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They Won in Court in 2021. The Wind Turbines Are Still There.
I almost wrote this as a story about a resolved case. In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that two wind farms built at Fosen, on land the Sami people have used for reindeer herding for centuries, violated their rights under international human rights conventions. That sounded like an ending. It wasn’t one. The turbines…
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Fair Trade Was Built to Solve One Problem. It Wasn’t Built to Solve Every Problem.
I researched Fair Trade tea expecting to write something straightforwardly encouraging, buy the certified bag, support a better system, done. A closer look at how the certification is actually structured complicates that story in a useful way. Fair Trade is built around a price floor, a guaranteed minimum price paid to farming cooperatives for their…
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Motion Sensors Won’t Cut Our Library’s Energy Use in Half. Here’s What They’ll Actually Save.
I proposed motion sensors for our library’s study rooms this week, pitching the idea partly on manufacturer claims I’d seen tossed around, savings up to 85 percent on lighting energy. When I actually went looking for independent, published field research rather than product marketing, the realistic number turned out to be a lot more modest,…
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A Bar of Chocolate Costs More Water and Land Than the Label Ever Mentions
I priced out Fair Trade chocolate against conventional bars this week, and the environmental footprint behind both surprised me more than the price difference did. Cocoa production from Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce close to 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, grew 62 percent over the decade between 2008 and 2019, according to…
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The 42 Percent Number I Used for California’s Grid Is Already Out of Date
I wrote that natural gas supplies about 42 percent of California’s electricity grid, the largest single source, and used that number to explain why every phone charge and cloud backup traces back to a gas plant somewhere. I need to correct that figure. It’s not just slightly off. The California grid has changed dramatically in…
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Sitting Still Outside Beats Exercising Outside, According to the Actual Research
I always assumed the mental health benefit of being outside came from doing something out there, hiking, running, some kind of movement. A 2025 study out of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stanford’s Natural Capital Project found something that undercuts that assumption almost completely. The research team pulled together data from 78…
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A Chemical Plant Closed in East Palo Alto in 2007. The Site Still Isn’t Fully Clean.
I wrote a post celebrating a local community group for helping close a hazardous waste facility in East Palo Alto, describing it as a clean win. Looking closer at what actually happened to the site afterward changed how I’d describe it. The facility was Romic Environmental Technologies, a hazardous waste recycling plant that operated in…
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Two San Joses, Twelve Miles Apart
I grew up thinking of San Jose as one city. It isn’t, not really, not when it comes to something as basic as the air. I started looking into why after learning that neighborhoods along highway corridors here, places like Mayfair and Alum Rock in East San Jose, have some of the worst air quality…
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For the First Time in Two Centuries, Land in the South Bay Returns to Tribal Stewardship
I’ve walked along the Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose more times than I can count without knowing its original name. In the Tamien language, it’s called Thamien Rummey. That name comes from the Tamien Nation, whose ancestral villages once stretched from the Guadalupe River watershed through the Santa Clara Valley, land that includes most…
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Every Time a Family Moves Farther From Work, Their Commute Emissions Go Up
I’ve been thinking about a specific chain of cause and effect, rising housing costs push a family farther from where they work and go to school, and a longer commute means more transportation emissions. I wanted to know if that chain actually holds up in research, or if it was just a plausible sounding story…
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A Corner of a Parking Lot Could Become 2,500 Square Feet of Nature
There’s a corner of the Campbell Civic Center parking lot near me that does nothing except get hot. No shade, no drainage, no purpose beyond holding a few extra cars on the busiest days. I started sketching out what would happen if that roughly 2,500 square foot corner became something else entirely, and the more…
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The Hidden Price Tag on Every T-Shirt
A plain cotton T-shirt takes about 700 gallons of water to make. A pair of jeans takes closer to 2,000. I read that number a few times before it actually sank in. That’s not the water I use washing the shirt. That’s the water it took just to exist in the first place, grown, dyed,…
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I Used to Ask If My Bee Research Worked. Now I Ask Who It’s Built For.
I entered this month thinking about my bee research the way an engineer thinks about a system, build a better sensor, get a cleaner signal, publish a stronger result. I’m leaving it asking a question I didn’t have language for a month ago. Not does this work, but who does this work actually reach, and…
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I Didn’t Change My Mom’s Mind. I Just Showed Her a Number.
I told my mom I’d wasted 900 grams of food in a single day, most of it avoidable, expecting maybe a nod. She was surprised enough that we ended up tracking our household’s food waste together for a week. Now she meal plans every Sunday, we portion rice more carefully, and she’s started shopping at…
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California’s Oldest Park Is Twelve Minutes From My House
I have lived near Alum Rock Park most of my life and only recently learned it is the oldest municipal park in California, older than the state’s other famous parks, older than most of the buildings around it. It was established in 1872. Before that, it had already been public land since San Jose was…
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More Than Half the Methane From Every Landfill in America Comes From One Thing
My brother and I tracked our household’s food waste for 24 hours this week, mostly to see the number for ourselves. I knew food waste was bad for the climate in some general way. I didn’t know exactly why until I looked past the food itself and into what actually happens once it hits a…
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A Chair, a Plant, and Ten Minutes Rewired What I Thought I Needed
I set up a small space by my window this week. A chair, a plant, whatever natural light came through at that hour. Ten minutes of just sitting there, breathing, felt almost embarrassingly simple compared to how scattered I’d felt walking into it. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. I hadn’t realized either one was…
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The Farmers Market Isn’t Always Cheaper. Sometimes It’s the Opposite.
I set myself a challenge to build a plant based meal for under four dollars a person, sourced fresh, local, organic and seasonal, and my working assumption going in was that a farmers market would be the cheapest way to do it. That assumption turned out to be only sometimes true, and the exceptions were…
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I Wrote My Senator a Letter. Here’s Why I Didn’t Just Sign a Petition.
I wrote a letter this week, an actual letter, to Senator Alex Padilla, asking him to push harder on federal forest protection and to fight for California’s remaining old growth against logging. I could have signed a petition in ninety seconds. I spent almost an hour on this instead, and I wanted to know if…
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The Headline Wasn’t What Actually Protected the River
I wrote a Declaration of Rights for Coyote Creek this week, modeled on the 2017 New Zealand law that made the Whanganui River a legal person. That case has become the go to example anyone reaches for when arguing nature should have legal standing. Recent research on what actually happened in Whanganui after the law…
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Thirty Days In, and I’m Not Done Yet
Today was supposed to be the finish line. Thirty days of daily assignments, done. I thought I’d feel like I crossed something. Instead I mostly just feel like I’m in the middle of a sentence that hasn’t ended yet. Some of the month was hard in ways I didn’t expect. One day I had to…
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Technically, Nestle Is Direct Trade Too
I visited a local roaster in Campbell this week that sources coffee through what’s called Direct Trade, meaning they buy straight from farmers they know personally, no middlemen, and pay well above Fair Trade minimums. I wrote a thank you letter praising them for it. Before I send anything else like it, I want to…
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The Pause Did More Work Than the Willpower Did
I cut my spending by 60 percent this month by pausing before every purchase and asking whether I actually needed it. I credited the shift to becoming a more conscious consumer, like the change was mostly about values. Looking into the actual mechanism behind why a pause works changed how I understand my own month.…
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The Water You Drink Probably Traveled Through a Forest You’ve Never Seen
I’ve seen the claim a lot, forests provide 75 percent of the world’s fresh water. It shows up on nonprofit infographics, tree planting campaigns, sustainability slideshows. I wanted to know if it actually holds up, or if it’s one of those numbers that gets repeated so often nobody checks it anymore. The honest answer is…
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What My Dinner Actually Cost
Steamed fish, rice, and stir fried bok choy. That’s my go to dinner. Simple, healthy, nothing fancy. So when I sat down to calculate the water footprint of that exact meal, I expected a decent number. I did not expect almost 3,700 liters. Here’s how it broke down. The fish alone, about 200 grams of…
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The Chocolate Industry Spent 215 Million Dollars Fighting Child Labor. It Went Up Anyway.
I priced out Fair Trade chocolate against conventional bars this week and wrote that paying an extra dollar or two literally keeps children out of cocoa fields. I need to walk that back, because the most rigorous data available says the opposite happened over the last decade, even with certification programs in place. The definitive…
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I Read My Mentor a Letter He Didn’t Know He Needed
I wrote a letter this week to the person who taught me beekeeping. Not a text, not a quick thank you after a good hive inspection. An actual letter, specific, three pages, meant to be read out loud to his face. I didn’t know until afterward that I’d basically just run a real, published psychology…
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My Sleepy-Time Miso Soup Might Not Actually Do What I Thought
I made a bowl of miso soup with tofu, wakame and spinach last night, telling myself the tryptophan in the tofu would help me sleep. That’s a claim I’ve seen everywhere, tryptophan makes melatonin, melatonin makes you sleepy, therefore tofu before bed equals better rest. When I actually looked into the mechanism, it turned out…
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For the First Time in Two Centuries, Land in the South Bay Belongs to Its Original People
I’ve walked along the Guadalupe River in downtown San Jose more times than I can count without knowing its original name. In the language of the people who lived along it before Spanish colonization, it’s called Thamien Rummey. That name comes from the Tamien Nation, whose ancestral villages once stretched from the Guadalupe River watershed…
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The 84 Percent Statistic That Almost Made Me Give Up
A month of eating mostly plant based meals changed how I think about food. It also put me one search away from a statistic that could have talked me out of continuing entirely: 84 percent of vegetarians and vegans go back to eating meat. I looked it up expecting to feel discouraged. What I found…
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The Plastic Pellet That Looks Exactly Like a Fish Egg
Two facts from a recent lesson stuck with me more than I expected. The first is just how much of the plastic economy runs on something almost nobody has heard of. The second is that this same thing is small, round, and pale enough that a fish will eat it thinking it’s breakfast. They’re called…
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I Built a Whole Project on the Wood Wide Web. Scientists Are Now Fighting About Whether It’s Real.
I designed a school resource sharing program this week explicitly modeled on the wood wide web, the idea that trees in a forest share water and nutrients through underground fungal networks, with older hub trees supporting younger ones. It’s one of the most viral science metaphors of the last decade. It’s also, as of the…
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A 48,652 Acre Redwood Forest Doesn’t Count Toward California’s Conservation Goal
I researched California’s old growth forest protections this week and found a specific case that made an abstract policy question concrete. Jackson Demonstration State Forest, 48,652 acres of coast redwood in Mendocino County, doesn’t currently count toward California’s 30×30 conservation goal, even though it’s state owned land. It doesn’t qualify because the forest is still…
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A Four Year Study Found Fair Trade Workers Sometimes Earn Less, Not More
I researched Fair Trade tea expecting to write something straightforwardly encouraging: buy the certified bag, support fairer wages, done. The most rigorous study I found on the subject complicates that story in a way I wasn’t prepared for. A team led by Christopher Cramer, professor of the political economy of development at SOAS University of…
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Thirty Days In, and I’m Not Done Yet
Today was supposed to be the finish line. Thirty days of daily assignments, done. I thought I’d feel like I crossed something. Instead I mostly just feel like I’m in the middle of a sentence that hasn’t ended yet. Some of the month was hard in ways I didn’t expect. One day I had to…
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I Said San Jose Has No Tenant Protections. It’s Had Them Since 2017.
I built an entire climate commitment around a claim I never actually checked: that San Jose, despite being the largest city in the Bay Area, still lacks comprehensive tenant protections that would prevent displacement. I framed the plan as bringing East Palo Alto’s example to a city that had never tried anything like it. That…
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California Legalized Cultural Burning in 2022. Only Two Have Happened Since.
Ron Goode, chairman of the North Fork Mono Tribe, once stood over a patch of brush that hadn’t burned in about 120 years. He said the plants were crying. That’s not a metaphor he uses loosely. For Goode and other California tribal fire practitioners, fire isn’t destruction. It’s a tool the land has been denied…
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One Nonprofit Has Planted 75,000 Trees Here. The City’s Canopy Is Still Shrinking.
I praised Our City Forest this week for planting more than 75,000 trees across San Jose with a 93 percent survival rate, framing it as a model of awareness turning into real, measurable impact. The organization’s numbers are real. What I left out is that they’re happening inside a citywide trend running in the opposite…
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Food’s Climate Footprint Is Bigger Than I Was Telling People
I mapped out plant based food spots in my neighborhood this week and wrote that agriculture accounts for 25 percent of global emissions as the reason it mattered. I want to correct that number, because the real one is actually worse, and I’d been underselling my own argument. The most cited research on this comes…
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One School Cut Cafeteria Waste 99 Percent in a Single Day. Then What Happened?
Trash in a local stream is what pushed me to write a plan for zero single-use plastic in our schools, built around monthly cleanups and a reusable container program. Before I actually launch anything, I wanted to know if a school has done this before, and what happened after the first cleanup ended. The clearest…
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Your Sunscreen Doesn’t Poison Coral. Coral Poisons Itself.
Something like half the oxygen in every breath I take doesn’t come from trees. It comes from the ocean, from phytoplankton so small you’d need a microscope to see one. A Scripps Institution of Oceanography study put actual numbers on part of that process in 2023, a single enzyme these tiny organisms use accounts for…
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Only One in Five Young People Actually Have This, According to Stanford Research
I wrote two lines this week about purpose, it grows when passions connect to action, and small consistent steps can build toward bigger change. Both felt true when I wrote them. I wanted to know if there was actual research behind the idea of youth purpose, not just the feeling of it, so I looked…
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The Ocean Hiding in My Dinner Plate
I thought I had a pretty good idea of how much water I use in a day. A shower, some dishes, a pot of rice, a few glasses of water here and there. I did the math in my head and got about 37.5 gallons. Then I ran the numbers through a real water footprint…
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My Right to Repair Workshop Idea Is Already California Law
I planned a series of Right to Repair workshops as part of an e-waste reduction plan for my school, framing them as teaching students a new skill. I need to correct the framing, not the workshops. California already passed a Right to Repair law, the Right to Repair Act, SB 244, which took effect in…
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There Are More Living Things In a Teaspoon of Dirt Than People On Earth
I crouched down by a garden bed recently and actually looked at the dirt instead of walking past it. Dark, crumbly, threaded with roots, a faint smell like rain. I’d always filed soil under background scenery, the stuff plants happen to sit in. It turns out that’s roughly as accurate as calling a city empty…
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The Trees That Store Five Times More Carbon Than a Rainforest
Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson asks a question I can’t stop turning over, what would it look like if we actually lived as if we loved the future? Not hoped for it. Loved it, the way you’d protect something you were attached to. I used to think hope was the goal. Johnson’s answer, in her…
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The Beet in the Discount Bin Was Never the Problem
I picked a beet out of the imperfect bin at the farmers market this week, oddly shaped, greens still attached, exactly the kind of thing most shoppers walk past for something rounder and cleaner looking. It was, as far as I could tell, completely fine. Same iron, same antioxidants, same beet. It just didn’t look…
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I Grew Up Hearing Waste Not, Want Not. I Still Wasted 900 Grams in One Day.
I weighed my food waste for 24 hours, expecting a small, forgettable number. It came out to 900 grams, close to two pounds, in a single day. About 71 percent of it, by my own count, was avoidable, forgotten leftovers in the back of the fridge, rice I’d cooked too much of, a curry that…
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One Doctor Has Spent Twenty Years Proving a Walk in the Woods Changes Your Blood
Wellness lists love throwing out foreign words for feeling good. Danish hygge, Swedish fika, Mediterranean siesta. The one that actually stopped me was Japanese, shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, mostly because it turns out to be the only item on most of these lists with two decades of a single researcher’s blood work behind it. Dr. Qing…
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A Volleyball Coach’s Warning Turned Into a Movement to Get Pesticides Off Campus
In 2017, a UC Berkeley beach volleyball player named Mackenzie Feldman showed up for practice and her coach told the team something odd, if the ball rolls off the court, just let it go. The courts had been sprayed with a glyphosate based herbicide. Feldman and a teammate, Bridget Gustafson, were unsettled enough to ask…