Every road leads to the same slaughterhouse

September 7, 2026 — Leave a comment

Why are you vegan?

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.

That’s why I’m vegan.

Teekay

The end of outside

August 27, 2026 — Leave a comment

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.

Teekay

Every Wildfire Begins with a Sandwich

August 12, 2026 — Leave a comment

France braces for 5th heat wave since June.

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.

Refusing unnecessary consumption isn’t celebrated.

Reusing old supplies isn’t celebrated.

Eating less meat and dairy isn’t celebrated.

Living with less isn’t celebrated.

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.

And every wildfire begins with a sandwich.

Food for thought.

Teekay

France Is Burning Because the System Chose Fire

July 11, 2026 — 1 Comment

France is burning.

8 minute read.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally.

France is suffocating under one of the worst heatwaves in its history, the third in less than two months.

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.

It is about being honest.

One of the most effective climate actions available to individuals is reducing or eliminating meat, dairy and eggs. Diets centered on plant-based foods reduce greenhouse gas emissions, free land for ecosystem restoration and place less pressure on forests, rivers and water supplies. As the IPCC concludes, diets richer in plant-based foods can significantly reduce emissions.

That does not mean climate change is the fault of ordinary people buying lunch.

It means food is political.

Our plates are connected to forests, rivers, oceans, workers, animals, subsidies and power.

The Great Paradox: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Nature

The Ocean Is Part of the Climate

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.

Bottom trawling is one of the clearest examples. It scrapes the ocean floor like a bulldozer, destroys marine habitats and releases carbon stored in seabed sediments.

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.

Trees cool cities through shade and evapotranspiration. Temperatures beneath a healthy canopy can be several degrees lower than nearby streets. Grass and soil shaded by trees remain dramatically cooler than asphalt, rooftops and parking lots.

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?

Forests are not simply carbon sinks.

They are climate infrastructure.

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 encouraged to feel guilty for driving to work while the richest 1% emits more carbon than billions of people combined.

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.

From Cash to Trash: 19 Everyday Things You’re Oversaturated With

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.

Thanks for reading. Make that change.

Teekay

The intelligence of slow water

January 27, 2026 — Leave a comment

And how unlikely engineers are fixing what we broke.

Somewhere between dams, drains and forgotten beaver ponds, we taught water to behave unnaturally.

For centuries, rivers weren’t linear channels cutting through land. They were living systems with multiple rhythms. They had (some still do) a normal bed, a medium bed and a larger floodplain. During certain periods, rivers would overflow into nearby fields and forests, depositing sediments, organic matter and nutrients. They would slow down, spread out, feed themselves and recharge the surrounding soils before returning to their usual course. Water lingered. Land absorbed it like a sponge. Life depended on that slowness.

Modern (human) engineering broke this balance. To protect infrastructure, agriculture and urban areas, rivers were straightened, dredged and confined between embankments. Their wider beds were erased. This caused for river channels to deepen because the straighter a river is, the faster it goes, and the faster it goes, the more it digs under itself, thus lowering its bed. This phenom’ had two immediate consequences. First, rivers stopped feeding themselves. Cut off from floodplains, they no longer collect organic matter, sediments and nutrients that once sustained aquatic ecosystems. Second, and more critically, they stopped feeding the land around them. The earth lost its role as a sponge.

When soils are regularly rehydrated by slow, spreading water, they remain loose, alive and porous. Microorganisms thrive. Roots penetrate deeply. Organic matter accumulates.

When this process is interrupted, soils dry out and compact. They become stiff and tight. Rain no longer infiltrates. It slides across the surface, picking up speed, eroding topsoil and rushing straight into rivers, then quickly into the ocean. Water is no longer stored in landscapes but evacuated as quickly as possible. What we call floods and droughts are often two sides of the same engineered mistake.

This acceleration of water is a massive stress on the planet. Freshwater ecosystems collapse. Groundwater reserves fail to recharge. Agricultural soils lose fertility. Coastal zones receive sudden, polluted surges of freshwater and sediments. The problem is not a lack of rain but a lack of time. Water is not allowed to stay.

Nature, left to itself, mirrors its creator’s perfection. So naturally, solutions do exist, and one of the most powerful allies in restoring hydrological balance is none other than the beaver.

Often dismissed as a nuisance or a pest, the beaver is in fact a master engineer, working in harmony with natural laws rather than against them. By building “dams”, beavers slow water down. They raise river levels back toward their natural height. They reconnect streams with floodplains. They recreate the layered beds that humans spent centuries destroying, and still are.

Beaver dams create chains of small wetlands and ponds, true oases across landscapes. These wetlands filter water by trapping sediments and pollutants. They store water during wet periods and release it slowly during dry ones, reducing both floods and droughts. They soften the surrounding soils, allowing water to infiltrate deeply and recharge aquifers. Land regains its sponge-like function.

The ecological benefits are extraordinary. Beaver wetlands provide habitat for fish, amphibians, aquatic insects, birds and mammals. Frogs, salamanders, dragonflies, trout, ducks and herons all thrive in these environments. Biodiversity increases not despite the dams but because of them. Even forests benefit, as higher groundwater levels support healthier trees and reduce vulnerability to fires.

Beavers don’t build for profit, efficiency or short-term control. They build for stability. Their work reverses, piece by piece, the damage caused by rigid, fast and extractive water management systems, built by us.

Where humans forced rivers to behave like drains, beavers restore them as living systems.

Reintroducing and protecting beavers is not a romantic gesture or a return to some imagined past. It’s a practical, science-backed response to centuries of bad engineering. Beavers show that the solution to water crises is not always more concrete, deeper channels or faster flows. Sometimes, the solution is to slow down, raise water back into the land and let ecosystems do what they have always done best.

If we’re serious about restoring soils, securing water and easing the planetary stress we created, we should stop fighting nature’s intelligence and start learning from it.

In that lesson, the beaver is the blueprint.

Food for thought.

Thank you for stopping by.

Teekay

Water speaks in ways we ignore

August 11, 2025 — Leave a comment

A memory, a teacher, a traveler from space.

Once upon a time, exactly 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was a violent place.

There were no oceans. No rivers, no rain, no life. Just a molten ball of fire and gas, spinning restlessly in space.

And then it came. Not as a storm or a miracle, but as dust, rock, and ice, hurtling through space and crashing into this young planet during what scientists now call the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Over millions of years, icy asteroids and meteorites may have delivered what Earth itself couldn’t produce on its own: water. Drop by drop, this alien substance transformed our planet, cooling its surface, filling its craters, and laying the foundation for every living thing that would ever exist.

In other words, the water in your glass, in your blood, in your tears, may not be from Earth.

This is a common theory among scientists, but how do they back it up?

Well, simply put, traces of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) in Earth’s water match those found in carbon-rich meteorites, not in Earth’s original atmosphere. In other words, water could well be extraterrestrial and we’re walking oceans, born of stardust and comets.

Pretty cool.

“A water molecule is made up of one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen. Hydrogen was created in the Big Bang, and oxygen in the cores of stars more massive than the Sun. Enormous amounts of water, in gaseous form, exist in the vast stellar nurseries of our galaxy.” – NASA

All that being said, new discoveries have challenged that theory. Science doesn’t care about romance and poetry..

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

Water is alive in ways we’re still discovering

Science has always viewed water as simple H₂O. But the more we look, the more mysterious it becomes.

Water doesn’t just hydrate, it reacts. It listens, and it may even remember!

Case in point, when scientists drill into glaciers in Antarctica or Greenland, they’re not just pulling out ice. They’re pulling out history. Inside those frozen cores are bubbles of ancient air, particles of volcanoes and wildfires, records of rainfall, drought, and dust storms, all preserved in perfect detail. These layers tell us the climate story of Earth going back hundreds of thousands of years.

So yeah, water stores information. It has a memory. It IS a memory, not metaphorically but quite literally.

But what if water also stores something more subtle?

Can water feel ? Like, does it have feelings?

The late Dr. Masaru Emoto, a Japanese researcher, believed it did. In his famous (and controversial) experiments, he exposed water to different words, prayers, music, and intentions, then froze it and photographed the crystals that formed.

On one hand, water blessed with words like “love” or “gratitude” formed stunning, symmetrical snowflake-like shapes. On the other, water exposed to hate, anger, or pollution formed distorted, chaotic patterns.

His work was dismissed by many in the scientific community, as they do. But for others, it cracked open a door. A possibility that consciousness and water might be connected in ways we don’t yet understand.

The mystery of memory in water

In 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist who co-discovered HIV, published a paper suggesting that highly diluted DNA in water emits electromagnetic signals, and that water retains this information even when the DNA is gone.

Another researcher and Swiss chemist, Louis Rey, studied water’s “memory” through thermoluminescence and noticed changes depending on what the water had previously been exposed to.

These findings are controversial, but they echo something ancient cultures have always known:

That water is not just a substance, it’s a carrier. A messenger. A mirror.

Water in religion & spirituality

Across every tradition and belief system, water is sacred.

• In Islam, it is said in the Qur’an: “We made from water every living thing” (21:30). Before drinking or washing, Muslims say “Bismillah”, or In the name of God, inviting His name to bless the water. Then there is the water of Zamzam, a sacred well in Mecca, believed to have sprung miraculously for Hagar and her son Ishmael in the desert. This water is revered for its purity and spiritual significance, and pilgrims often drink it during Hajj and Umrah, and take it home as a cherished gift.

• In Christianity, water baptizes, purifies, rebirths.

• In Buddhism and Taoism, water is a symbol of humility and transformation. It yields but wears down mountains.

• And Bruce Lee, blending martial arts with Eastern philosophy, famously said:

“Be like water, my friend.”

Meaning: stay flexible, formless, adaptive, like the element that takes the shape of whatever holds it, and yet remains itself.

Water teaches us to flow, to remember, and to release.

Our bodies remember too

Our body is made up of about 60% water. Our brain? Closer to 75%.

We are, quite literally, a walking river. Every cell depends on water, not just to survive, but to communicate, to regenerate, to feel.

Our emotions, hormones, sleep, focus, creativity, they all ride on the flow of water inside us.

And yet, for something so vital, we’ve forgotten how rare it is.

Water is scarce and under threat

Earth may be covered in water, but only 0.007% of it is drinkable and accessible. The rest is locked away in oceans, glaciers, or underground.

Meanwhile, pollution, overconsumption, and climate change are drying up and polluting a resource that our very existence relies on. Every environmental campaign is focused on the pollution of air (which causes 7 million deaths a year), which is great, but most campaigns don’t even touch on the irreversible pollution of water (mostly due to the fashion industry and animal breeding). Why? The air is much easier to clean than our fresh water streams. and yet..

Meanwhile, pollution, overconsumption, and climate change are depleting and contaminating a resource essential to our very survival: water. Most environmental campaigns rightly focus on air pollution, which causes 7 million deaths each year btw, but rarely address the irreversible pollution of our freshwater sources, much of it driven by the fashion industry and industrial animal farming. Why? I mean if anything, air is far easier to clean than our streams, rivers, and aquifers..

• The fashion industry produces 20% of global industrial water pollution. Dyes and synthetic materials poison rivers from Asia to South America.

• The meat industry is one of the biggest consumers and polluters of water. One single beef burger requires over 2,000 liters of water to produce. But that’s not it: Waste from livestock contaminates rivers and groundwater. Read about the Green Tide, aka Killer Slime or green algae, a magic seaweed that can kill you in SECONDS, another scandal brushed under the rug because a certain lobby is too powerful to let it be mediatized.

Food production accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions. 18% of those are due to livestock production. – Stanford

• Plastic and pesticides enter our lakes and oceans at alarming rates. Microplastics have now been found in rainwater and even in unborn babies.

By 2030, the United Nations warns that 40% of people could face severe water scarcity if we don’t act.

Water is strong. It’s self-purifying, patient, ancient. But even it has limits.

A call to return to reverence

We live in a world where water comes from a tap, which is why we forget how sacred it is. We wear clothes made in countries we’ll never visit, eat food raised on land we’ll never see, throw away plastics that outlive us by centuries, and we don’t see the water trails behind them.

But now we know better.

We know that water is more than H₂O. It holds the blueprint of life and the story of our planet. It listens. It reflects us.

So what can we do?

• Plant trees.

• Eat more plants and less dead flesh.

• Repair our clothes.

• Use less plastic and ban single use plastics.

• Speak blessings into our glass.

• Treat water like the rare, cosmic treasure that it is.

Because every drop of water you drink has seen stars. It’s been ice. It’s been vapor. It’s fallen as rain, flowed through rivers, and run through the veins of everything that has ever lived.

And maybe, just maybe, when you speak to it, it remembers you too.

Thanks for reading.

Tee.

Reasons why we don’t eat honey

May 12, 2025 — 1 Comment

Besides the fact that we don’t “need” to.

Honey comes from bees. Bees are tiny creatures who play a huge role in keeping our planet alive and healthy, I’ll explain how.

Bees are born in beehives, where they grow up, work together, and take care of each other. While most people think bees are just busy flying around, they’re not! They actually have specific “jobs”, or tasks if you will. In fact, each bee has a specific role: some clean the hive, some feed the baby bees, and others go out to find food. Basically, they’re like us, except more advanced, because they don’t pollute, fight over nonsense and hate each other for no reason.

Bees are also pollinators.

When bees buzz from one flower to the next, they’re doing something extremely important known as pollination. Here’s how it works: As bees collect nectar for making honey, they carry pollen from flower to flower. This simple act helps plants grow fruits, veggies, seeds, and even more flowers. Without bees doing their thing, a lot of the food we rely on wouldn’t exist.

Let that sink in for a second.

Case in point, 75% of the food we eat depends on pollinators like bees (WEF). 75 freakin’ percent! Apples, strawberries, cucumbers, almonds, and even coffee all need pollination. So, losing bees would mean most of these foods would disappear, or become extremely rare and expensive.

Besides, pollinators also help plants that grow in the wild. These plants give food and shelter to animals and help keep the air clean. So, pollinators help whole ecosystems survive, not just farms and gardens.

While bees are the most famous pollinators, they’re not the only ones. Butterflies, hummingbirds, bats, moths, beetles, and even some types of ants and wasps also help pollinate plants. However, bees are the most effective because they focus their energy on flowers and carry lots of pollen.

This year (2025), we’ve had the worst honeybee loss in recorded history in the US. In fact, 80% of honeybees died suddenly. We still “don’t know” why (pesticides, it’s pesticides).

So, why don’t we eat honey? Simple: bees make honey to feed themselves and keep their hive alive, especially through the winter. When humans harvest honey, they’re taking away the bees’ own food (and heat) source. To make up for it, beekeepers sometimes replace the honey with sugar water, but that doesn’t give bees the nutrients they need to stay healthy. In fact, just like in humans, too much sugar can weaken their immune systems and make them more vulnerable to disease.

Worse still, to harvest honey, beekeepers often use smoke or chemical fumes to force bees out of their hives. This disorients them, causing stress, panic, and confusion, sometimes even leading them to get lost or die as they flee.

Even though it might not seem harmful at first, stealing honey puts a lot of pressure on bee colonies. It is in fact one of the reasons we’ve seen millions of bees die in recent years.

This is why many vegans consider honey as part of animal exploitation. The more we take from bees and damage their homes, the fewer bees we have, which in turn puts entire ecosystems, and our own food systems, at risk. In numbers, honeybees pollinate a worth of 15 billion dollars of crops in the US only, yearly.

If bees disappear, many plants won’t be pollinated. This means fewer fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Animal species that eat these plants will struggle, and so will the animals that eat them. It’s a chain reaction that could cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Eventually, the extermination of bees would entail food shortages even for us, humans, and thus our death as well.

Humans have long seen themselves as sitting at the top of the pyramid, a concept known as speciesism, but in reality, we’re just one part of a vast, interconnected family of living, sentient beings.

Fascinating facts about bees

Here’s where things get interesting: Plants, being rooted in the ground, carry a small negative electric charge. Interestingly, this charge increases the higher up the plant you go, creating an electric field around the flower itself.

Bees, in contrast, acquire a positive charge during flight due to friction with the air, which causes them to lose electrons. So, as a bee approaches a flower, the opposing electric fields of the bee and the plant begin to interact. This interaction subtly changes the flower’s natural vibrations or signals, imperceptible to humans, but detectable to bees.

When the bee lands on the flower, the positive charge from the bee and the negative charge of the flower neutralize each other almost instantly. This leads to two remarkable outcomes:

The negatively charged pollen from the flower is attracted to and effectively “jumps” onto the positively charged bee;
The flower’s electric field is altered, signaling to other approaching bees that it has already been visited. This change communicates that the flower likely has no nectar left, prompting bees to move on and return later. Mindblowing!

So, flowers use electric fields not just to attract pollinators, but also to communicate whether they still have nectar. They have their own language of electricity, completely imperceptible to us.

Other interesting facts about bees: They can also recognize human faces, communicate with each other through a little dance, and even show signs of emotion. Scientists also suggest bees can count and they might even dream.

What can we do to protect the bees and our soils?

Ban pesticides.

Plant flowers that bees love, like lavender, sunflowers and wildflowers.

Replace honey with the million other alternatives in existence: maple syrup, agave nectar, date syrup, molasses, and even fruit-based syrups work great. Why participate in the extinction of a whole species (and many other would follow suite) when you can avoid it?

Bees may be small, but they are mighty. Taking care of them is not just about saving one species, it’s about saving the world we all share.

Thank you for stopping by. This post was inspired by a conversation with my wife ❤

Peace!

Teekay

WATCH: 31 Documentaries that will change your perception of food (with trailers)

December 23, 2024 — 1 Comment

You are what you eat.

An Updated Guide to Must-Watch Documentaries on Health, the Environment, and Animal Welfare

A few years ago, I compiled a list of powerful documentaries that opened eyes and sparked conversations about the connections between our diets, personal health, the planet, and animal welfare. Since then, new documentaries have emerged, offering fresh perspectives and deeper insights into these critical topics.

This updated list features 31 must-watch documentaries that will inspire you to rethink your choices, understand the broader impact of what’s on your plate, and consider the powerful role food plays in shaping our world.

Whether you’re passionate about health, sustainability, or ethics, these films are a compelling call to action, and a perfect way to kickstart meaningful change.

You Are What You Eat: The Twin Experiment (2024)
A twin-focused dietary experiment exploring the effects of different eating habits on health.
Notable Figures: None known.

Earthlings (2005)
A groundbreaking documentary examining humanity’s reliance on animals for food, clothing, and entertainment.
Notable Figures: Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.

Dominion (2018)
Exposing the darker side of animal agriculture through hidden-camera footage.
Notable Figures: Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, and Sia.

Forks Over Knives (2011)
A case for adopting a plant-based diet to combat chronic diseases.
Notable Figures: Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn.

What the Health (2017)
Investigating the link between diet, disease, and corporate influence in health organizations.
Notable Figures: Kip Andersen, Keegan Kuhn.

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)
Revealing the environmental impact of animal agriculture.
Notable Figures: Directed by Kip Andersen.

Seaspiracy (2022)
A critique of the fishing industry’s devastating impact on marine ecosystems.
Notable Figures: Directed by Ali Tabrizi and Kip Andersen

Christpiracy (2024)
Examining the intersection of religion and ethical food choices.
Notable Figures: Directed by Kip Andersen and Kameron Waters.

The Game Changers (2018)
Debunking myths about plant-based diets and athletic performance.
Notable Figures: Produced by James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I Could Never Go Vegan (2024)
Addressing common excuses and challenges against veganism.
Notable Figures: None known.

Vegucated (2011)
Following three people as they attempt to adopt a vegan lifestyle.
Notable Figures: Directed by Marisa Miller Wolfson.

Milked (2021)
A deep dive into the dairy industry and its global implications.
Notable Figures: Created by Chris Huriwai.

Pignorant (2024)
Exploring the psychology behind ignoring the ethics of animal consumption.
Notable Figures: Created Joey Carbstrong.

Eating Animals (2018)
An exposé of industrial farming and its impact on food systems.
Notable Figures: Based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, narrated by Natalie Portman

Carnage: Swallowing the Past (2017)
A satirical take on a future where veganism is the norm and meat-eating is taboo.
Notable Figures: Directed by Simon Amstell.

The Smell of Money (2022)
Investigating the environmental racism tied to industrial pig farming.
Notable Figures: Guess appearance: Cory Booker

The End of Meat (2017)
Imagining a world where meat consumption has ended.
Notable Figures: Directed by Marc Pierschel.

The Invisible Vegan (2019)
A focus on the often-overlooked contributions of Black communities to veganism.
Notable Figures: Directed by Jasmine Leyva, guest appearance by John Salley

Mission Blue (2014)
Chronicling Dr. Sylvia Earle’s mission to protect ocean habitats.
Notable Figures: Featuring Sylvia Earle.

Eating Our Way to Extinction
Exploring how our diets are destroying ecosystems and biodiversity.
Notable Figures: Narrated by Kate Winslet.

Eating You Alive (2018)
Highlighting the health benefits of a whole-food, plant-based diet.
Notable Figures: Featuring Samuel L. Jackson, James Cameron.

H.O.P.E. What You Eat Matters (2018)
Demonstrating the health, environmental, and ethical reasons for eating consciously.
Notable Figures: Guests; Jane Goodall, Vandana Shiva

Food Choices (2016)
A comprehensive look at how dietary choices impact health and the planet.
Notable Figures: Directed by Michal Siewierski.

Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home (2009)
Farmers recount their journeys from animal agriculture to veganism.
Notable Figures: Directed by Jenny Stein.

Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days (2009)
Following individuals reversing diabetes through a raw vegan diet.
Notable Figures: Featuring Gabriel Cousens.

The Cove (2009)
Unveiling the horrors of dolphin hunting in Japan.
Notable Figures: Featuring Ric O’Barry.

Speciesism: The Movie (2013)
Challenging societal norms about animal exploitation.
Notable Figures: Directed by Mark Devries.

73 Cows (2018)
The journey of a farmer transitioning from cattle farming to sustainable living.
Notable Figures: Directed by Alex Lockwood.

Live and Let Live (2013)
Examining ethical veganism and its implications.
Notable Figures: Directed by Marc Pierschel.

Land of Hope and Glory (2017)
An exposé on UK factory farming practices.
Notable Figures: Directed by Ed Winters.

Rowdy Girl (2023)
A former cattle rancher turns her farm into an animal sanctuary.
Notable Figures: Featuring Renee King-Sonnen.

Why We Love Nature but Keep Destroying It

July 24, 2024 — 1 Comment

How can we do better, collectively?

My self-professed love for nature is no secret to my readers.

Being close to nature is and has always been my thing.

Nature is wondrous, full of beauty and peace.

Hiking photo by Teekay Rezeau-Merah — Hiking photo by author Teekay Rezeau-Merah

The reason I became a vegan minimalist was mainly to protect it and its inhabitants.

But doing so opened my eyes on a fascinating paradox, especially in the vegan and vanlife communities; a paradox I ponder upon on a daily basis.

Spending more time in the great outdoors allowed me to come to a poignant realization: The very nature that we, avid nature enthusiasts and animal lovers, hold dear to our hearts, is the very same nature we often unwittingly damage with our bad habits.

How can we enjoy something so much while simultaneously participate in its destruction?

Teekay @teekayrezeaumerah — Please don’t leave toilet paper in nature (photo by author)

Well, here’s where my thinking is at the moment.

Reasoning

First of all, I want to make something clear: As pragmatic as I can be, my personal belief is that human beings are born good.

However, human beings are also amazing at compartmentalizing.

meaning of compatmentalize by Teekay Rezeau-Merah — Screenshot by author

A fitting illustration of my point is that of individuals who profess to be staunch advocates for human rights, yet they contradictorily sport Nike shoes, H&M dresses and Zara pants.

Note: If you don’t know what I’m hinting at, read this.

The same can be said about vegans who consume palm oil, or vanlifers who consume animal products (that destroy the very nature we want to be surrounded by).

Now look, I always say life is all about balance, and I believe it is, but sometimes — often times — rocking something ethically sourced won’t hurt you in any way, shape or form. Perhaps you’ll pay more for it, but you don’t have to if you buy second hand.

This applies to almost all consumables.

So the first takeaway from this piece is to think twice before your next purchases. Always consider the added value of what you buy, its environmental impact and whether there are other alternatives.

That’s one way to tackle this paradox.

Another reason we engage in actions that cause harm to nature is our toxic sense of entitlement, or deservingness.

This manifests itself in different forms: Arrogance, greed, boastfulness or in some cases, negative narcissism.

Some of us behave as if the world owes us. This sense of entitlement emanates from a lack of self-awareness and gratitude, which itself is the result of a Godless, non-religious and non-spiritual society.

Many people believe, wholeheartedly and arrogantly, that everything they have was owed to them.

Hustle culture prescribes “hard work and determination” as the ultimate solution for success, often discarding external factors that also contribute to one’s accomplishments.

Unfortunately, such attitude blinds us from seeing the bigger picture: That none of what we have, none of what we achieve is truly ours, and that it can be taken away from us at any time. It will be when we die.

More humility would do us all a world of good, and without it, we will continue indulging in things that harm us and everything we love.

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money. — Native American saying

The third reason behind this great paradox is our lack of concern for the future.

In other words, selfishness.

Social Media may have exasperated this, but many people believe they MUST prioritize their own pleasures and conveniences over the well-being of the environment and future generations.

It’s sickening when you think about it.

But I don’t blame us, not entirely. If anything, we were programmed and brought up this way, but it’s time for a change, a big one.

As a matter of fact, we can’t live like we did 30 years ago, times are changing and so should we, evolution and all.

Indeed, our planet can’t sustain our greed and selfishness for too long, and the time to turn things around is now.

I would never advocate for anything radical, life is all about balance once again.

As such, we don’t have to move to self-built huts, nor do we have to wear banana leaves, but it’s our duty to watch what we consume, how we consume it, and what we want to support.

Your dollars are more potent than your vote and your words. So put your money where your mouth is.

How

You see, I often write about boycotting certain products: Palm oil, white sugar, animal products, single use plastic, brands that pollute our water and source their products in Chinese slave camps and Bengali/Indian sweatshops, brands that support wars, so on and so forth.

To take part of this would make the world significantly better. To do so and to raised our collective awareness is as close to perfection as we can get.

That and reversing consumerism. Remember, minimalism (and essentialism) isn’t just an aesthetic, it’s a philosophy.

In 1927, a Boston-born, Harvard educated son of immigrants went to work for Lehman Brothers. His name was Paul Mazur and his interest in the economics of consumption and retailing made him a rising star in the investment banking establishment for more than 50 years.

Mostly he was responsible for manipulating the psyche of the American consumer. — Sherry Truitt

His philosophy in a nutshell:

“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture,” He wrote. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

“Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” That’s a powerful statement, and a scary one.

So you see, as stated above, human beings are born good, but we were led astray for many decades.

Indeed, our actions are often shaped by cultural and societal norms. Unfortunately, said norms favor efficiency and convenience over wellbeing and ethics. They also favor desires over altruism and consumerism over self-awareness.

We all follow patterns and attitudes considered “normal” in our society, hence why we hardly question anything.

With that being said, let’s not forget that we’re still human, and luckily for us, God bestowed upon us reason and logic.

God gave us free will too, so it’s on us to outgrow our biases and harness original thinking.

Final word

All in all, the paradox of enjoying and destroying nature at the same time is a complex and deeply ingrained issue.

It’s not just about individual behavior, it’s rooted in our cultural, political, and economic systems, making it extremely difficult to shake off.

The one thing I want to leave you with is to question things and at least make sure your actions are aligned with your values, that’s it.

Perhaps some of us have a stronger moral obligation to protect nature, while others don’t. That’s okay, life can’t be perfect and neither can we, but does that mean we should stop trying?

Peace!

Tee.

Minimalism Across Cultures and Religions

July 3, 2023 — Leave a comment

Simplicity unites.

Minimalism didn’t begin with Netflix documentaries, Scandinavian furniture or YouTube creators.

Humanity has been rediscovering the same idea for thousands of years.

I’ve noticed a genuine interest from my readers in the “HOWs” of minimalism, but how about the “WHYs” and the “WHEREs” ?

Well, that’s what we’re here for today. What you’re about to read will bring things full circle.

After reading and writing about minimalism for 5+ years, I realized that this philosophy is nothing new. In fact, throughout history, most cultures and religions have emphasized the importance of living a simple and minimalist life.

Minimalism in ancient European Civilizations

In ancient Greece, Socrates famously espoused the idea that “the secret of happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”

Socrates believed that living a simple life was key to achieving contentment and stressed the importance of focusing on the essentials. His philosophy also focused on avoiding excess and materialism.

Similarly, in ancient Rome, Seneca wrote extensively about the virtues of minimalism.

In fact, Seneca believed that focusing on the basics and refraining from excess granted human beings a sure sense of inner peace and tranquility, and he couldn’t be more right.

Not only that, Seneca also emphasized the importance of mindfulness, advocating for individuals to live in the present moment and appreciate the simple pleasures in life.

Minimalism in Eastern religions

The concept of minimalism is central to many teachings in Buddhism and Hinduism.

In fact, Buddhism teaches that “desire is the root of all suffering” and that inner peace can only be achieved by letting go of our attachment to material possessions.

Indeed, the Buddha himself renounced his belongings and lived as a monk, teaching his followers to let go of desires and attachments in order to achieve enlightenment.

The Buddhist practice of meditation is the perfect illustration of that. While Seneca didn’t insist on one particular practice to promote mindfulness and presence, his ideas perfectly match Buddhist philosophy on this point.

Similarly, in Hinduism, the concept of “Sannyasa” or “renunciation”, is a central theme.

Sannyasa involves renouncing material possessions and living simply and in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.

But Sannyasa isn’t the only Hindu concept that highlights a certain form of minimalism.

“Aparigraha” or “non-possessiveness” also points up the importance of avoiding excess and materialism in favor of simplicity and contentment, which ultimately shows that minimalism is nothing new, and that it took center stage in century long beliefs and religious practices in the East as much as in the West.

Minimalism in Monotheistic religions

In Judaism, the concept of “Tzedakah” or charity, is an essential part of the religion.

Tzedakah involves giving to those in need and promoting social justice.

By giving to others, we learn to reduce our attachment to stuff. Not only that, giving means we learn to prioritize the needs of others over our own desires.

The world needs more of this practice.

How about in Christianity?

Well, one of Jesus’ (AS) most famous teachings says “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

This idea highlights the importance of avoiding excess and materialism, and promotes selflessness and spiritual values.

Last but certainly not least, Islam.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) lived a humble and simple life. He owned the bare minimum, despite his influence, status and the wealth of his wife hazrat Khadija (RA).

7 Remarkable Things About Khadija, Wife of Prophet Muhammad

Many of Prophet Muhammad’s (PUBH) teachings revolved around the above-mentioned values of charity, avoiding excess and emphasizing spiritual and ethical values over material possessions.

Case in point, the Islamic concept of “Zakat” involves giving a fixed and predetermined percentage of one’s wealth (once a year) to the less fortunate, promoting empathy and compassion for others.

The universality of minimalism is evident in its presence across different cultures and regions worldwide, and there’s more !

Minimalism in ancient South American culture

Often forgotten when talking about minimalism and anti-consumerism, South American cultures and civilizations had some equally impressive values to the ones mentioned above.

“When the rivers are all dried up, and the trees cut down, man will then realise that he will not be able to eat money.” Native American proverb

For instance, if you look at the Inca civilization (present-day Peru, 13th to 16th century), living simply and in harmony with nature was paramount.

The Incas prioritized the concept of “Ayni,” which involved the reciprocal exchange of goods and services among members of the community, encouraging mutual aid and support.

Similarly, the Maya civilization (present-day Mexico and Central America, 2000 BC to the 16th century) practiced a simple and sustainable way of life as well.

The Maya were famous for their beliefs in the conservation of natural resources and living in harmony with the surrounding nature.

This was reflected in their agricultural practices, namely terrace farming and irrigation systems, which were brilliantly designed to maximize efficiency and minimize waste.

Quite the opposite of what we do today.

While the Incas and the Mayas are quite well-known, there’s another lesser-known civilization in the Nazca civilization.

Nazcas lived in a desert region (in modern day Peru) and relied on sustainable practices to survive.

For instance, they built underground aqueducts and water management systems to make sure they survived in their harsh environment.

The Nazcas also produced simple but elegant pottery, textiles, and other crafts, demonstrating their appreciation for the beauty in simplicity.

Nazca pottery by Teekay RM — Nazca, painted pottery (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Minimalism in ancient Asia

Last but not least, Asian ancient cultures also provide numerous examples of minimalism and simplicity being valued and practiced way back.

For instance, in ancient China, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, Taoism highlights the importance of living a simple and natural life, in harmony with the flow of the universe this time.

This is commonly known as the concept of “Wu Wei.”

“He who knows he has enough is rich.” Lao Tzu

But besides ancient China and India (through Buddhism and Hinduism), another gigantic civilization from the East has its own form of minimalism: Japan.

Indeed, the Japanese aesthetic of “wabi-sabi” is a great example of minimalism and simplicity.

Wabi-sabi celebrates the beauty of imperfection and transience, emphasizing the importance of finding joy and contentment in the simple things in life.

Final word

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

That’s what fascinates me most about minimalism.

Across continents, religions and civilizations, people repeatedly arrived at the same conclusion, that a meaningful life is rarely built on excess. Time and again, humanity discovered that simplicity, generosity and moderation lead to a greater sense of peace and contentment.

Minimalism isn’t a Western trend or a passing lifestyle. It’s one of humanity’s oldest ideas.

Perhaps that’s because our deepest needs have never really changed.

We all seek purpose, inner peace and a sense of belonging. Throughout history, countless people found that owning less often helped them appreciate more.

I hope minimalism helps you live a life that is not only simpler, but also more ethical, more intentional and more fulfilling.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay.