nature

Mass tourism = human pollution

Why Overtourism Is a Capitalist Crisis

August 25, 2026 — Leave a comment

The tourist didn’t design the system that made travel a substitute for a life worth living.

A new form of environmental propaganda has quietly become mainstream.

Every week, another headline appears telling ordinary people they are responsible for climate change, then hands down the same list of penances. Drive less. Fly less. Stop buying this. Stop enjoying that. Recently, Le Monde highlighted that tourism accounts for around 9% of global CO2 emissions.

The number itself bothers me. It’s huge, and mass tourism is something I have no patience for.

The framing bothered me even more.

Once again, the spotlight was placed on ordinary people instead of the system that shapes almost every decision they make.

It’s becoming increasingly common to hear the same message.

You’re responsible.

You’re the polluter.

You’re destroying the planet.

Study. Work. Pay your bills. Repeat. But if you finally manage to save enough money for a vacation, you’re suddenly made to feel guilty for that too.

That is not environmentalism.

That is misdirection.

Anyone who reads my essays knows I take my environmental footprint seriously. The choices behind that, the minimalism, going vegan, the way I get around, weren’t picked up to look good or fit in. They came out of years of reflection.

I’ve been a minimalist for nearly a decade because endless consumption makes neither people nor the planet happier.

I’m vegan because I care about animals. I also recognize the immense environmental cost of industrial animal agriculture, from habitat destruction to food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

I buy second hand exclusively and repair things before replacing them. I don’t buy new clothes. I’d rather walk or take public transportation than drive, and I’d rather borrow or share something than own it outright, because half the stuff we buy individually just sits there waiting to be used once a year. I’ve taken a nine hour bus instead of a forty five minute flight to the same destination, more than once, because the extra hours felt like a small price for the difference in footprint. I believe we should leave this world better than we found it.

None of that makes me exceptional. It just means I got lucky, or stubborn, enough to question habits most people never get the chance to question, because those habits get taught before we’re old enough to notice them.

Unlike wild animals, humans cannot realistically leave no trace at all. We build, consume, and transform our surroundings. But we can choose to leave as little trace as possible.

That responsibility matters.

What I reject is the idea that environmental collapse is primarily the consequence of millions of individuals making bad personal choices, as if those choices appeared out of nowhere.

They didn’t.

We’re born into a world that treats consumption as the default. Questioning it comes later, if at all, because most people spend their lives just trying to survive rent, survive the cost of food and shelter. Then, once that survival eases up even a little, we try to make up for lost time. We overconsume to compensate for what we never had, the same way anyone leaving poverty tends to, emulating the people who always had the means. “Treat yourself. You earned it. You worked hard for it.”

Individualism finishes the job from there. Look after your own happiness first, leave everyone else’s problems to someone else. That isn’t a flaw people are born with. It’s a job someone trained us for.

So yes, individuals are responsible for what they do. But the system is responsible for how most individuals were shaped to behave in the first place, and pretending otherwise lets the actual architects of the mess off the hook.

The system was built so individuals would fit inside it, and it worked well enough that the individual is now a piece of the machine that keeps breaking us. That’s what makes escape so hard. It isn’t one bad law or one greedy company standing in the way. It’s advertising, employers, housing, food systems, culture, and habit all pulling the same direction at once, thousands of small parts that don’t need to coordinate because they all reward the same behavior. No amount of individual willpower gets the masses out of a system built from that many interlocking pieces. You can opt out personally. The system barely notices.

Now, does tourism have environmental impacts?

Absolutely.

Mass tourism damages ecosystems. It strains local infrastructure. It raises housing prices. It pollutes coastlines. It turns historic neighborhoods into amusement parks. Entire cities are transformed into products designed for visitors instead of homes for residents.

These are real problems.

But they’re not caused by tourists wanting to see the world. They’re caused by an industry that’s turned that desire into something to sell as much of as possible, to as many people as possible, regardless of what the planet or the destination can absorb.

That distinction matters.

And here’s the part that should actually worry us. Right now, only a small share of the world’s population can afford to travel the way tourism gets discussed in Le Monde or anywhere else. If everyone on earth consumed the way the average French person does, we’d need close to three planets to sustain it. Live like the average American and the number climbs higher still.

The uncomfortable truth is that the planet is only holding together because most of humanity is still too poor to consume like the wealthy world does. As more of that population gets richer, and some of it will, that 9% doesn’t stay at 9%. It grows, the same way every other consumption metric grows when purchasing power spreads. We’re not looking at a stable number. We’re looking at a preview.

I also have for a long time questioned whether much of what we call tourism today is even about travel anymore. My work attests to that.

For many people, traveling is just another form of consumption.

They fly somewhere, stay in the same spots, eat at the same chain restaurants, shop in the same luxury stores, and return home with thousands of photos that exist mainly to prove they were there.

The destination changes.

The lifestyle doesn’t.

Social media has accelerated this transformation. Many destinations are no longer visited because they offer something meaningful. They’re visited because their images perform well online.

Travel becomes content.

Experiences become status symbols.

Places become backdrops.

This isn’t the industry malfunctioning. It’s the industry working exactly as designed. Travel companies exist to grow. Growth means selling more trips to more people more often, and the easiest way to do that is to sell travel as a reward, a treat, a thing you’ve earned and deserve, the same script used to sell everything else. Advertise the escape, not the destination. Call it self care. Call it living your best life. The vacation guilt the headlines produce and the vacation obsession the industry produces come from the same machine. One hand points the finger, the other hand keeps the conveyor belt running.

I think it reflects something much deeper than the shallowness of the masses.

Many people feel disconnected from their work, their communities, and even themselves. Life often revolves around earning enough money to repeat the same routine next week. Under these conditions, vacations become less about discovery and more about escape.

People aren’t always searching for another country.

They’re searching for relief.

Give people meaningful work. Give them stronger communities. Give them time with family. Give them parks, culture, nature, and purpose close to home.

Many would feel far less pressure to chase an escape valve on the other side of the planet every summer.

There will always be genuine explorers.

Some people are naturally driven to understand different cultures, ecosystems, languages, and ways of living. They travel to learn, to question their assumptions, and to return home with ideas worth sharing.

I’d guess that’s a minority. Watch how travel actually gets consumed, the itineraries, the photo spots, the same five restaurants recommended to everyone, and it’s hard to conclude that curiosity is the main thing driving most of it.

Historically, travel served the purpose of learning through exploration rather than consumption. People left home to study, exchange knowledge, observe other societies, and bring back innovations that improved their own communities.

Travel wasn’t simply about extracting something from a place.

It was about growing through them.

Today, too much tourism encourages the opposite. It treats landscapes the way it treats products, something to use up and move on from. It’s also flattening a diverse world into sameness.

That isn’t a failure of human nature.

It’s a predictable outcome of an economic system that turns everything into something to be bought and sold.

So yes, I oppose mass tourism. I absolutely do.

I oppose cruise ships that poison the oceans they sail through before dumping their waste in port cities and leaving.

I oppose short weekend flights taken simply because they’re cheap.

I oppose cities being redesigned for visitors while residents are priced out.

I oppose zoos and circuses that trade animal suffering for entertainment.

I oppose beachfront developments that sell the view and never mention what it cost to build.

I even oppose ecotourism, most of the time it’s just greenwashed tourism for the rich, another way to price out ordinary people while the outcome stays the same.

None of that makes the tourist the offender. An industry built to sell escape, and paid handsomely for doing it, is the one that turned a personal desire into an ecological liability.

The system is the culprit.

The environmental crisis will not be solved by making people feel guilty for taking a vacation. Most don’t even care.

It starts with education, teaching people to question the conditioning instead of just living inside it.

From there, it will be solved by degrowth. Not for the nation building its first hospitals or its first clean water system, that’s need. Degrowth is for the societies that already have what they need and keep manufacturing new needs anyway, the Emirates building another amusement park in the desert, Nevada building another casino with a golf course attached. One is need. The other is appetite dressed up as progress.

We already own enough clothes to dress the world for generations. The pile sitting in circulation right now would outlast most of us several times over, yet the fashion industry keeps manufacturing seasonal trends to convince us otherwise. That’s the target. That’s where degrowth should appear.

Less consumerism. Less unnecessary work. Eating plant based, living with less, minimalism as a norm rather than a lifestyle choice for the few. More shared economy and less of the individualism that trains us to treat our own comfort as the only thing worth protecting.

Degrowth looks like communities that function without a car and a credit card for every errand, hobbies that give something back instead of costing something, planting trees and cleaning rivers instead of shopping malls and card tables in casinos.

It looks like people who no longer need two weeks a year on the other side of the planet to remember they’re alive, because the other fifty weeks stopped feeling like a sentence.

Until we are willing to confront that reality, the headlines will keep telling you to fly less while the industry keeps telling you to fly more, and both of them profit from you never noticing it’s the same voice. Guilt won’t shrink a system built to keep expanding. Only pulling its foundations out will.

That’s the trip actually worth taking. And unlike the one on the brochure, nobody’s selling it to you.

Teekay

Rainforest

How to Read a Rainforest

August 20, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the plants, poisons and people who turn the jungle into a pharmacy, a grocery store and a home

I didn’t realize how little I knew about the forest until our guide started pointing things out.

Our trek through Taman Negara, near Kuala Tahan, covered around 8 kilometers. We started at 10 in the morning and got back around 5pm, with a break at Teras Waterfall before the boat ride back to town.

The trail demanded attention from beginning to end. Mud, wet rocks, exposed roots and shallow streams meant every step had to be placed carefully, and in several spots ropes were fixed to the hillside to help hikers climb or descend slippery slopes. Waterproof hiking shoes with good grip aren’t optional here. They’re the difference between enjoying the trek and spending the day sliding through the mud, if not something worse.

But the distance and the terrain weren’t what made the hike memorable. It was realizing that most ordinary-looking plants are much more than they let on. By the end of the day, I wasn’t seeing trees and bushes anymore. I was seeing functions.

Our guide walked us through plant after plant, and one stuck with me more than the rest. It was used to treat snake bites. When cut open, it’s applied directly to the wound. According to the guide, the inside of the plant would turn yellow as it absorbed the venom, and fresh pieces were applied until the inside stayed white, which is believed to mean no venom is left. Whether or not modern medicine backs that up, it’s a testament to thousands of years of people experimenting with what grows around them.

Other plants did other jobs. One relieved asthma. Another became shampoo, soap and mosquito repellent all at once. I didn’t catch its name, but all it took was rubbing a few leaves together with water before a rich, citrus-scented foam appeared in the guide’s hands. It smelled better than most commercial soaps I’ve used.

The forest also supplies drinking water. Those thick vines made famous by Tarzan actually hold water inside them, and so does bamboo. In a place where rivers aren’t always close, knowing which plants can quench your thirst can matter more than you’d think.

One of my favorite discoveries was the stingless bees. They build their nests inside hollow tree trunks, with only a narrow wax entrance reaching outside. The honey stays protected deep in the wood, out of reach of most predators. Seeing a colony hidden inside a living tree was something I’d never come across before.

There were still plenty of reminders that we were sharing the forest with wild animals. At several points, the guide stopped because he could smell them before seeing them. The scent, he said, likely came from monkeys or maybe elephants that had recently passed through. We also found deep claw marks running up the side of a tree, almost certainly left by a sun bear climbing toward a hollow trunk where bees had built their nest. As if that wasn’t enough, he showed us a recent photo of a local man who had survived a panther attack, a humbling reminder that this rainforest still belongs to its wildlife as much as its visitors.

After hours of humidity and sweat, reaching Teras Waterfall felt like a reward. The cold water washed away the heat before we made our way back to the river and boarded the boat home.

The boat dropped us off for the last stop of the day, and we walked up a slippery, muddy slope to reach the Batek camp. Right at the entrance sat a pile of freshly cut bamboo, maybe for a new hut. The camp itself had several huts, built entirely from bamboo with roofs made from local palm leaves, arranged around a central fire pit. One small hut off to the side served as the “shop” where they sell crafts to visitors. Off by one of the huts, a group of unmarried men sat together, just talking among themselves, in no hurry to be anywhere.

The Batek are one of the Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia and have lived in these forests for thousands of years. Physically, they reminded me of Papuan people, though generally taller. Their entire population today is only around 2000 people.

The camp felt almost entirely integrated into the forest. The only domestic animals I noticed were three chickens running around near the huts, apparently kept for special occasions rather than everyday meals, a small sign of how much even their world has started trading with ours.

One man showed us how they start a fire using nothing but what the forest provides. He worked in near silence, and it was over in maybe 20 seconds. The second he finished, he just sat back, calm, like he’d done it ten thousand times before, which he probably had.

Then came the blowpipes, and this is where hunting in the forest really came alive for me. The Batek still use these to hunt monkeys, squirrels and birds high in the canopy, and I was surprised by how sophisticated the weapon actually is. It’s made from bamboo, while the darts are carved from what they call water palm trees. Behind each dart sits a small piece of plant fiber that seals the tube, so the hunter’s breath pushes the dart forward with real force. At the mouthpiece is a black bulb that creates an airtight seal and makes the shot more efficient. The man demonstrating it was quiet, maybe shy, maybe just naturally calm. At one point he said something to me directly, but I didn’t catch it. Even Bahasa isn’t really their first language, let alone English.

I got to try it myself. Standing about 15 meters from the target, I took a deep breath and blew as hard as I could. The dart landed dead center, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

The darts get even more interesting once you learn how they’re prepared. Their tips are coated with poison collected from a tree. The bark is cut until a white sap starts to bleed out, then the dart is coated with the latex and left to dry. Rather than killing instantly, the poison weakens the animal over the next 15 minutes or so, and hunters simply follow their prey until it collapses.

Back at the village, the hunter presents the animal to the village leader, who carves another ring into the weapon. Over time, the blowpipe stops being just a tool and becomes a record of experience.

They told us how they live too. Unmarried men traditionally live together until they marry, often young. They don’t follow an organized religion but believe the forest is inhabited by spirits.

When someone dies, the body is placed high in a tree and the family leaves the camp to settle elsewhere.

The Batek have traditionally been nomadic, moving every few months, sometimes because food gets scarce, sometimes because predators like leopards make an area unsafe, sometimes because the death of a family member means it’s time to leave. Their movements follow the rhythms of the forest rather than property lines or borders.

Today they also host small groups of visitors and sell handmade crafts, among them miniature blowpipes and hunting sets, to supplement their income. It struck me that they’ve probably never had to think about whether those objects might get stopped by airport customs. In their world, they’re everyday tools. In ours, they’re something else entirely.

I was the last one to leave the camp, and for a moment I just stood there taking it in. These people would spend that night around the same fire pit, and the next night, and the one after that.

The view from the camp looked out over the river and the rainforest, and it hit me that this might be the oldest rainforest in the world, older than the Amazon, and these people have been living in it, exactly like this, the whole time.

Looking back, what stayed with me wasn’t any single plant or demonstration. It was realizing that the rainforest isn’t simply a collection of species. It’s a pharmacy, a grocery store, a hardware store, a source of clean water, a place of worship and a home, all at once. Without someone to interpret it, I would’ve spent seven hours walking through an endless sea of green. With a guide, I found out that almost every tree, vine and leaf had a story to tell.

This trip was a gift for my wife’s birthday. In the end, it turned into a gift for both of us, one more memory we’ll carry for a long time.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Cu Chi tunnels

The Bomb Craters That Became Bunkers Beneath Cu Chi

August 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the American War, working with nature and the remarkable ingenuity of the Vietnamese resistance

Of the three things I wanted to see around Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Cu Chi was the one I almost didn’t care about.

It was last on my list. It ended up being first in my mind.

I thought I knew the American War in Vietnam fairly well.

Turns out, I barely knew anything.

Cu Chi is a district outside Saigon where Vietnamese forces and civilians built a vast underground network during the American War. At its height, the tunnel system stretched for hundreds of kilometers beneath the jungle, allowing soldiers and civilians to live, move, fight and hide underground while American forces tried to destroy them from above.

Before I go any further, a special shoutout to our guide, Dragonking. Without his explanations, I would’ve walked away thinking I’d visited a fascinating historical site. Instead, I left with an entirely different way of looking at war, nature and human ingenuity.

The first thing he explained completely changed the way I looked at the tunnels.

Most people imagine that someone simply decided to dig more than 250 kilometers of tunnels beneath the jungle.

That’s not how it happened.

When American bombs carved enormous craters into the earth, the Vietnamese didn’t waste time filling them back in.

They used them.

A bomb crater became a bunker, built in a single night, without electricity, without machinery, without floodlights. The crater became the room. Trees, bamboo and clay hid it from above. Once the bunker was finished, they dug a tunnel to the next crater, then the next, then the next. Little by little, hundreds of isolated shelters became one of the most extraordinary underground networks ever built.

I kept waiting for Dragonking to move on to the next fact, the next date, the next number. He didn’t. He kept circling back to that same crater, that same night, as if the story wasn’t really about tunnels at all.

It wasn’t.

Along this trip, I realized I wasn’t learning about tunnels. I was learning about a completely different relationship with the world.

The deeper he went into the explanations, the more I noticed the same pattern repeating itself, over and over, in everything he described. Nothing existed on its own. Everything worked together.

The clay hid the entrances. The bamboo became pipes, supports and traps. The trees concealed the bunkers. Termite mounds inspired ventilation shafts that disappeared into the landscape. Some exits near the Saigon River even benefited from the natural movement of the tides to help circulate fresh air.

Smoke from cooking, something that could reveal an entire position, wasn’t simply vented into the air. It traveled through long underground channels before escaping so gradually that it blended into the morning mist rising through the forest.

None of it was borrowed and none of it was forced. Every part of the jungle already had a use, and they just had to notice it. Standing there, I couldn’t think of it as people surviving despite their surroundings. They were becoming part of them.

The tunnels themselves followed exactly the same philosophy. They weren’t designed to be comfortable. They were designed to favor the people who knew them.

Three underground levels housed kitchens, meeting rooms, hospitals, workshops, sleeping quarters and armories. Above them lay a maze of narrow passages, hidden doors and deadly traps. Punji stake pits, swinging spike traps and concealed trapdoors meant that even if an American soldier managed to enter, he had no idea where he was, where he was going or what waited around the next corner.

The jungle wasn’t protecting the tunnels. The tunnels were an extension of the jungle.

Then came the underground workshops, and this part genuinely left me speechless. When American bombs, artillery shells or rockets failed to explode, the Vietnamese collected them. They emptied the explosives to manufacture land mines. They cut up the steel to make traps. The enemy’s weapons became the tools of their own resistance.

Again, the same idea. Nothing was wasted. Everything was transformed.

By then, I stopped seeing individual examples. I started seeing a philosophy.

One side arrived with industrial warfare. Bombers. Napalm. Heavy machinery. The belief that overwhelming force could solve everything.

The other answered with clay, with bamboo, with rivers, with trees, with insects, with patience, with an intimate knowledge of the land they called home.

That’s probably why Cu Chi affected me so much. It wasn’t simply a story about winning a war. It was a story about understanding your environment so deeply that it becomes part of you.

Modern warfare usually leaves behind dead forests, poisoned rivers and landscapes stripped of life. Cu Chi tells another story. It reminds us that our greatest strength has never been our ability to dominate nature. It’s been our ability to work with it.

The Vietnamese didn’t separate themselves from the forest. They became an extension of it.

None of that erases what freedom cost here. No one should ever romanticize war, and nothing about those tunnels was easy or bloodless. But standing in them, one thing became impossible to ignore. The Vietnamese didn’t defeat a superpower by having more. They won by understanding something their enemy never truly could.

The land beneath their feet.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

ham sandwich in a baguette

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-heatwave-wildfire-climate-crisis

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

Take back the night

Maybe your sleep isn’t broken, maybe your schedule is

June 21, 2026 — Leave a comment

The middle sleep vs capitalism

I’ve always felt there was something strange about the way we talk about sleep.

We speak about it as if it should be clean, obedient and uninterrupted.

You go to bed.

You disappear for 8 hours.

You wake up.

You function.

Then you do it all over again the next night.

And when the body does anything else, we treat it like a problem.

Wake up at 2 AM?

Problem.

Lie there thinking?

Problem.

Feel awake for a while, then tired again?

Problem.

Everything becomes a disorder the moment it fails to fit the schedule.

But I’m no longer convinced the schedule is neutral.

I’m not even convinced it’s natural.

Because I’ve lived another kind of sleep.

Not every night. Not perfectly. Not as some routine I’m trying to sell.

But enough to know there is something real there.

I sleep for 4 or 5 hours.

Then I wake up.

Not violently. Not in panic. Not because an alarm ripped me out of my body.

I just wake up.

The world is silent.

Everyone else is asleep.

The air feels different.

My mind feels different.

I pray, then sit in that strange state between sleep and waking, between night and morning, between the body resting and the soul speaking.

And then something opens.

Ideas arrive.

Problems untangle.

Sentences appear.

Things I couldn’t solve during the day suddenly become obvious.

No noise. No demand. No performance. No one needing anything from me.

Just me, the night and whatever rises when the mind is finally left alone.

That’s when I write some of my best work.

The over-controlled mind of the day goes quiet. The part of me that’s always responding, planning, defending, explaining and calculating finally steps aside.

And something deeper speaks.

Then, after a while, my body gets tired again.

So I go back to sleep.

Another few hours.

And somehow, the whole thing feels natural.

Maybe ancient.

Not broken.

Not disordered.

Not like insomnia.

Just ancient.

As if my body remembers something the modern world has tried to erase.

Maybe sleep was never meant to be one single block for everyone.

Maybe the middle of the night wasn’t always an issue to be addressed.

Maybe waking after a few hours wasn’t always something to fear.

Maybe there was a time when the night had two doors: one for rest, one for reflection, then rest again.

Historians have written about segmented sleep, especially in preindustrial Europe. People spoke of a first sleep and a second sleep. Between the two, they might pray, think, talk, make love, tend to small things or simply exist in the dark without immediately diagnosing themselves.

That detail matters.

Because today, when someone wakes in the middle of the night, they don’t usually ask, “What is this moment giving me?”

They ask, “What’s wrong with me?”

That tells us something.

Not only about sleep.

About the society around sleep.

Because modern life doesn’t tolerate rhythms it can’t use.

It sees darkness and calls it wasted time, hence the horrendous daylight saving invention.

It sees silence and tries to fill it.

It sees the body refusing to behave like a machine and immediately asks which product, pill, app, supplement or routine can force it back into obedience.

This is where sleep becomes political.

Sleep itself is natural.

The modern sleep schedule isn’t.

It belongs to work.

To school.

To office hours.

To alarms.

To productivity culture.

To the economic need to make bodies predictable.

Capitalism colonized our sleep.

It took something ancient, intimate and mysterious, then forced it into a format that serves production.

One block.

One alarm.

One workday.

Repeat.

And because we live in a performance-driven society, even rest has to justify itself.

We don’t sleep because the body is sacred.

We sleep so we can function and be productive.

We don’t rest because life is more than work.

We rest so we can return to work less damaged.

Even sleep has been made useful.

Recovery.

Optimization.

Output.

Efficiency.

A better brain.

A better body.

That’s the real sickness.

Not simply lack of sleep.

Not simply insomnia.

A society that can only respect sleep when sleep serves production is very sick.

Nature doesn’t work like that.

Summer is not winter.

December is not June.

The year breathes.

Days stretch and shrink.

Nights lengthen and shorten.

Trees lose their leaves.

Animals slow down.

Light changes.

Energy changes.

Everything adapts except us.

We expect the same output in winter as in summer.

Same wake-up time.

Same productivity.

Same pressure.

Same artificial brightness.

As if the body should be indifferent to the sun.

As if a dark winter morning and a bright summer morning ask the same thing from us.

They don’t.

Winter asks for slowness.

Modern economic life asks for output.

Winter gives us longer nights.

We turn on the lights and carry on.

Then when people collapse, we call it fatigue, burnout, low motivation, seasonal depression or poor sleep hygiene.

Sometimes those words describe something real.

But they can also hide something.

Many people are not failing at rest.

They’re being forced to live against it.

Their rhythm isn’t broken by nature.

It’s broken by a dying society that still demands performance from exhausted bodies.

That’s why I don’t trust most conversations about sleep.

They talk about blue light, magnesium, melatonin, sleep trackers, cold rooms and perfect pillows.

Fine.

Some of that can help.

But they rarely talk about capitalism and all it entails.

Stress.

Work.

Poverty.

Grief.

Debt.

Noise.

Fear.

The nervous system living under constant pressure.

They rarely admit that many people are tired because their lives are built against the body.

Instead, they sell us solutions to problems the system created, the system being capitalism.

You’re stressed, so they sell you sleep content.

You’re overworked, so they sell you recovery hacks.

You’re anxious, so they sell you supplements.

You’re disconnected from nature, so they sell you artificial routines.

You’re exhausted by capitalism, so they sell you wellness.

And the simplest truth is ignored.

Maybe people need less stress.

More time.

More silence.

More prayer.

Work that doesn’t swallow their life.

Enough space to do things that make them happy before their body collapses at night.

Maybe people don’t need to become better machines.

Maybe they need to stop being treated like machines at all.

Science can tell us many useful things about sleep, but it becomes dangerous when it forgets that humans are not only organisms in a lab.

A sleep study can measure the brain.

It can’t fully measure what the night means to a person.

It can’t measure the feeling of waking naturally after 4 or 5 hours, praying in the dark, writing from a place you can’t access during the day, then returning to sleep as if you had visited some hidden room inside yourself.

That room matters.

That middle space matters.

The world has become so loud that we’ve forgotten what the mind does when it’s not being interrupted.

During the day, thought is constantly attacked.

Messages.

Screens.

Tasks.

People.

Plans.

Bills.

Responsibilities.

Even when we’re alone, we’re rarely alone.

But the middle of the night is different.

It gives the mind a privacy the day can’t offer.

Maybe that’s why creativity often lives near sleep, near dreams, near the strange border where the rational mind loosens and something deeper comes forward.

The edge of sleep is not empty.

It’s fertile.

Not always useful in the capitalist sense.

But sometimes revealing.

And that is not the same thing.

That’s why I refuse to see every night waking as a problem.

Sometimes it’s stress, illness or pain.

Sometimes it’s too much worry, too much light or too much life pressing on the chest.

But sometimes, it’s something else.

Sometimes the body wakes because it has entered the second chamber of the night.

The chamber where the ego is quieter.

Where ideas come without being chased.

Then sleep returns.

Not as defeat.

As completion.

First sleep.

A waking.

Second sleep.

A rhythm, a conversation between the body, the soul and the dark.

Maybe that’s what we’ve lost.

The true meaning of sleep.

We reduced it to recovery.

Made it serve productivity.

Turned it into another thing to optimize, track and monetize.

We forgot that sleep is also surrender.

Also mystery.

A borderland.

One of the last places where the body refuses complete control.

That might be why modern life is so obsessed with managing it.

Because sleep reminds us that we’re not machines and never will be.

No matter how many alarms we set.

No matter how many apps we download.

No matter how many experts explain our cycles.

At some point, the body asks to return to the dark.

And maybe, if we stop being afraid of every interruption, we might discover that the night wasn’t only made for unconsciousness.

Maybe part of it was made for meeting ourselves without the noise of the world.

The most human sleep was never a straight line.

It was a tide.

The middle of the night was never the enemy.

The enemy is a society that turned even rest into a performance.

Resist capitalism, take back your sleep.

Thanks for reading.

Tee.

Small changes to improve life

April 24, 2026 — 1 Comment

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.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Winter by Tee

Winter knows something we forgot

March 18, 2026 — Leave a comment

You don’t hate winter, you hate how we live through it.

I’m such a winter person. I resisted that idea for years because I don’t particularly enjoy being cold and I absolutely hate humidity, but I’m done arguing with it now.

Winter is my favorite season, the one that makes me feel most alive. Fall comes close behind. Maybe I’m really a fall-first person who only settles once winter arrives. Fall feels like a threshold, a kind of preparation, while winter is the place it all leads to.

Most people say they hate winter, but I don’t even think that’s true. I think they hate winter under capitalism, which is a very different thing.

Winter isn’t simply December 21st to March 20th like we’re taught in school. December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the deepest point of darkness. In many ways, that’s peak winter. It’s both the heart of it and the beginning of its slow release.

If you look at older seasonal systems, especially the Celtic calendar, winter is often understood differently. It begins around early November, with Samhain, and transitions toward spring around early February, with Imbolc. I’ve always intuitively aligned with this rhythm, a rhythm that feels more real in the body.

Winter always makes me nostalgic about my childhood. Where you grow up shapes your relationship to it. Below the equator, winter falls during what we call summer months. It’s shorter, less harsh. It’s still winter, but it doesn’t carry the same weight. Above the equator, winter has a presence. It changes everything.

Winter in New York, for example, is unmatched. But to understand it, you have to start with fall. Fall is special in a way that’s hard to replicate. The air sharpens, the leaves start falling, the temperature drops just enough to wake you up. School starts again. People return from summer scatteredness with a sense of purpose. There’s motivation, a quiet hope that something new can begin before the year closes.

Then come the holidays. I don’t celebrate them myself, but I can’t deny the atmosphere. Halloween, with kids everywhere. Thanksgiving, massive in New York. Then the Christmas season, with its films, its smells, its food. Cinnamon, baked goods, warmth. Fall is about getting cozy. It’s about preparing, consciously or not, for winter.

And then winter arrives.

One of my favorite childhood memories is hearing on the radio that a blizzard had shut everything down. Schools closed for days. Travel discouraged. The world paused. I remember the feeling of going back to bed, diving under the blanket, watching the snow fall outside. There was a kind of collective stillness. Everyone was home at the same time, in the middle of the week, which almost never happened.

Winter meant snowball fights with family and friends. Building snowmen. Coming back inside after hours in the cold to drink something hot, cinnamon-heavy or just a simple hot chocolate. Winter also meant shorter days, which I’ve always loved. There’s something honest about darkness arriving early. It forces you inward, and you simply sleep better. At least I do.

Now that I live in a coastal town, winter has taken on a different form. The place empties out. It becomes a ghost town. Only a few locals remain. I can walk through the streets, along the beach, into the forests, and not see anyone. Not hear anyone. Just space, and peace.

Fall here is also the perfect time for mushroom picking. There’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food, bringing it home, cooking it. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but when I do, it reconnects me to something older than all of this.

Winter also brings unpredictability. Storms, floods, strong winds, snow.

I’ve always been fascinated by storms. There’s something humbling about them. They remind you how small you are without humiliating you. Just placing you back in proportion.

And this is where my relationship with winter becomes more than just aesthetic.

Winter, to me, is supposed to be a time of slowing down. A form of hibernation. Not complete inactivity, but a reduction. A softening. A withdrawal from constant output.

But winter under capitalism is the opposite of that.

It’s when everything accelerates. Black Friday. Christmas consumption. New Year’s, January sales. Valentine’s Day. It becomes a concentrated period of economic extraction. A time where people are pushed to spend more, move more, produce more, exactly when their bodies are asking for less.

I don’t adhere to that. I reject it.

Because biologically, intuitively, winter asks something else from us. Even illness patterns reflect that. People don’t just get sick because of viruses. They get sick because they keep pushing at summer pace in a winter body. They ignore the signal to slow down.

Historically, people understood this. They worked through the year, harvested their crops, prepared for winter. Around the end of October, they gathered, celebrated the end of harvest. And then life shifted. Maintenance replaced expansion. Survival replaced growth.

Nature does the same. Animals retreat. Bears hibernate. Bees cluster. Even plants withdraw into themselves. Winter is not death. It’s conservation.

I sometimes imagine a different life. A cabin. A cycle where summer is for harvesting, fall for preparing, winter for resting. Wood gathered. Food stored. Time spent simply maintaining what’s already there.

Life, at its core, is that simple. But systems built on constant expansion don’t allow simplicity to survive.

Winter, for me, is also about people. Not crowds, but closeness. Seeing friends, family. Sitting together, drinking tea, sharing time without urgency. There’s a different quality to connection in winter. It’s slower, deeper.

Even sports feel different. The air, the light, the coziness of it all. Everything sharpens.

And if I’m honest, part of why I love winter is personal. I’m introverted. I need that inward space. But it’s also something else. A fatigue with what humanity has become. The constant noise, the endless movement, the destruction of everything around us.

Winter feels like a counterforce.

It slows us down whether we like it or not. A storm doesn’t ask for permission. A blizzard doesn’t negotiate. When it hits, everything stops. And in that moment, we’re all equal. No one is above it.

There’s something powerful in that.

To me, winter restores balance. It interrupts the illusion that we can operate at maximum intensity all year long. The shortening of days, the stretching of nights, the way time itself feels heavier, slower, none of that is accidental. It’s a form of design.

Fighting that rhythm has consequences. You see it in people who try to live winter like summer. They burn out. They get anxious. They get sick.

I haven’t had a cold in years. That’s not just because I’m active or because of my diet, though those matter. It’s because I try, as much as possible, to align with that rhythm. To accept that winter is not the time to push.

Winter is about gathering. With nature, with people, with yourself. It’s not about peak productivity. It’s not about consumption. It’s not about proving anything.

It’s about remembering.

And maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because despite everything, despite the systems we’ve built to override it, winter still imposes itself. It reminds us, quietly or violently, that we are not in control of everything.

That there is a rhythm beyond us.

And that we’d probably be better off listening to it.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay.

Beaver

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 magic

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.