Christmas Letter 2017

For three months this year, our neighborhood park hosted an installation that delighted and challenged everyone who saw it. We were one of five parks selected for the city’s Monuments Lab, a project that explored the nature and meaning of monuments in today’s world.

The artist’s concept was straightforward. She covered an existing monument with reflective material. Visitors to the park could then look at the installation and see, not the past, but the present and future, for themselves and the neighborhood.

The installation was simple. Its meaning was complex and many-layered. At times it seemed to melt into the surrounding trees, and visitors wondered where it had gone. One visitor called it a portal to another dimension. Others took photos of themselves and their reflections. Everyone who saw it found a different meaning—often more than one.

As summer came to an end and autumn approached, the light and the surrounding trees changed. The installation seemed to change as well.

When our monument’s time ended, some wondered whether it would be moved or have a permanent place in another part of the park. It had become a part of our lives, if only for a short time—a thing of beauty and wonder for all to see, enjoy, and contemplate. Now it is gone, but the monument it covered stays with us, perhaps with added meaning,

Monuments can remind us of good works and great people—but some honor men who betrayed their country to preserve a slave system that destroyed human lives and corrupted everything it touched. Remembering that part of our past is essential if we are to overcome it, but honoring it makes the task of rebuilding more difficult.

Our monument brought people together, delighted the eye, and challenged the mind. It honored the present and the future in ways that we had not seen before. It affirmed the power of art to change us for the better.

May you find beauty and hope wherever it awaits you—in the power of art, in kindness from others, and in the love that you give to those around you. May you find your own monuments and may they help you to build a better future, for everyone.

Christmas Letter 2016

Nearly three million years ago in East Africa’s Rift Valley, a new species appeared. It was both hunter and hunted, and the odds against its survival were great. It was weak, small and slow. Its senses—eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell—were no match for other predators. They would provide little protection against more powerful attackers.

As a solitary hunter, it would quickly have disappeared. But that was not its instinct or its nature. It built families to care for its vulnerable young and small communities to protect its families. It learned to hunt with teamwork, not strength. It learned to gather plants to supplement meat from the hunt.

The new species—our common ancestor—survived by cooperating, by caring about others in its community, and by working together for the common good. In the end, it became the dominant species on our planet.

Today it can be hard to remember that, despite our faults, we did not survive by practicing hatred, division, and greed. All of these in their many forms have made our journey more difficult, sometimes nearly destroying us. But at bottom they are not who we are. We evolved to cooperate with each other. We would not have survived if we had not.

All that we know about ourselves—our science, our spiritual traditions, our arts, and the wisdom of our philosophers—tells us that we can overcome our divisions and build a better world, if we have the will and if we listen to our better nature.

The voices of that nature are very quiet now. But we have been here before. The world has seemed broken, divided and hopeless before. Yet we have survived, and we have overcome hatred and division when that seemed impossible.

Even in times like these, we can make a start. We can be good neighbors. We can support our communities. We can reject hatred. We can do the healing tasks that lie before us. Together, we can create a better future.

Christmas Letter 2015

A few blocks from our house, there is a small neighborhood park. It is a quiet, attractive green space, with old trees, a historic house, playground equipment for children, and a space laid out for softball games.

Like most urban parks, it had suffered over the years from neglect and lack of funding. The playground area had become unsafe and unattractive, and there was no money to rebuild it. The sidewalks needed repairs. There were not enough light fixtures, and many were missing or broken.

For the past four years, a small group of supporters, including our family, has worked to revitalize the park and make it the community treasure that we believed it could be.

This year the city and two local non-profit groups chose our park as one of six to receive makeovers. When the park reopened this fall, the sidewalks were repaired, the playground was renewed, and, most important, the lighting was abundant and beautiful. It was a gift to the community. It would not have happened without the work of our group and the help of many people and agencies.

In a world beset by climate change, wars, terrorism, economic recession, and poisonous politics, giving a small park new life seems like a small victory—but it is not. Urban parks lift a community’s spirits, improve its health, and spark changes that benefit all the park’s neighbors and the earth itself.

So it is with many changes for the better. They begin with small victories, achieved because ordinary people took the first step and dedicated themselves to the task before them. We cannot know how our work will end, but we can know that it is right for us to do it. And, with good fortune and help from many hands, we can build a better future.

May all your good works prosper in the year to come, and may they be fruitful beyond your hopes and your expectations.

Christmas Letter, 2014

Just before Halloween this year, we turned on our holiday porch lights. The days were getting shorter. Daylight Saving Time was about to end. The headlines during the week had been discouraging. We hoped that our lights might help to cheer up the neighborhood in a time that seemed very dark.

It was a purely symbolic act. Two strings of white lights could transform our porch, but they could not transform the world.

We turn the lights on every night now, and our porch looks very attractive in the dark. The world has not changed, but at least there is one more string of lights to challenge the darkness—literally, in a small way, and, in a much larger way, symbolically.

We are a species that creates symbols. We live by them. We die for them. They point toward realms of the spirit where mere words fail us. They sustain us through difficult times and enrich our lives when times are better.

In the darkest time of the year, we celebrate our holidays with light. This is no accident. Light symbolizes hope. With it, we can find a way forward.


Happy holidays, and may your light never fail.

Christmas Letter 2013

At the end of each year, the days grow short. Darkness prevails—but only for a brief time. We know this, and we celebrate not the dark, but the light that is coming and the hope that it brings.

This year we also celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela, who brought liberation to South Africa and hope to a world that badly needs it.

Mandela would say that he did not do this, that change in his country was the work of many, not one. No great work—in politics, in science, even in more solitary disciplines like literature—happens in isolation. All build on the work of those who came before and depend for their success on the cooperation of others. That is what Mandela would probably say, and he would be right.


Yet he would also be wrong. The change in South Africa was the work of many, but it would not have come about without the vision of one who saw that he could not liberate the oppressed without also liberating their oppressors.


That was Mandela's central quest: to bring justice and healing to all who had been damaged by apartheid. South Africa's break with its past came, in the end, peacefully. Its rebuilding process has not ended, and we still do not know whether it will succeed. What we do know is that Nelson Mandela saw further and understood what was needed more deeply than any of us.


Mandela succeeded beyond all hope. He had been labeled a terrorist, yet he brought not revenge but reconciliation. He had been a prisoner of his country, yet he became its president. In the end he voluntarily relinquished his office, thereby affirming the future of democracy in South Africa.


As we observe the holidays this year, let us also remember Nelson Mandela. As we seek justice, peace, and hope, in small ways or large, we will honor his life and help to build a world that is better than the one we inherited. That is the best way to celebrate.

Christmas Letter 2012

Every year after Thanksgiving, we decorate the house for the year-end holidays. Our decorations are simple: some wreaths, a string of lights and a small display on the porch,  another string of lights in the dining room, and some tinsel and ornaments on the mantelpiece in the living room.

We grew up with Christmas, so we think of our decorations as Christmas decorations. In other households they would look different and celebrate different traditions, but the similarities in spirit would remain. Many people from many traditions—or no formal tradition at all—mark the end of the year with music, special days, special food, and family gatherings. For some it is a religious occasion; for others, a special time for family. For many it is both.

Like many other families, we decorate and celebrate in good years and in bad. Even in a year of drought, storms, floods, and conflict, like the one just ending, we try to find hope for the future. So, in their own ways, do other families and other traditions.

The end of each year is a time of darkness. The days grow shorter, and the light seems to fail. In our part of the world, the weather grows colder and more dismal. Our holidays celebrate the coming of light, and with it the triumph of hope over despair, of love over hate, of community over chaos. They help us to find a way forward even when there appears to be none.

Whatever your tradition, may you bring greater light to your home and the world in the coming year.

Christmas Letter 2011

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
—Robert Frost

A few weeks ago I watched a video of the planet Jupiter from the Pic du Midi observatory in France. The clarity of the film and the sheer beauty of the planet left me feeling awestruck, small, humble, and proud of my species all at the same time.

We will probably never know all the secrets of Jupiter. It is too far away, and its environment is too hostile for us to explore it directly. We can only, as Frost put it, dance in a ring and suppose. But in the process we have learned much and seen much that we would have missed if we had not joined the dance.

Frost’s couplet reminds us that we are human and limited—but we also try to get beyond our limitations. Our search for truth, beauty, and meaning, however, is not just a struggle. It is also a dance.

Dance requires discipline and concentration. It is never perfect. But in the search for perfection, the dancer finds great beauty, a kind of truth, and deep meaning—and in the end, great joy for dancer and audience.

So it is with all of us. We may never penetrate the Secret, but our effort to do so—our science, our philosophy, our religious and moral traditions—is what makes us fully human and reveals to us worlds we had not expected to find. It gives us hope, even in the most discouraging times.

Christmas Letter 2010

Every year at this time the days grow shorter. We celebrate the end of the year with light—the Menorah, the Christmas tree, even the strings of lights on our porches—because we know that light will grow in the new year, and in the end, darkness will not prevail.

This year it has been harder than ever to see light and hope. The financial crisis continues, and millions are suffering. Yet our leaders speak, not of generosity and healing, but of austerity and sacrifice.

The earth, too, suffers. We are slowly killing the only place we call home, yet the nations cannot agree on a plan of action that might save it.

The triumph of darkness over light can seem inevitable at times.

It need not be. We are human and imperfect; but the past is prologue, not precedent. The future can be different, and we already know how to make it so. We know because the wisest among us, and our many spiritual and moral traditions, have shown us the way.

We can put truth ahead of ideology. We can practice compassion instead of expediency. We can seek justice, not advantage. We can choose to heal rather than destroy.

None of this will guarantee a way ahead. We may always fall short of our ideals. But the fact that we have ideals at all makes a better future possible. That alone is reason for hope.

An Ethic for the Future

At a recent PEN World Voices forum on climate change, the Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder proposed an expansion of the ethic of reciprocity (the Golden Rule) to include the effects of our actions on future generations. A video of his presentation will be found in Andrew Rivkin's Dot Earth blog (Warning: the video is 1 hour 35 minutes long).

Gaarder's presentation is timely. The Golden Rule is not a rule at all, but a method for making ethical and policy decisions. Nearly all religious traditions recognize it in some form. It is simple and powerful.

Climate change is not only a scientific issue, but a moral one. The power of Gaarder's idea lies in his suggestion that the "others" in the traditional formulations of the Golden Rule must now include people not yet born who will live in the future that we create now. They will inherit the world we build or destroy.

Christmas Letter 2009

In difficult and frightening times, it is often helpful to return to first principles. How are we to live? How shall we act toward our neighbors—those who are next door, and those who, in a world of instant communication, are thousands of miles away?
Few have answered these questions more compellingly than the prophet Micah. We are required, he wrote, to do justice; to love mercy; and to walk humbly with our god.
This simple teaching grows more complex and rewarding as we reflect on it. We must do justice, but justice without mercy can become mere vengeance. We must love mercy, but mercy without justice cannot heal the world. And we must be humble. We must guard against the arrogance that can undercut both our justice and our mercy and lead us toward disaster.
Of the prophet’s three virtues, humility may be the most important today. Arrogance—the sense that we could control events without limitations—helped tempt the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan. The attempt to eliminate financial risk with accounting tricks helped bring about our economic crisis. We assumed that the earth was there for our convenience, when in fact we were destroying it. We did not practice humility, and that has cost us.
This year, let us resolve to do justice; to temper justice with mercy; and to walk humbly with our neighbors and on the earth.

The Best, the Worst, and the Good

The climate change bill that passed the House earlier this month is predictably full of compromises. Climate change deniers, of whom Congress has more than its full share, wanted no bill at all. House members who supported the bill were under pressure from energy companies, mining interests, and car manufacturers to preserve jobs and industries. The result was a cap and trade approach to controlling greenhouse gases, with givebacks to polluters, that was far from the best it could be.

Cap and trade systems are more complex than the alternative—a tax on carbon—favored by many environmentalists. They are harder to administer fairly and far more difficult to understand. Cap and trade, even without the givebacks in the House bill, is not the best approach to curbing emissions.

With all its faults, however, the bill is an important step forward, assuming the Senate passes it as well. For the first time, at least in the United States, it sets a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Imperfect as its price mechanism is, it will force businesses to consider environmental costs when setting prices, purchasing supplies, replacing equipment, and choosing shipping methods. It will not make as much difference as a more perfect approach, but it will make a difference.

The key here is to recognize that the good is not always the enemy of the best, and to avoid making the best the enemy of the good. The House bill becomes a problem only if we see it as a final policy rather than a step toward a better policy. It can also become a problem if we reject it because it is not the ideal bill. It is better than having no policy, as long as the nation follows it with more efficient and more stringent systems. If there is no followup, then, by encouraging complacency, the good has become the enemy of the best; but it is still better than doing nothing.

This general principle—that we should not let the best become the enemy of the good, and vice versa—applies in many areas. And in all these areas, the worst is usually the enemy of both the good and the best.

Consider land use planning. Better land use is essential to any program to control greenhouse gases. If shops, services, and jobs are not accessible without a car, then Americans will depend on their cars and use them all the time. They will have no choice. The best planning encourages walkable shopping districts, jobs that are within a short walk of home, and public transit connections to shopping and work located further away.

The picture at the head of this article shows the worst, both in design and in environmental impact. The fast food restaurants, each surrounded by its own parking lot, are far from where their customers live. The parking lots complicate and pollute water runoff. There is no public transit in the picture, and probably none for miles (if there is any at all). The highway that leads to these eateries is dangerous for walking and biking. This little complex is a disaster in almost every way: it is a threat to the environment and an affront to the eye, and the food is pretty bad as well (not to mention its own impact on the environment).

The best solution to the problems posed by this complex is to change the incentives so that locating a restaurant in the middle of nowhere makes no economic sense. This is unlikely all at once, but a good first step would be zoning reform to allow mixed land use (shops and offices located near, or even among, houses where people live). This will not satisfy those who think fast food complexes should all be torn down, but in the long run, well-judged zoning reform could rebuild communities and transform them. Zoning reform would begin to change the incentives, even if it did not immediately reshape the community.

The worst, however, is in this case the enemy of the good and the best. In the long run, if we do nothing about places like this fast-food complex—or worse, continue to build more of them—both our good proposals and our best proposals will no longer matter. Climate change and the damage that comes with it will be impossible to reverse or control.

Many people see nothing wrong with miles of stand-alone, plastic eateries surrounded by parking lots. No one considers environmental costs in locating a new MacDonald's or Burger King—or no one has until recently. These attitudes are deeply imbedded in our culture, and they must change. By putting a price on carbon emissions, even a flawed cap and trade system will encourage corporations to ask themselves hard questions about location, food production, and nearly every aspect of their operation. Walkable locations and smaller parking lots will become more attractive, as will locally-produced food products.

This will not be ideal—the ideal would include radical changes in the American diet, for example—but it would be a step toward lower carbon emissions. That is not the best, but it would help us to move in the right direction.

Getting There from Here—Mobility and Freedom

First in an occasional series on the ethics and practicalities of mobility.

How, in a finite world, can we get from here to there? Should we even be traveling at all? How much, and how freely?

For most of us most of the time, broad questions like these do not come up. We worry about getting to work, keeping the car fueled and running, getting to the train on time, and similar problems. Underlying all of these, however, is the question of mobility—how much we should have and how we can achieve it most efficiently.

Any discussion of mobility has three aspects:

• The Ethics of Mobility: Should we be able to move freely from place to place? If not, how are we to determine restrictions on our movements? More important, who can legitimately make that determination? (Here I am speaking about policy decisions; the ethical questions facing individuals are different from those facing policymakers.) If we have some sort of right to mobility, we face a series of decisions about the best modes of transport. Hence the second aspect of the discussion:
  
• The Efficiency of Our Transportation: How can we move individuals and large numbers of people from place to place at the lowest cost in fuel, money, stress, and emissions? Once we have a proposal to do this, we need to determine how to apply it in practice:
  
• Implementation of Transportation Plans: How can we persuade people to use the most efficient method to get to their destination?

I begin with ethics because most commentators don't discuss them. Most of our discussions concern how to make our transportation more efficient and less destructive, how to manage traffic, the state of our highways, and similar questions. To the question of whether we should be able to travel from place to place, most of us answer, "Of course," without further justification.

This is the most defensible position, but it never hurts to remind ourselves why we adopt it. The ability to move from place to place—to change cities, to change countries, to get from home to our place of work—is a fundamental component of human liberty. Countries that have restricted it, as Czarist Russia did with internal passports, are unattractive models for the future. An internal passport under the Czars was a means of social control that required a large and intrusive enforcement apparatus. Unlike a mere identity card, it could be, and was, used to restrict peoples' movements.

In order to save fuel and reduce our carbon emissions, it might be useful to restrict travel, limit the use of automobiles, or force travelers to choose certain modes of transport over others. We would do this, however, only at the cost of becoming a quite different, and far less free, society. It is no accident that totalitarian societies restrict mobility as well as speech, requiring exit visas for those who wish to go abroad and proper paperwork even for those who want to go to a different city.

Choices about mobility are also choices about what kind of society we will have. The wrong choices may change us in ways we might be unable to bear.

That, in brief, is part of the ethical case for preserving freedom of movement. Stated generally like this, it does not provide much practical guidance. The practical question is whether we can preserve mobility without destroying the planet, and if so, how. The next article in this series will take up this question, along with other ethical questions it raises.

Christmas Letter 2008

This is a time of paradox in our lives. For all of us, in the United States and around the globe, it is a season of hope—for change and for a better day to come. The recent election, though not the ultimate victory over our tragic past, has moved us many steps closer to the beloved kingdom that, each in his or her own way, we all seek.

Yet this is also a time of near-despair. Our livelihoods and ways of living are under threat, not only from economic collapse, but also from the prospect that our planet itself, the underpinning of our very existence, may break down. We are living with hope. And we are also living with despair.

This is the paradox of our time. Yet the tension between opposites—between hope and despair, joy and sadness, even good and evil—can be a creative force in our lives and in the world. That is why this is also a time of great possibility. As individuals, as a nation, and as a global people, we can still create our future. Fear tells us we must find new ways to live with each other and with the earth; hope tells us that we can.

We have already begun. This year, let us celebrate that fact and draw strength for the future from it.

Empty Houses and Toxic Loans

Amid all the commentary on the housing bubble and the banking crisis of 2008, few have asked what kind of houses and communities the real estate boom was helping to create. This is not surprising; the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the threat to the U.S. and world financial system, and the Bush Administration's bailout plan have pushed all such questions into the background.

It is important, however, that we ask them. The consequences of our current crisis will include not just financial disruption, but bricks and mortar—houses and subdivisions built on the assumption that the market would take care of community planning with little oversight from the communities where the homes were being built. The result, in far too many places, was suburban design on steroids. The new "financial instruments" that have now proven so badly flawed financed bigger houses in neighborhoods where two or three cars became a necessity because the nearest stores and services were ten or twenty miles from home.

Many of these houses are now in foreclosure, unsaleable, or abandoned. Most, because of the housing bubble, were priced far beyond the means of ordinary families. In 2003, the New York Times reported that the rise in housing prices had affected mainly communities that were already affluent. By 2008, houses everywhere had been affected to some extent. The market did a good job of making money for developers and hedge fund managers; it did a poor job of providing affordable, sustainable houses in liveable neighborhoods.

What we forgot in the early years of the 21st Century is that, as Adam Smith argued, markets alone do not create a viable society or the good life. Smith, who in his time was known as much for his moral philosophy as for his economics, relied on our moral sentiments to restrain market excesses and protect the common good.

It is impossible to know whether there will eventually be buyers for the houses now in foreclosure, or how long they will sit empty in virtually abandoned neighborhoods. As fuel prices rise and access to public transit becomes an asset, the automobile-centered suburb and the McMansion will surely become less viable. If we are wise, we will learn from this episode and begin once more to invest in real neighborhoods and sustainable housing.

A Waste of Good Food

For those who missed it, there is an excellent article by Andrew Martin in the May 18 New York Times on how U.S. consumers, supermarkets, and the food distribution system waste food (about 1 pound per day per person). The photo above, which accompanies the article, gives readers a feel for the scale of the waste.

The demand for grain for biofuels, it appears, is only one among many reasons for increases in the cost of food. Food waste, which occurs quite literally at every stage from field to grocery store to plate, is also a major culprit.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.

This is an old study, but according to Andrew Martin an update is under way. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded in a study that

Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

The problem for the planet, it appears, is not just what we eat, but what we don't eat.

A Good Way to Remember

It is the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the places where the attacks took place, in a field in central Pennsylvania, and throughout the country, Americans will remember those who died in the attacks. This is fitting and proper, even for those, like me, who disagree with the strategy and tactics of the military operations, the use of torture on suspects, and the changes in the law that followed the attacks. The dead could have been any of us, and their tragedy is ours.

But it is also important to honor the dead by our actions. To many this means supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the troops caught up in those conflicts. To others, including me, it means something different and more profound. It means changing our way of life to avoid (as much as possible) direct and indirect support for the use of terror as a tactic, wherever it occurs.

We in the West, not just in the United States, depend heavily on oil. Some of the money we spend on oil to fuel our cars, airplanes, and power plants eventually finds its way to terrorist groups and to countries like the Sudan, whose use of terror in Darfur has shocked the world's conscience.

The ability to move freely from place to place is an important component of human liberty and therefore of democracy. Electricity is essential to trade and communication. Our civilization would be much diminished if we did not have these things.

But it is fitting on this day, more than on most, to consider the human and environmental cost of our civilization and resolve to do everything in our power to make that cost smaller—and by so doing, give less indirect support to the use of terror against anyone. We owe this to the memory of the dead, to ourselves, and to future generations.

Offsetting Without Tears

Carbon offsetting, in which individuals, households and corporations "offset the carbon emissions [their] lifestyle generates by funding projects that reduce carbon emissions" (Consumer Reports, March 2008), have become increasingly popular lately. Offsetting seems to offer an accessible way to reduce emissions beyond what is possible by individual conservation alone. In principle, it is a helpful idea. In practice, there are traps for the unwary.

The system seems easy and painless. A family or corporation calculates its carbon footprint (the emissions it generates annually). This is theoretically easy to do using one of the many online carbon footprint calculators. Most calculators—which are in effect fundraising devices—assign a dollar amount per ton to carbon emissions. The user donates this amount to the organization which provided the calculator, and the money goes to projects that are supposed to lower the worlds's overall emissions, usually low-emissions power projects, conservation projects, or reforestation projects.

The difficulties with this approach, although they do not necessarily invalidate the idea of offsetting, should lead us to approach it with care:

• Calculating a family or corporate carbon footprint is not a simple matter, and the online calculators are not as easy or helpful as they seem. I tried four of them and got family footprints ranging from 16.0 tons (of carbon) per year to 32 tons. This in turn led to suggested offsetting donations ranging from $236.00 to $640.00.
  
• Every calculator that I tested needed data that was difficult (or in some cases nearly impossible) to get. This shows that the calculators are serious—providing data on energy use requires a lot of record-keeping and research—but it can be frustrating for the user, especially when:
• Online carbon footprint calculators ask different questions, which means they are using different metrics and algorhythms for their calculations. Thus it is not surprising that they get different results.
• Carbon offsets and providers are currently unregulated in the United States. Consumers should be sure that an offset provider will actually deliver on its promises.
  
• Although contributions to (or investments in) sustainable power and conservation are likely to be useful, experts differ about whether reforestation is likely to have much of an impact. An organization like The Nature Conservancy, which emphasizes reforestation and land management, may have less impact on carbon emissions than a group which invests in sustainable power. (The Nature Conservancy's calculator, however, is the most thorough and easy to use of the ones I tested, which is why it appears in the column on the right of this essay.)
  
• Some, like the environmentalist George Monbiot, argue that carbon offsetting can provide a kind of "license to pollute," allowing families and corporations to think they are saving the planet without changing their own habits—or in some cases, polluting more and rationalizing their bad habits with offsetting. This argument, while perhaps unfair, stands as a reminder that there is no solution to climate change that avoids changes in individual and corporate behavior.

Despite the difficulties, carbon offsetting has in fact raised capital for low-emissions energy and conservation projects—and reforestation, whether or not it sequesters carbon as its advocates claim, is desirable in itself for many reasons. The problem with offsetting is not the concept itself. It is finding the best way to implement it.

Here is one approach that seems reasonable for a small household. First, calculate the household carbon footprint using a good online calculator. The suggested donation will vary with the organization providing the calculator, and in any case, one household may be able to give less, another more. The simplest way to proceed is to use the suggested donation as guideline. One can only do what is within one's power to do.

The keys to this approach are

• Offset some of your household's normal usage. Offsetting is of little or no use if it becomes a rationalization for increased emissions.
• Do not simply donate to the organization that offers the calculator. If you already know and trust the organization, a donation may be the wisest use of your money. If not, without regulation and established quality standards it can be very difficult to judge. A good alternative is to:
  
• Donate to a good local project that needs financial support to succeed, or invest directly in an alternative energy project or company that needs capital.
  
• In addition to making an offsetting donation, look for additional ways to reduce your household's carbon footprint.
  

Our family's particular project is the Friends Center's green retrofit in Philadelphia. In the United States, buildings are the third largest source of greenhouse gases after the industrial and transport sectors (EPA figures), which makes green building projects particularly suitable for offsets. The Friends Center was originally a more or less typical energy-intensive 1970s building. It differs from most buildings of its era only in having windows that open, thanks to pressure on the architects from the organizations which built it. Remaking it will save a great deal on carbon emissions even though it is a small building. Supporting a project like this will not, by itself, save the planet. But it is a start.

Wagering on the Future

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal suggested in his Pensees that believing in God is a better "bet" than not believing. This is Pascal's Wager, which

. . . posits that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe, because the expected value of believing (which Pascal assessed as infinite) is always greater than the expected value of not believing. (Wikipedia)

Those who "bet" on God, Pascal argues, lose nothing if they are wrong, but gain boundless life now and in the next world if they are right. Those who "bet" against God lose nothing if they are right, but gain nothing—and may reap eternal punishment in hell for the fact of their unbelief—if they are wrong.

As an argument for religious belief, Pascal's Wager is not persuasive. Philosophers and theologians have presented many criticisms of it since Pascal's time, but the chief difficulty with it is simple: No one commits to religious belief or unbelief because of a bet. People do not manage their spiritual lives that way.

As a rough guide to risk management, however, the Wager (which is actually an example of decision theory) can be useful. It can clarify issues, and in using it we are forced to make at least approximate predictions about the consequences of our wagers.

Consider its application to climate change. The scientific consensus is that the climate is growing warmer, and that human-generated greenhouse gases—mainly from burning fossil fuels—are a major cause of the change. Those who accept this theory argue for policies that will reduce our production of greenhouse gases. A small number of skeptics argue that any observed warming is part of a natural cycle and not subject to change by human action or inaction.

In the original Wager, readers were asked to "bet" by choosing whether to live as if God is real. Applying this reasoning to climate change, we "bet" by choosing either to live as if human actions—our actions—can make a difference or choosing to live as if our actions make little or no difference.

If our actions can make a difference, then we would want to make some changes in our way of life. For example:

• We might invest in public transit to encourage people to drive less, thereby using less oil;
• We might invest in technologies, existing and new ones, not based on fossil fuels, to generate electricity; and
  
• We might invest in technologies that use less energy (e.g., compact fluorescent light bulbs) in order to use less fuel of any kind.

These actions and others we might take have one thing in common: All of them have side benefits quite apart from their effect on climate change. If we burn less fossil fuel, we will be less dependent on oil from unstable parts of the world, and our air will be less polluted. If we improve public transit and drive less, our roads will be less full and travel will become easier even for those who must drive (e.g., ambulances, which will get to hospitals faster). If we invest in sustainable technologies, we can open up new possibilities for economic development and jobs. Thus, even if we have bet wrongly and the skeptics turn out to be right, our world will be a cleaner and better place to live.

If, on the other hand, we bet that the skeptics are right, we need not take any actions to reduce our use of fossil fuels. We might want to for strategic reasons (to protect our economy from disruptions in oil supplies) or because we think reducing pollution is a good thing in itself. But nothing in the skeptics' position compels us to change. We would probably reduce pollution and fossil fuel usage less than if we had bet against the skeptics. Thus, if the skeptics turned out to be right, we would very likely be quite a lot worse off. The planet would still be warming alarmingly, the air would be more polluted, and we would still suffer from traffic jams and oil dependency.

If it turns out that the skeptics are wrong, and we have lived as if they were right, we would face the prospect of greater and faster global warming than if we had bet against the skeptics—and the air would likely be more polluted, the roads more jammed, and our lives far more at risk.

It should be an easy bet to make.

Christmas Letter 2007

In the past few years we have learned a great deal about what divides us. Our politics is bitter and partisan. Our churches, mosques and synagogues are split-sometimes lethally-over issues of doctrine, tradition, and practice. Even our popular culture caters to a fragmented, disunited world.

This is not all bad. We are diverse, and our diversity can strengthen us and make us richer and more interesting. But too often our differences become divisions. We fear the stranger. We shun the neighbor who does not follow our path. We find it hard to imagine that we have anything in common with either.

Hatred and anger-harsh words, border fences, bombings-make for exciting news. But they are not the whole story. The great moral teachers and prophets, from Jesus and Hillel to Mohammed, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, have long shown us a better way. Above all, they have taught us to love our neighbors, whoever they are; to be compassionate toward all, and to strive for a world built on justice and humane values.

It is a vision that dares us to rethink everything. But it is not a false hope. Every day, in large ways and small, people practice compassion. Acting separately, they may seem to change little. But taken together, they counter hatred and fear in surprising and effective ways. At the end of the year, let us celebrate them and look beyond the headlines toward a better world.

Small Steps, Large Ideals

In a 1940 essay, The Relevance of an Impossible Ideal, G.H.C. MacGregor argued that Christian pacifism was relevant to our lives, even if in practice we could never achieve its goals. It set a standard of conduct that allowed us to assess our own actions and decisions. Perfect peace, MacGregor suggested, might not come in this world. But we could do our best to move the world toward it and to live in harmony with it. The effort to realize the ideal in practice can in and of itself lead to positive change.

One doesn't have to agree with MacGregor's pacifism to see the importance of his argument, or to see that it applies not just to the ideal of peace, but to other ideals as well.

Consider the ideal of a sustainable world. Many of the measures that could bring about such a world are politically and culturally difficult to achieve in practice. But even small steps toward sustainability are helpful and make it easier to move forward to the larger steps we need. Ten million compact fluorescent light bulbs will not cut greenhouse emissions to safe levels—but they will make a start, and those who use them will discover that caring for the earth is not the impossible and frightening task that it might have appeared. It may even have benefits (in this case, lower electric bills). Steps that appear small may, in fact, be very large indeed if they lead to other steps in the direction of the goal.

Ideals, that is to say, do not become worthless because they are hard to achieve. They become worthless if we give up on them—or if we do not value the small changes that can lead to larger changes.

There are two ways of giving up on an ideal. One is to abandon it entirely by saying that we cannot achieve it. The other is to make the best the enemy of the good—to reject the small steps because they do not achieve the goal all at once.

In building for the future, we must avoid both of these hazards. We will not achieve a perfect world. But we can move the world closer to the ideal if we value small steps and have faith that they matter.