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.
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.
An interconnected system that made me healthier and more aligned.
You can’t expect your body to function properly if everything you expose it to works against it.
What you touch, what you eat, what you breathe in, what you surround yourself with matters.
Most of these changes didn’t come from theory. They came from small moments of doubt. Something feels off, you look into it, you adjust, and then you don’t go back. Over time, those adjustments start forming a pattern.
Plastic was the starting point
Once I started paying attention, plastic was everywhere. Not just single-use items, but containers, cutting boards, utensils, bottles. Even when it’s thick and reusable, it still degrades over time. Microplastics are already present in food and water, so adding more exposure through daily habits made little sense. I removed plastic containers, replaced cutting boards, and shifted entirely to glass, wood, and metal for anything that comes into contact with food. I now store and consume food exclusively using stable, non-degrading materials.
Water isn’t neutral
Tap water is often treated as a given, but once you look into what it contains, it changes how you approach it. I invested in a proper filtration system and regret not having done so earlier. Before that, I went with a basic pitcher, the Brita type, then moved to something more advanced (and more expensive) to remove a wider range of contaminants. That said, I also started being more intentional with how I drink water. In the morning, I’ll often have water with cucumber and lemon, and I’ll leave cucumber slices in the bottle throughout the day. Given how much of the body is made up of water (60%, vs 73% for the brain), it doesn’t make sense to treat it casually.
Cookware and daily exposure
Cooking used to be about convenience. Non-stick pans, plastic utensils, quick cleaning. Once concerns around certain coatings and chemical residues became more visible, that convenience started to feel like a trade-off. I replaced everything with stainless steel cookware and switched plastic utensils for wood or metal. It requires more attention, but it removes a layer of uncertainty.
Eliminating plastic in hygiene products
The same pattern showed up in the bathroom. Most hygiene products come in plastic packaging, and beyond that, their composition raises lots of questions anyway. Shampoo, shower gels, toothpaste, it’s all part of the same system. Moving away from plastic bottles was supposed to be difficult, till it wasn’t. Toothpaste remained the hardest to replace due to cost and availability, though totally doable. Plus, you can make your own, if time allows. As for shampoo, it’s been close to a decade since I’ve reduced it drastically, once a month on average, and even less in the summer when I’m regularly in the ocean or rivers. When I do use one, it’s always a natural, oil-based, plastic-free option. The rest gets washed with regular, natural soap.
Perfumes and what goes through the skin
I used to collect perfumes. At one point I had around thirty bottles. It was part of how I presented myself. Over time, I learned more about what actually goes into most fragrances. They’re not just alcohol and plant extracts. Many contain compounds that interfere with hormonal systems. Applying them directly on the skin, especially around the neck, didn’t make sense anymore. In fact, it became a health hasard. I still use what’s left of my collection, but only and exclusively on my clothes.
Body lotions and absorption
That same logic extended to body lotions. At first, plastic packaging was the issue. Then I realized the formulations themselves raised similar concerns. Long-lasting scents rely on chemical stabilizers that don’t just sit on the surface, they penetrate well into our body and weaken our nervous system. I replaced them with simpler alternatives like coconut oil, jojoba oil, and monoi stored in glass bottles. They do what’s needed without unnecessary complexity.
Sound, stimulation, and the nervous system
There’s also what we expose our brain to. I used to listen to music at maximum volume for hours every day. Looking back, it’s surprising there wasn’t more damage in my inner ear. More recently, I started questioning constant exposure to wireless ear devices as well. It’s not easy to step away from, but I’ve made adjustments. I use wired earphones more often, reduced how much I listen to anything overall, and capped the volume so it never exceeds 85 decibels on my phone. Silence has taken a bigger place too, especially through long walks.
Food as a baseline
Diet was one of the earliest shifts and it stayed consistent. Processed sugars and ultra-processed foods were removed and haven’t come back. The focus is on whole foods, fiber and stable energy rather than spikes. Fermented foods like homemade kefir became part of daily intake to support gut health. Supplements were added with specific purposes. Creatine for performance and recovery, cordyceps and lion’s mane for energy and cognitive support, vitamin D in winter, omega-3 for long-term brain health, turmeric for inflammation. Fruit is eaten whole rather than juiced to avoid unnecessary glucose spikes. Alongside this, I fast intermittently throughout the year, supporting deeper internal regulation. And of course , everything 100% plantbased and palm oil-free.
Sun exposure, corrected over time
Sun exposure is another area where I had to adjust. For a long time I approached it carelessly. I even used coconut oil thinking it would protect my skin, when in reality it was doing the opposite. I rarely burned, but that doesn’t mean there was no damage. Over time, I learned to be more controlled. Less direct exposure on the face, protection when needed, and no more chasing tans.
Living closer to nature
One of the biggest shifts didn’t come from removing something, but from changing the environment itself. Living closer to nature makes everything easier. Movement, silence, exposure to natural elements. Practices like grounding or earthing stop being abstract ideas and become part of daily life. Walking barefoot, touching the ground, spending time in natural surroundings. There’s a noticeable effect on stress levels, posture, and overall balance. Even something as simple as leaning against a tree or staying still outdoors changes how the body settles. Oh yeah, and tree hugging FTW!
Reconnecting with natural signals
Some changes are harder to explain in purely scientific terms, but still feel real in practice. Hair is one of them. There are older ideas about hair acting as a kind of antenna, a connection to the environment. Historically, cutting hair has sometimes been used not only for hygiene but also as a way to strip identity, control individuals, or disconnect them from something deeper, which is why you often see it done immediately in contexts like slavery or imprisonment. Whether or not that idea can be measured, I’ve noticed a difference since growing it out and stopping the use of chemical-heavy products. There’s a stronger sense of awareness and sensitivity, so keep your hair, guy, unless you’re balding, of course !
Positive thinking and internal dialogue
Not everything is physical. The way you think shapes how you experience all of this. I’ve always been confident, but intentional self-talk is something else entirely. It requires awareness, especially when you’ve been exposed to environments where things don’t always go well. I’ve been working on reinforcing more constructive internal patterns. At the same time, I’ve developed more understanding for people who lean toward pessimism. Most of the time it’s not a choice. It’s conditioning. Repeated negative experiences shape expectations, and those expectations shape perception. A lot of people judge that without understanding it, don’t be one of them.
Interconnectedness
At some point, all of this converges. What you eat, what you drink, what you wear, what you apply to your skin, what you listen to, where you spend your time, it all feeds into the same system. None of these changes exist in isolation. Each one reinforces the others. Once you start seeing that, it becomes difficult to go back to unconscious habits. So, approaching one’s environment and lifestyle as one interconnected system is the key to all this.
Across all these changes, the pattern is consistent. Remove what is unnecessary, reduce synthetic exposure, and replace it with simpler alternatives. When something can’t be avoided, create distance between it and the body. Over time, those small decisions compound, and life gets better.
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.
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.
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.
• 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.
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?
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.
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?
Teekay Rezeau-Merah 