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by shoo 3838 days ago
## Things I've been doing this year that's a change from last year:

* switched jobs from full time permanent to better paying less interesting contract work

* moved house to reduce expenses

* growing vegetables

* donating to crowd sourced environmental lobbying campaigns, attending the odd climate change rally

## Thinking that's influenced these actions

+ our civilisation is geared towards pursuing economic growth, that was a reasonable idea in earlier times, but is now an arguably terrible one, as we near/exceed planetary environmental boundaries. changing reality, old thinking. our goals are wrong.

+ if i learn to be more self sufficient and live modestly i can retire in a few years, and will be more resilient against things going amiss with the economy / society.

## Books I've read that have influenced my thinking:

* a stack of climate-change related books. e.g. here's a few book recommendations from a post i made earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053960

* personal finance blogs

Warning: it's probably best not to read a bunch of climate change books if you are in a place in your life where you are prone to depression.

4 comments

@shoo Have you seen http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/? Also, message me if you want to collaborate on an environmental advocacy platform. http://writegreen.org/ Unfortunately, it's not currently working because I need to migrate the app to Cedar 14 on Heroku. I haven't been hacking since 2011 (http://mbahacks.com/), so not feeling confident I could successfully migrate myself. Here is the old writegreen site that talks about the idea a bit more: https://writegreen.wordpress.com/problem/ . The Nature Conservancy and NRDC were interested in the tool, but I wasn't able to invest any more time into it at the time (I had a family to feed).

Anyhow, I'm looking to get back into trying to make a dent on this topic. Would love to connect with others to collaborate on something. Writegreen, or otherwise. I'd like to leave this world to my children better than I found it. Right now, it's not looking that way. You can message me directly via ed dot castano at gmail.com

Honest question: Does any of these books predict any positive change due to climate change ? I can hardly believe that climate change will be a catastrophic event, without any further qualifier.

Other than that, your lifestyle change is something that has been on my mind for years now. Kudos for "shipping".

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/Zeitgeist-Movement-Defined-Realizing-T...
Climate change does make for difficult reading, I just finished Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall. It was a fascinating read but pretty grim.