets.
Research on Phoenix Arizona has found that AC waste heat alone pushes nighttime outdoor temperatures up by more than one degree Celsius, right when the heat should be breaking. Elsewhere, modeling done on a city like Paris found that if every building ran AC to hold a comfortable indoor temperature, the waste heat could raise the temperature by up to three and a half degrees Celsius.
The same mechanism behind the Dust Bowl I mentioned earlier is still running quietly in American suburbs today. Grass and trees cool the air through evapotranspiration, water moving up through roots and out through leaves. Strip that away for pavement and clean-cut lawns and you lose all the moisture. The ground stops cooling itself the way it used to, so the heat just builds and kills the remaining grass.
Singapore has more air conditioners per capita than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, and it has also spent years planting rooftop gardens, vertical greenery, and tree canopy to bring outdoor temperatures down.
The greenery helps, but the heat from all those compressors doesn’t disappear just because there are more trees to stand under. As long as the AC stays, the waste heat stays with it. Greening a city while leaving mechanical cooling untouched isn’t the answer, it’s proof that the answer has to include using less of the machine, not just planting around it.
This is capitalism distilled into a single object.
Create the crisis. Sell the adaptation. Repeat.
The future should not be millions of homes humming behind permanently closed windows.
It should be cities dense with trees instead of parking lots. Buildings designed for cross ventilation, thermal mass, and passive solar heating and cooling instead of sealed glass that needs a machine to survive its own design. Public spaces that invite people outdoors instead of shopping malls that replace them. Fewer cars. Less concrete. More shade. More wind. More life.
We don’t need to get better at hiding from the climate. We need to build a world where hiding is no longer necessary, and stop mistaking climate control for control over the climate.
Global warming is not only melting glaciers. It’s melting the very idea of outside. If we accept air conditioned isolation as the endpoint of civilization, we’ve accepted far more than a hotter planet.
We’ve accepted the disappearance of human life beneath the open sky.
The tourist didn’t design the system that made travel a substitute for a life worth living.
A new form of environmental propaganda has quietly become mainstream.
Every week, another headline appears telling ordinary people they are responsible for climate change, then hands down the same list of penances. Drive less. Fly less. Stop buying this. Stop enjoying that. Recently, Le Monde highlighted that tourism accounts for around 9% of global CO2 emissions.
The number itself bothers me. It’s huge, and mass tourism is something I have no patience for.
The framing bothered me even more.
Once again, the spotlight was placed on ordinary people instead of the system that shapes almost every decision they make.
It’s becoming increasingly common to hear the same message.
You’re responsible.
You’re the polluter.
You’re destroying the planet.
Study. Work. Pay your bills. Repeat. But if you finally manage to save enough money for a vacation, you’re suddenly made to feel guilty for that too.
That is not environmentalism.
That is misdirection.
Anyone who reads my essays knows I take my environmental footprint seriously. The choices behind that, the minimalism, going vegan, the way I get around, weren’t picked up to look good or fit in. They came out of years of reflection.
I’ve been a minimalist for nearly a decade because endless consumption makes neither people nor the planet happier.
I’m vegan because I care about animals. I also recognize the immense environmental cost of industrial animal agriculture, from habitat destruction to food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
I buy second hand exclusively and repair things before replacing them. I don’t buy new clothes. I’d rather walk or take public transportation than drive, and I’d rather borrow or share something than own it outright, because half the stuff we buy individually just sits there waiting to be used once a year. I’ve taken a nine hour bus instead of a forty five minute flight to the same destination, more than once, because the extra hours felt like a small price for the difference in footprint. I believe we should leave this world better than we found it.
None of that makes me exceptional. It just means I got lucky, or stubborn, enough to question habits most people never get the chance to question, because those habits get taught before we’re old enough to notice them.
Unlike wild animals, humans cannot realistically leave no trace at all. We build, consume, and transform our surroundings. But we can choose to leave as little trace as possible.
That responsibility matters.
What I reject is the idea that environmental collapse is primarily the consequence of millions of individuals making bad personal choices, as if those choices appeared out of nowhere.
They didn’t.
We’re born into a world that treats consumption as the default. Questioning it comes later, if at all, because most people spend their lives just trying to survive rent, survive the cost of food and shelter. Then, once that survival eases up even a little, we try to make up for lost time. We overconsume to compensate for what we never had, the same way anyone leaving poverty tends to, emulating the people who always had the means. “Treat yourself. You earned it. You worked hard for it.”
Individualism finishes the job from there. Look after your own happiness first, leave everyone else’s problems to someone else. That isn’t a flaw people are born with. It’s a job someone trained us for.
So yes, individuals are responsible for what they do. But the system is responsible for how most individuals were shaped to behave in the first place, and pretending otherwise lets the actual architects of the mess off the hook.
The system was built so individuals would fit inside it, and it worked well enough that the individual is now a piece of the machine that keeps breaking us. That’s what makes escape so hard. It isn’t one bad law or one greedy company standing in the way. It’s advertising, employers, housing, food systems, culture, and habit all pulling the same direction at once, thousands of small parts that don’t need to coordinate because they all reward the same behavior. No amount of individual willpower gets the masses out of a system built from that many interlocking pieces. You can opt out personally. The system barely notices.
Now, does tourism have environmental impacts?
Absolutely.
Mass tourism damages ecosystems. It strains local infrastructure. It raises housing prices. It pollutes coastlines. It turns historic neighborhoods into amusement parks. Entire cities are transformed into products designed for visitors instead of homes for residents.
These are real problems.
But they’re not caused by tourists wanting to see the world. They’re caused by an industry that’s turned that desire into something to sell as much of as possible, to as many people as possible, regardless of what the planet or the destination can absorb.
That distinction matters.
And here’s the part that should actually worry us. Right now, only a small share of the world’s population can afford to travel the way tourism gets discussed in Le Monde or anywhere else. If everyone on earth consumed the way the average French person does, we’d need close to three planets to sustain it. Live like the average American and the number climbs higher still.
The uncomfortable truth is that the planet is only holding together because most of humanity is still too poor to consume like the wealthy world does. As more of that population gets richer, and some of it will, that 9% doesn’t stay at 9%. It grows, the same way every other consumption metric grows when purchasing power spreads. We’re not looking at a stable number. We’re looking at a preview.
I also have for a long time questioned whether much of what we call tourism today is even about travel anymore. My work attests to that.
For many people, traveling is just another form of consumption.
They fly somewhere, stay in the same spots, eat at the same chain restaurants, shop in the same luxury stores, and return home with thousands of photos that exist mainly to prove they were there.
The destination changes.
The lifestyle doesn’t.
Social media has accelerated this transformation. Many destinations are no longer visited because they offer something meaningful. They’re visited because their images perform well online.
Travel becomes content.
Experiences become status symbols.
Places become backdrops.
This isn’t the industry malfunctioning. It’s the industry working exactly as designed. Travel companies exist to grow. Growth means selling more trips to more people more often, and the easiest way to do that is to sell travel as a reward, a treat, a thing you’ve earned and deserve, the same script used to sell everything else. Advertise the escape, not the destination. Call it self care. Call it living your best life. The vacation guilt the headlines produce and the vacation obsession the industry produces come from the same machine. One hand points the finger, the other hand keeps the conveyor belt running.
I think it reflects something much deeper than the shallowness of the masses.
Many people feel disconnected from their work, their communities, and even themselves. Life often revolves around earning enough money to repeat the same routine next week. Under these conditions, vacations become less about discovery and more about escape.
People aren’t always searching for another country.
They’re searching for relief.
Give people meaningful work. Give them stronger communities. Give them time with family. Give them parks, culture, nature, and purpose close to home.
Many would feel far less pressure to chase an escape valve on the other side of the planet every summer.
There will always be genuine explorers.
Some people are naturally driven to understand different cultures, ecosystems, languages, and ways of living. They travel to learn, to question their assumptions, and to return home with ideas worth sharing.
I’d guess that’s a minority. Watch how travel actually gets consumed, the itineraries, the photo spots, the same five restaurants recommended to everyone, and it’s hard to conclude that curiosity is the main thing driving most of it.
Historically, travel served the purpose of learning through exploration rather than consumption. People left home to study, exchange knowledge, observe other societies, and bring back innovations that improved their own communities.
Travel wasn’t simply about extracting something from a place.
It was about growing through them.
Today, too much tourism encourages the opposite. It treats landscapes the way it treats products, something to use up and move on from. It’s also flattening a diverse world into sameness.
That isn’t a failure of human nature.
It’s a predictable outcome of an economic system that turns everything into something to be bought and sold.
So yes, I oppose mass tourism. I absolutely do.
I oppose cruise ships that poison the oceans they sail through before dumping their waste in port cities and leaving.
I oppose short weekend flights taken simply because they’re cheap.
I oppose cities being redesigned for visitors while residents are priced out.
I oppose zoos and circuses that trade animal suffering for entertainment.
I oppose beachfront developments that sell the view and never mention what it cost to build.
I even oppose ecotourism, most of the time it’s just greenwashed tourism for the rich, another way to price out ordinary people while the outcome stays the same.
None of that makes the tourist the offender. An industry built to sell escape, and paid handsomely for doing it, is the one that turned a personal desire into an ecological liability.
The system is the culprit.
The environmental crisis will not be solved by making people feel guilty for taking a vacation. Most don’t even care.
It starts with education, teaching people to question the conditioning instead of just living inside it.
From there, it will be solved by degrowth. Not for the nation building its first hospitals or its first clean water system, that’s need. Degrowth is for the societies that already have what they need and keep manufacturing new needs anyway, the Emirates building another amusement park in the desert, Nevada building another casino with a golf course attached. One is need. The other is appetite dressed up as progress.
We already own enough clothes to dress the world for generations. The pile sitting in circulation right now would outlast most of us several times over, yet the fashion industry keeps manufacturing seasonal trends to convince us otherwise. That’s the target. That’s where degrowth should appear.
Less consumerism. Less unnecessary work. Eating plant based, living with less, minimalism as a norm rather than a lifestyle choice for the few. More shared economy and less of the individualism that trains us to treat our own comfort as the only thing worth protecting.
Degrowth looks like communities that function without a car and a credit card for every errand, hobbies that give something back instead of costing something, planting trees and cleaning rivers instead of shopping malls and card tables in casinos.
It looks like people who no longer need two weeks a year on the other side of the planet to remember they’re alive, because the other fifty weeks stopped feeling like a sentence.
Until we are willing to confront that reality, the headlines will keep telling you to fly less while the industry keeps telling you to fly more, and both of them profit from you never noticing it’s the same voice. Guilt won’t shrink a system built to keep expanding. Only pulling its foundations out will.
That’s the trip actually worth taking. And unlike the one on the brochure, nobody’s selling it to you.
On the plants, poisons and people who turn the jungle into a pharmacy, a grocery store and a home
I didn’t realize how little I knew about the forest until our guide started pointing things out.
Our trek through Taman Negara, near Kuala Tahan, covered around 8 kilometers. We started at 10 in the morning and got back around 5pm, with a break at Teras Waterfall before the boat ride back to town.
The trail demanded attention from beginning to end. Mud, wet rocks, exposed roots and shallow streams meant every step had to be placed carefully, and in several spots ropes were fixed to the hillside to help hikers climb or descend slippery slopes. Waterproof hiking shoes with good grip aren’t optional here. They’re the difference between enjoying the trek and spending the day sliding through the mud, if not something worse.
But the distance and the terrain weren’t what made the hike memorable. It was realizing that most ordinary-looking plants are much more than they let on. By the end of the day, I wasn’t seeing trees and bushes anymore. I was seeing functions.
Our guide walked us through plant after plant, and one stuck with me more than the rest. It was used to treat snake bites. When cut open, it’s applied directly to the wound. According to the guide, the inside of the plant would turn yellow as it absorbed the venom, and fresh pieces were applied until the inside stayed white, which is believed to mean no venom is left. Whether or not modern medicine backs that up, it’s a testament to thousands of years of people experimenting with what grows around them.
Other plants did other jobs. One relieved asthma. Another became shampoo, soap and mosquito repellent all at once. I didn’t catch its name, but all it took was rubbing a few leaves together with water before a rich, citrus-scented foam appeared in the guide’s hands. It smelled better than most commercial soaps I’ve used.
The forest also supplies drinking water. Those thick vines made famous by Tarzan actually hold water inside them, and so does bamboo. In a place where rivers aren’t always close, knowing which plants can quench your thirst can matter more than you’d think.
One of my favorite discoveries was the stingless bees. They build their nests inside hollow tree trunks, with only a narrow wax entrance reaching outside. The honey stays protected deep in the wood, out of reach of most predators. Seeing a colony hidden inside a living tree was something I’d never come across before.
There were still plenty of reminders that we were sharing the forest with wild animals. At several points, the guide stopped because he could smell them before seeing them. The scent, he said, likely came from monkeys or maybe elephants that had recently passed through. We also found deep claw marks running up the side of a tree, almost certainly left by a sun bear climbing toward a hollow trunk where bees had built their nest. As if that wasn’t enough, he showed us a recent photo of a local man who had survived a panther attack, a humbling reminder that this rainforest still belongs to its wildlife as much as its visitors.
After hours of humidity and sweat, reaching Teras Waterfall felt like a reward. The cold water washed away the heat before we made our way back to the river and boarded the boat home.
The boat dropped us off for the last stop of the day, and we walked up a slippery, muddy slope to reach the Batek camp. Right at the entrance sat a pile of freshly cut bamboo, maybe for a new hut. The camp itself had several huts, built entirely from bamboo with roofs made from local palm leaves, arranged around a central fire pit. One small hut off to the side served as the “shop” where they sell crafts to visitors. Off by one of the huts, a group of unmarried men sat together, just talking among themselves, in no hurry to be anywhere.
The Batek are one of the Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia and have lived in these forests for thousands of years. Physically, they reminded me of Papuan people, though generally taller. Their entire population today is only around 2000 people.
The camp felt almost entirely integrated into the forest. The only domestic animals I noticed were three chickens running around near the huts, apparently kept for special occasions rather than everyday meals, a small sign of how much even their world has started trading with ours.
One man showed us how they start a fire using nothing but what the forest provides. He worked in near silence, and it was over in maybe 20 seconds. The second he finished, he just sat back, calm, like he’d done it ten thousand times before, which he probably had.
Then came the blowpipes, and this is where hunting in the forest really came alive for me. The Batek still use these to hunt monkeys, squirrels and birds high in the canopy, and I was surprised by how sophisticated the weapon actually is. It’s made from bamboo, while the darts are carved from what they call water palm trees. Behind each dart sits a small piece of plant fiber that seals the tube, so the hunter’s breath pushes the dart forward with real force. At the mouthpiece is a black bulb that creates an airtight seal and makes the shot more efficient. The man demonstrating it was quiet, maybe shy, maybe just naturally calm. At one point he said something to me directly, but I didn’t catch it. Even Bahasa isn’t really their first language, let alone English.
I got to try it myself. Standing about 15 meters from the target, I took a deep breath and blew as hard as I could. The dart landed dead center, which I wasn’t expecting at all.
The darts get even more interesting once you learn how they’re prepared. Their tips are coated with poison collected from a tree. The bark is cut until a white sap starts to bleed out, then the dart is coated with the latex and left to dry. Rather than killing instantly, the poison weakens the animal over the next 15 minutes or so, and hunters simply follow their prey until it collapses.
Back at the village, the hunter presents the animal to the village leader, who carves another ring into the weapon. Over time, the blowpipe stops being just a tool and becomes a record of experience.
They told us how they live too. Unmarried men traditionally live together until they marry, often young. They don’t follow an organized religion but believe the forest is inhabited by spirits.
When someone dies, the body is placed high in a tree and the family leaves the camp to settle elsewhere.
The Batek have traditionally been nomadic, moving every few months, sometimes because food gets scarce, sometimes because predators like leopards make an area unsafe, sometimes because the death of a family member means it’s time to leave. Their movements follow the rhythms of the forest rather than property lines or borders.
Today they also host small groups of visitors and sell handmade crafts, among them miniature blowpipes and hunting sets, to supplement their income. It struck me that they’ve probably never had to think about whether those objects might get stopped by airport customs. In their world, they’re everyday tools. In ours, they’re something else entirely.
I was the last one to leave the camp, and for a moment I just stood there taking it in. These people would spend that night around the same fire pit, and the next night, and the one after that.
The view from the camp looked out over the river and the rainforest, and it hit me that this might be the oldest rainforest in the world, older than the Amazon, and these people have been living in it, exactly like this, the whole time.
Looking back, what stayed with me wasn’t any single plant or demonstration. It was realizing that the rainforest isn’t simply a collection of species. It’s a pharmacy, a grocery store, a hardware store, a source of clean water, a place of worship and a home, all at once. Without someone to interpret it, I would’ve spent seven hours walking through an endless sea of green. With a guide, I found out that almost every tree, vine and leaf had a story to tell.
This trip was a gift for my wife’s birthday. In the end, it turned into a gift for both of us, one more memory we’ll carry for a long time.
France has barely extinguished one of its largest wildfires in decades. An area roughly the size of Hong Kong has burned, and we’re only halfway through the summer. But another heatwave is already here.
People ask how this keeps happening.
I think we’re asking the wrong question.
Every wildfire begins with a sandwich.
Not because a ham sandwich can physically ignite a forest, but because it represents the countless ordinary decisions that build the world in which forests burn.
The sandwich.
The cigarette.
The dairy ice cream we hand to our children without a second thought.
The Shein order arriving tomorrow.
The new backpack and notebooks bought every September even though last year’s are still perfectly usable.
Each decision appears harmless. Each is too small to matter. That is exactly how systems survive. It’s recreated every morning when we choose convenience over necessity, novelty over sufficiency, habit over reflection.
Every purchase is a vote. Not because one purchase changes the world overnight, but because billions of purchases, repeated every day, determine which industries grow, which disappear, and what kind of civilization we continue to finance.
One Amazon order won’t send a billionaire and his friends into space. One dairy ice cream won’t destroy a forest. One unnecessary notebook won’t fill a landfill.
But none of those things happens only once. They happen millions of times, every single day. Eventually those “insignificant” decisions become greenhouse gases, deforestation, polluted rivers, shrinking biodiversity, exhausted soils, expanding infrastructure and ecosystems pushed beyond their limits.
Then comes the heat. Then the drought. Then the spark.
And suddenly everyone becomes an environmentalist.
Hundreds of volunteers leave their homes to protect forests from the flames. They carry water, clear vegetation, do everything they can to stop the fire from reaching nearby villages. Most people see humanity at its finest.
I see humanity desperately trying to repair yesterday while continuing to finance it this morning.
The same people who volunteer their time and energy to protect the forest are then handed tables full of ham and butter sandwiches, soft drinks, sometimes cigarettes.
Volunteering is great. These people are giving their time to protect their homes, their communities, the forest around them. That matters. What bothers me is how easily we separate the emergency from everything that preceded it. We celebrate the person who runs toward the flames while treating the quieter forms of prevention as optional, eccentric, even ridiculous.
Those choices rarely earn applause because they happen long before the crisis, when there is no fire to fight and nobody watching. Yet they may matter far more than the dramatic moments that make the evening news.
We have confused loving the way nature makes us feel with caring about nature itself.
We hike through forests while eating products that contribute to the destruction of ecosystems. We photograph mountains while wrapped in disposable consumption. We defend a burning forest while continuing to finance the industries that place increasing pressure on forests around the world. We rush to fight the fire while throwing fuel onto it for the rest of the year. Economic fuel. Cultural fuel. Political fuel.
None of this means every choice weighs the same. A handful of industries and a handful of governments make decisions that outweigh what any individual could do in a lifetime, and no amount of reused notebooks cancels out a pipeline. But that asymmetry is not an excuse. It’s the reason our purchases are also our politics. Every dollar we hand to an industry is a small vote for its continued expansion, and the industries we’re describing don’t grow without millions of us feeding them first.
People often ask who is responsible for ecological collapse. The government? Corporations? Consumers? The uncomfortable answer is that there isn’t a single culprit. There is a chain, a chain in which every link seems too small to matter until the whole thing snaps.
That’s the butterfly effect.
A civilization is not destroyed by one catastrophic decision. It’ss destroyed by millions of ordinary ones.
Schools are closing or changing schedules. Trains are slowing down. Workers are being told to adapt. Older people are urged to stay indoors. Animals are dying in barns. Rivers are warming. Nuclear power stations are struggling to cool their reactors and being closed down. Farmers are watching the sky, hoping for rain that never comes. Cities are discovering, once again, that concrete, asphalt and glass are not neutral materials. They trap heat.
Every heatwave ends the same way.
“We need to adapt.”
Of course we do. Nobody serious argues otherwise. When temperatures reach 40°C, we need shade, cool public spaces, drinking fountains, schools that do not become ovens, hospitals that can keep functioning and cooling in strategic public buildings, especially for older people, children, sick people, outdoor workers and anyone trapped in poorly designed housing.
But adaptation cannot become the polite word for surrender.
The real question is not how we survive longer heatwaves.
The real question is why we continue to organize society in ways that make them worse.
Unfortunately, that’s the conversation many people would rather avoid.
The climate crisis is not a natural disaster in the way an earthquake is. Scientists warned us for decades. Communities raised the alarm. The solutions have been available for years. Yet, governments protected fossil fuel interests. Oil and gas companies expanded production. Executives collected billions. Politicians delayed, negotiated, softened regulations, greenwashed and lied.
This was not inevitable.
It was a political and economic choice.
Now, the same system that chose fire is trying to sell us fans, bottled water, air conditioners, climate insurance, private pools, green capitalism and survival kits.
The house is burning, and someone has opened a shop in the living room.
Heat Is Only the Symptom
The mistake is thinking this is only about high temperatures.
A heatwave is a stress test for almost everything that keeps society running.
It pushes the human body beyond its limits. It kills directly, especially when nights remain hot and people cannot recover. It damages sleep, concentration, heart health and kidney function. It turns classrooms into places where children struggle to learn and workplaces into places where people struggle to work.
It pushes infrastructure to its limits. Railway tracks expand. Roads soften. Electricity grids strain under rising demand. Hospitals become overloaded.
The irony is that ACs draw more power precisely when energy systems are already under pressure. Nuclear plants need cool water, yet rivers become warmer and shallower. The same heat that increases electricity demand can make electricity harder to produce.
It pushes agriculture as well. Cows produce less milk. Chickens die in industrial sheds. Crops dry out and/or suffer damage that only becomes visible weeks or months later. Soil loses moisture. Water restrictions arrive. Harvests shrink. Food prices rise.
Then everyone acts surprised that groceries become more expensive.
The damage does not end when the thermometer falls.
That’s why surviving the next heatwave is not enough.
The Food System Nobody Wants to Discuss
Climate conversations usually focus on transport.
And transport matters. Flying less matters. Driving less whenever possible matters. The World Cup spread across North America is a perfect example of climate absurdity, an event marketed as global unity while sending teams, fans, journalists and sponsors across an entire continent for entertainment.
But another major part of the crisis rarely receives the same attention because it sits on our plates.
Animal agriculture is one of the least efficient uses of land, water, energy and living ecosystems on Earth.
Livestock occupies roughly three quarters to more than four fifths of global agricultural land, depending on how it is measured, once grazing land and crops grown for animal feed are included. Yet, animal products provide only a minority of the world’s calories and protein. One widely cited Science study found that meat, dairy, eggs and aquaculture use about 83% of farmland while supplying just 18% of calories and 37% of protein.
Read that again.
Most of the farmland.
A fraction of the food.
That is not efficiency.
It is ideology disguised as agriculture.
The system produces far more than meat, milk and eggs. It produces methane, deforestation, polluted rivers, antibiotic resistance, dead zones in coastal waters and immense pressure on land and water.
It also produces immense suffering.
During heatwaves, pigs, chickens and cows cannot simply adapt because consumers expect cheap animal products. Ventilation systems fail. Cooling systems are inadequate or absent. Transport trucks become ovens. Poultry dies by the hundreds of thousands. Dairy cows suffer severe heat stress and milk production falls.
Then the industry presents itself as another victim of climate change while helping drive the crisis in the first place.
This is not about blaming someone trying to feed their family on a tight budget.
The ocean may be the most neglected part of the climate conversation.
We rightly describe forests as the lungs of the planet. They deserve that attention. But the ocean is far more essential to life on Earth. It has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. It takes in a large share of the carbon dioxide we emit. It produces roughly half of the oxygen we breathe, largely through microscopic phytoplankton.
The ocean is not scenery.
It’s not a backdrop for holidays.
It is one of the reasons this planet is still habitable.
There is something profoundly irrational about destroying marine ecosystems while wondering why the planet keeps overheating.
Industrial fishing is not simply the act of catching fish. It tears apart ecosystems. It removes key species from food webs, kills countless non-target animals and drags heavy nets across the seabed, destroying habitats that took decades, centuries or even millennia to develop.
Yet this rarely appears in mainstream climate debates.
We are told to fly less, and rightly so.
We are told to drive less, and rightly so.
We are only beginning to hear serious discussion about livestock.
But fishing is still treated as though fish simply appear on supermarket shelves and the ocean can absorb endless extraction without consequence.
It cannot.
If the ocean regulates climate, absorbs carbon dioxide, produces oxygen and stores enormous amounts of heat, protecting marine ecosystems is climate policy.
Eating less fish, or choosing not to eat it at all, is not only an ethical position. It is a climate position.
For those who continue to eat seafood, there is at least an important distinction to make between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.
The ocean is one of Earth’s greatest cooling systems. Protect it at all costs.
Why Air Conditioning Can’t Be the Plan
Air conditioning has an important role.
During extreme heat, it saves lives. Hospitals, schools, care homes, public libraries, emergency shelters and social housing all need effective cooling strategies. No one should die inside an apartment built for a climate that no longer exists.
But air conditioning can’t become our primary response.
Every unit cools an indoor space by releasing heat outdoors. Across an entire city, that extra heat makes streets even hotter, particularly after sunset. Air conditioners also increase electricity demand during the hottest periods of the year. Where electricity still depends on fossil fuels, emissions rise. Even cleaner grids face greater strain as peak demand grows.
Singapore illustrates both the benefits and the limits of this approach.
The city has become highly dependent on cooling. Buildings require constant air conditioning. Those systems release heat into the streets. Outdoor spaces become less comfortable, encouraging people to remain indoors, which increases demand for cooling still further.
The cycle reinforces itself.
That’s not resilience, it’s technological dependence.
We don’t need cities filled with cooled rooms.
We need cities that stay cool in the first place.
We Forgot How to Build for Nature
The most effective cooling technology has existed for millions of years.
Trees.
Not decorative saplings planted in tiny squares of concrete, but mature urban forests and healthy green canopies.
Anyone who has walked barefoot from hot pavement onto shaded grass already understands this without reading a scientific paper.
So why, every time France approaches 40°C, do we talk about buying more air conditioners before planting more trees?
Why do we pave over soil, remove mature trees, expand shopping centres, build vast parking lots and approve developments that trap heat, only to claim that more machines are the answer?
They store water, protect biodiversity, stabilise soils, reduce erosion, create humidity and lower temperatures. They make landscapes more resilient long before a heatwave arrives.
Yet even forests are increasingly treated as another industrial resource.
Living ecosystems become timber reserves. Old-growth forests become biomass. Trees are cut down, burned for energy and labelled renewable, while complex ecosystems that took centuries to develop are reduced to units of production.
The same logic appears again and again.
If something can be extracted, it is.
If something can be sold, it is.
The living world is valued less for keeping us alive than for generating another stream of profit.
Water Is Becoming Political
Water is becoming one of the defining political issues of this century.
Yet we still manage it as though nothing has changed.
During droughts, ordinary people are told to take shorter showers. Farmers are asked to reduce irrigation. Small growers are criticised for watering their crops.
Meanwhile, luxury uses fight for exemptions.
Golf courses have become symbols of this contradiction because they expose the politics behind water allocation. While vegetables struggle and ecosystems dry out, perfectly green fairways are often defended. Leisure for the comfortable can receive more protection than food production or ecosystem survival.
Mega-basins reveal the same mindset.
On paper, the idea sounds simple. Capture water in winter and use it during summer.
Reality is more complicated.
Many of these reservoirs are open to the air, increasing evaporation as temperatures rise. They can concentrate control of water in the hands of a limited number of large farms. They often allow water-intensive agricultural models to continue instead of encouraging the transition toward crops and farming systems adapted to the climate that is already arriving.
The question is not whether storing water can ever make sense.
The question is who controls it, who benefits from it and whether it helps transform agriculture or merely postpones change.
A society preparing for the future would treat every drop of freshwater as precious.
Rainwater would be collected wherever possible.
Wastewater would be safely reused.
Leaking infrastructure would be repaired.
Soils would be restored so they can retain moisture.
Cities would remove unnecessary concrete and allow water to return to the ground.
Farmers would receive support to transition toward more resilient practices.
Luxury water use would never be treated as equivalent to drinking water, food production or healthy ecosystems.
The Logic Behind the Crisis
The deeper problem is that our economic system rarely asks what keeps life alive.
It asks what can be sold.
That’s why so many climate conversations end in absurdity.
We’re told to separate our recycling while billionaires fly private jets.
We’re reminded to save water while enormous data centres consume vast amounts of electricity and freshwater to cool servers powering artificial intelligence, advertising and endless digital consumption.
We debate plastic straws while militaries burn enormous quantities of fuel, flatten cities, destroy farms, poison soil and create another wave of emissions through reconstruction.
The priorities are impossible to ignore once you see them.
The Climate Cost of War
War remains one of the largest blind spots in climate politics.
The climate impact of the war on Gaza has been estimated in the tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent once direct military activity and reconstruction are included.
The opening weeks of the US-Israel war on Iran were estimated to produce several million tonnes of emissions.
Lebanon has accused Israel of ecocide following the destruction of forests, farmland and ecosystems in the south.
Yet military emissions are still treated as though they exist outside the atmosphere.
As though bombs leave no carbon footprint.
As though fighter jets fly on moral complexity.
As though hospitals, schools, roads, farms and homes rebuild themselves without steel, cement, machinery and energy.
We can’t keep pretending these emissions don’t count simply because they’re politically inconvenient.
The pattern is difficult to ignore.
Capitalism drives extraction.
Extraction fuels empire.
Empire produces war.
War destroys societies.
Destruction demands reconstruction.
Reconstruction creates more emissions.
Then we’re told that buying a bamboo toothbrush is the meaningful response.
It is not.
Personal Responsibility Matters, but It Is Not Equal
None of this means personal choices are meaningless.
They matter because they reduce demand for destructive industries, help shift culture and make political demands more credible.
But responsibility is not shared equally.
A working family struggling to pay rent is not comparable to a billionaire with private aircraft, multiple homes, yachts and investments in fossil fuels.
Someone eating the foods they were encouraged to consume from childhood is not comparable to multinational agribusinesses lobbying to protect industrial livestock.
A commuter driving because public transport is inadequate is not comparable to governments that refuse to invest in reliable trains, cycling infrastructure and walkable cities.
The message can’t be that ordinary people are the problem.
The message is that we live inside a system designed to make destructive choices easy, profitable and normal while making better choices more expensive, less accessible or socially unusual.
Recognising that distinction is not about avoiding responsibility.
It is the first step toward directing responsibility where it belongs.
What We Can Do
None of this means waiting for someone else to act.
Some of the simplest changes are still among the most effective.
Eat less meat, or stop eating it.
Eat less fish, or stop eating it. If you choose to keep eating fish, understand the difference between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.
Buy fewer clothes. Buy second hand. Repair what you own. Stop treating fashion as a weekly identity update.
Do the same with appliances. Borrow, share, repair and buy used whenever possible.
Build a culture where tools, equipment, transport and household goods are shared instead of endlessly duplicated.
Fly less.
Drive less whenever practical.
Support political parties and movements that take climate change, biodiversity, animal welfare, water management, public services and peace seriously. Voting alone will not solve the crisis, but electing governments that deny climate science, protect fossil fuel interests and normalise war will accelerate it.
Above all, reject fake solutions.
A city with air conditioning but no trees is not prepared.
A country with mega-basins but dying soils is not prepared.
A food system built on industrial animal suffering is not prepared.
A sporting culture that flies millions of people across continents for profit is not prepared.
A digital economy that consumes ever more electricity and water in pursuit of endless growth is not prepared.
A world that treats war as ordinary is not prepared.
France is not ready for what’s coming, and that pains me.
Europe and America aren’t ready either.
The Crisis Behind the Crisis
The tragedy is that even by the narrow standards of economic growth, this system is failing.
Heat kills workers.
It reduces productivity.
It damages harvests.
It weakens infrastructure.
It raises healthcare costs.
It disrupts schools.
It destabilises insurance.
It pushes food prices higher.
It forces governments to spend billions (of our money) responding to disasters they chose not to prevent.
Even someone who cares nothing for animals, forests, rivers, oceans or social justice should recognise one simple reality.
This model is becoming too expensive to sustain itself.
The climate crisis is not only an ecological crisis.
It is a crisis of imagination.
We keep trying to preserve the lifestyle that created the emergency, then call that realism.
But there is nothing realistic about filling unliveable cities with more air conditioners while cutting down trees.
There is nothing realistic about building reservoirs while refusing to transform agriculture.
There is nothing realistic about defending industrial livestock, industrial fishing, fossil fuels, permanent war and luxury consumption while asking ordinary people to adapt.
Realism begins by accepting that an economy built on endless extraction can’t produce a liveable planet.
We don’t need a parasasol over the apocalypse.
We need accountability.
We need to recognise that climate is not a separate issue. It runs through everything.
Our cities.
Our countryside.
Our food.
Our transport.
Our water.
Our forests.
Our oceans.
Our economies.
Our wars.
Not because that sounds radical.
Because the moderate path has become the one driving the crisis.
The planet is not burning because we failed to understand what was happening.
It’s burning because those with the power to change course chose not to.
That choice can still be reversed.
But only if we stop confusing adaptation with acceptance and start confronting the system that keeps choosing fire.
This isn’t fiction. It’s called the African Jerusalem.
People there don’t need clocks. The bees tell the time.
As my readers know, I’m vegan, so I don’t take from animals, not even honey. That hasn’t changed. But in the highlands around Lalibela, I noticed a different way of living with them, one rooted in respect and faith.
I spent four years of my teenage life in Ethiopia, then returned again at 22. Some places stay with you in a way that doesn’t fade, and for me, this is one of them.
Not far from Lalibela, in rural areas often referred to locally as Gueorgis, beekeeping isn’t just a livelihood. It’s something older, something spiritual. Among Ethiopian Orthodox Christian communities, bees are not seen as simple insects. They’re often regarded as pure creatures, sometimes described as reflecting the discipline and harmony of angels. Not because they’re divine, but because they’re part of a creation that follows a precise order, one that humans are meant to observe and respect.
That idea of order shows up everywhere, especially in how people relate to time.
The concept of time
There’s a belief I heard more than once while I was there. The bees give the time three times a day. In the morning around what we would call 10, then at midday, and again in the afternoon around 3. These are the moments when their activity peaks, when they leave in visible waves to gather nectar. It’s not a clock in the modern sense, but it becomes one in daily life.
And in many of these rural areas, that matters more than any watch.
Because the reality is that in remote parts of Ethiopia, especially around Lalibela, people have historically lived without precise, mechanical timekeeping. Time is read through the sun, through patterns. Morning begins when the light settles a certain way. Midday is when the sun stands above you. Evening arrives when shadows stretch and the air cools.
People don’t meet at exact hours. They meet in moments. And everyone understands those moments.
There’s a cliché you hear often about Africans being fashionably “late,” about Ethiopians not caring about time. I don’t take that at face value. Without claiming it as a proven explanation, I think it says more about the observer than the people being described.
If your entire system is built around minutes and precision, then anything outside of that looks like disorder. But what if it’s just a different structure?
For instance, in Islamic cultures, time is extremely precise. Daily prayers are tied to exact solar positions. Fasting begins and ends at defined moments. The lunar calendar governs entire cycles of life. Time there is something to be measured carefully and adhered to strictly.
In contrast, in many rural societies, time is lived before it’s measured. It flows with what God has set in motion, rather than being cut into exact units. So what looks like “lateness” might simply be life unfolding without the pressure of the clock.
And Ethiopia takes that even further in a way most people don’t even realize.
It doesn’t just live time differently. It counts it differently.
There’s what we call international time, and then there’s Ethiopian time. In Ethiopia, the day starts at what we would call 6 AM, roughly sunrise. That’s hour one. So what we call 7am becomes 1 o’clock. Noon becomes 6. What we call 6 PM becomes 12. It’s not confusion. It’s consistency with the sun. The first hour begins when light begins.
It’s a system that actually makes a lot of sense. It aligns the clock with lived reality rather than abstract convention.
The calendar follows the same logic.
Ethiopian calendar has 13 months, not 12. Twelve months of 30 days, and a thirteenth month of 5 days, or 6 in a leap year. That last month, Pagume if my memory hasn’t failed me, is short, almost like a pause between cycles.
Thus, the new year doesn’t begin on January 1st. It begins around September 11th. Right after the heavy rainy season, when the land resets, when the skies clear, when life begins again. It’s agricultural, but also spiritual. A renewal that actually follows the environment people live in.
And because of how this calendar was preserved, based on older Christian calculations of the Annunciation, Ethiopia is about 7 to 8 years “behind” the Gregorian calendar. So while much of the world is in 2026, Ethiopia is in 2018.
It’s not that one is right and the other is wrong. It’s that one remained rooted in its own continuity, and I love and salute that.
Beekeeping in the African Jerusalem
That continuity matters when you look at places like Lalibela, often called the African Jerusalem. Tied to Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, whose name is understood to mean “the bees recognize his greatness/sovereignty”, it reflects one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world. Christianity has been practiced in Ethiopia since at least the 4th century, long before much of Europe fully adopted it.
So when people bring honey to churches, when priests bless bees and beekeepers, it’s not symbolic in a modern sense. It’s continuity across centuries.
And that continuity is visible in movement too.
During honey harvesting seasons, some people from extremely remote villages set out for the markets of Lalibela, carrying honey in hand-crafted clay jars to sustain their families. They walk for days, not hours, days!
They move across the highlands, guided by the sun, by memory, by instinct. No maps, no schedules. Just direction.
Along the way, they stop at churches. Some of them centuries old, carved into rock. They offer part of their honey. Priests receive it, bless it, sometimes bless the bees themselves. It’s not commerce. It’s passage.
When night falls, they stop.
No tents. No inflatable beds. No modern equipment. They sleep outside, on the ground, with whatever they carry. Then at sunrise, they continue. Dozens of kilometers, step after step, until they reach the central market.
And this still happens today.
Part of what makes this possible is the geography of the Ethiopian highlands, historically known as Abyssinia. Compared to neighboring regions in Kenya or Tanzania, which are home to large populations of dangerous wildlife, the high plateaus around Lalibela are relatively safer. Fewer large predators, different ecosystems. It doesn’t mean there’s no risk, but it makes long-distance walking without protection far more viable.
The beehives themselves are adapted to this environment. Made from hollowed logs, woven fibers, and natural seals, they protect the bees from temperature swings and pests, and can survive in remote areas with minimal attention. Over generations, this system has allowed Ethiopian beekeeping to continue for at least 1500 years, deeply tied to the rhythms of the land.
The climate shapes everything too. Much of Ethiopia doesn’t follow four seasons, but cycles of rain and dryness that vary by altitude. Life organizes itself around what is given, and when it’s given, whether for people or for bees. In this context, priests play a role. Honey and candles are brought to churches, blessed, and prayers are offered for people and their bees.
Provision ultimately comes from God, and humans participate within limits they cannot control.
Even so, tension remains. People treat the bees with care and respect, but taking honey is still taking. Even when done carefully, it remains a form of exploitation. It may be necessary, it may be balanced, but it must also be acknowledged.
What stayed with me after all these years and despite how much I traveled was the alignment. A place where time is not just counted differently, but felt differently. Where a day doesn’t begin at midnight because a clock says so, but when light actually appears. Where a year resets not in the middle of winter, but after the rains have passed. Where journeys are measured in effort, not in minutes.
In a place like Lalibela, you start to question what we consider “normal.”
Maybe precision isn’t always clarity.
Maybe being “on time” isn’t always being in sync.
And maybe there are ways of living, still existing today, that haven’t forgotten that time was never meant to be owned, only followed.
You don’t hate winter, you hate how we live through it.
I’m such a winter person. I resisted that idea for years because I don’t particularly enjoy being cold and I absolutely hate humidity, but I’m done arguing with it now.
Winter is my favorite season, the one that makes me feel most alive. Fall comes close behind. Maybe I’m really a fall-first person who only settles once winter arrives. Fall feels like a threshold, a kind of preparation, while winter is the place it all leads to.
Most people say they hate winter, but I don’t even think that’s true. I think they hate winter under capitalism, which is a very different thing.
Winter isn’t simply December 21st to March 20th like we’re taught in school. December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the deepest point of darkness. In many ways, that’s peak winter. It’s both the heart of it and the beginning of its slow release.
If you look at older seasonal systems, especially the Celtic calendar, winter is often understood differently. It begins around early November, with Samhain, and transitions toward spring around early February, with Imbolc. I’ve always intuitively aligned with this rhythm, a rhythm that feels more real in the body.
Winter always makes me nostalgic about my childhood. Where you grow up shapes your relationship to it. Below the equator, winter falls during what we call summer months. It’s shorter, less harsh. It’s still winter, but it doesn’t carry the same weight. Above the equator, winter has a presence. It changes everything.
Winter in New York, for example, is unmatched. But to understand it, you have to start with fall. Fall is special in a way that’s hard to replicate. The air sharpens, the leaves start falling, the temperature drops just enough to wake you up. School starts again. People return from summer scatteredness with a sense of purpose. There’s motivation, a quiet hope that something new can begin before the year closes.
Then come the holidays. I don’t celebrate them myself, but I can’t deny the atmosphere. Halloween, with kids everywhere. Thanksgiving, massive in New York. Then the Christmas season, with its films, its smells, its food. Cinnamon, baked goods, warmth. Fall is about getting cozy. It’s about preparing, consciously or not, for winter.
And then winter arrives.
One of my favorite childhood memories is hearing on the radio that a blizzard had shut everything down. Schools closed for days. Travel discouraged. The world paused. I remember the feeling of going back to bed, diving under the blanket, watching the snow fall outside. There was a kind of collective stillness. Everyone was home at the same time, in the middle of the week, which almost never happened.
Winter meant snowball fights with family and friends. Building snowmen. Coming back inside after hours in the cold to drink something hot, cinnamon-heavy or just a simple hot chocolate. Winter also meant shorter days, which I’ve always loved. There’s something honest about darkness arriving early. It forces you inward, and you simply sleep better. At least I do.
Now that I live in a coastal town, winter has taken on a different form. The place empties out. It becomes a ghost town. Only a few locals remain. I can walk through the streets, along the beach, into the forests, and not see anyone. Not hear anyone. Just space, and peace.
Fall here is also the perfect time for mushroom picking. There’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food, bringing it home, cooking it. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but when I do, it reconnects me to something older than all of this.
Winter also brings unpredictability. Storms, floods, strong winds, snow.
I’ve always been fascinated by storms. There’s something humbling about them. They remind you how small you are without humiliating you. Just placing you back in proportion.
And this is where my relationship with winter becomes more than just aesthetic.
Winter, to me, is supposed to be a time of slowing down. A form of hibernation. Not complete inactivity, but a reduction. A softening. A withdrawal from constant output.
But winter under capitalism is the opposite of that.
It’s when everything accelerates. Black Friday. Christmas consumption. New Year’s, January sales. Valentine’s Day. It becomes a concentrated period of economic extraction. A time where people are pushed to spend more, move more, produce more, exactly when their bodies are asking for less.
I don’t adhere to that. I reject it.
Because biologically, intuitively, winter asks something else from us. Even illness patterns reflect that. People don’t just get sick because of viruses. They get sick because they keep pushing at summer pace in a winter body. They ignore the signal to slow down.
Historically, people understood this. They worked through the year, harvested their crops, prepared for winter. Around the end of October, they gathered, celebrated the end of harvest. And then life shifted. Maintenance replaced expansion. Survival replaced growth.
Nature does the same. Animals retreat. Bears hibernate. Bees cluster. Even plants withdraw into themselves. Winter is not death. It’s conservation.
I sometimes imagine a different life. A cabin. A cycle where summer is for harvesting, fall for preparing, winter for resting. Wood gathered. Food stored. Time spent simply maintaining what’s already there.
Life, at its core, is that simple. But systems built on constant expansion don’t allow simplicity to survive.
Winter, for me, is also about people. Not crowds, but closeness. Seeing friends, family. Sitting together, drinking tea, sharing time without urgency. There’s a different quality to connection in winter. It’s slower, deeper.
Even sports feel different. The air, the light, the coziness of it all. Everything sharpens.
And if I’m honest, part of why I love winter is personal. I’m introverted. I need that inward space. But it’s also something else. A fatigue with what humanity has become. The constant noise, the endless movement, the destruction of everything around us.
Winter feels like a counterforce.
It slows us down whether we like it or not. A storm doesn’t ask for permission. A blizzard doesn’t negotiate. When it hits, everything stops. And in that moment, we’re all equal. No one is above it.
There’s something powerful in that.
To me, winter restores balance. It interrupts the illusion that we can operate at maximum intensity all year long. The shortening of days, the stretching of nights, the way time itself feels heavier, slower, none of that is accidental. It’s a form of design.
Fighting that rhythm has consequences. You see it in people who try to live winter like summer. They burn out. They get anxious. They get sick.
I haven’t had a cold in years. That’s not just because I’m active or because of my diet, though those matter. It’s because I try, as much as possible, to align with that rhythm. To accept that winter is not the time to push.
Winter is about gathering. With nature, with people, with yourself. It’s not about peak productivity. It’s not about consumption. It’s not about proving anything.
It’s about remembering.
And maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because despite everything, despite the systems we’ve built to override it, winter still imposes itself. It reminds us, quietly or violently, that we are not in control of everything.
That there is a rhythm beyond us.
And that we’d probably be better off listening to it.
Living near the ocean and surrounded by forest comes with a quiet gift: the constant presence of small, living worlds brushing past my own.
In 2024, my wife and I moved to Lacanau Océan almost by accident and immediately fell in love with the area, especially during the off season, when silence settles in. Beyond the calm and the sense of space, what stays with me most is the wildlife I encounter on my daily walks near the ocean and through the forest.
Below is a little gallery of animals I come across regularly, depending on the season. I’m probably forgetting some.
A list of land animals
Wild boars
Roe deer
Rabbits
Hedgehogs
Red foxes
Bats
Red squirrels
Frogs
Moles
Butterflies
Dragonflies
Snails
Lizards
Ducks
Cats of course
and dogs
And then a bunch of birds too
Kentish plover (the funniest birds itw)
Ravens (my faves)
Blackbirds
White storks (lucky if you see them, but they’re around)
Teekay Rezeau-Merah 