When we do anything about environmental quality—say, recycle our garbage, reduce our driving, or advocate on behalf of a treasured landscape or natural resource—we are not really engaging “the environment” in an abstract sense.

Rather, we are seeking, and sometimes finding, a different way of relating to the environment. We seek a change, not so much in an objective or abstracted thing, apart from ourselves, but a change in the relationship we actually experience.

Take global warming as an example. The threat to our livelihoods and perhaps even to our continued existence as a species is an objective fact. It is also abstract: a combination of data and phenomena spread over the entire globe, an accumulation of bits and pieces of evidence.

Global warming only becomes concrete when we begin to engage a personal and social process to do something about it. And it will become more concrete as we change what and where we drive, plant trees, and participate in campaigns for alternatives to more coal power plants.

Environmental programs and advocacy are stuck, it seems, somewhere in between objective and abstract goals (“improve water quality”) and subjective but concrete actions (“keep those suds away from the storm drain”).

A heck of a lot of effort—I'm thinking too much effort—is put toward showing links between those goals and actions. Perhaps this way of defining “effectiveness” is, in itself, part of the problem.

Maybe it would be better to simply redefine the goal itself from something objective and abstract like “improve water quality” to something more concrete like “engage the community in making decisions and carrying out actions which they believe will improve water quality.”

You could go wrong, I suppose. People's beliefs could be wrong, and could remain wrong. But we get it wrong much of the time now—failing to act, falling down on enforcement, building things wrong—even as we spend millions on monitoring and compiling reports in an attempt to be objective. And maybe there are cheaper and faster ways of ensuring we get the actions, if not all the objective facts, at least nearly right.

I always appreciate praise and admiration—sometimes I think I'm addicted to them—but sometimes praise and admiration give me an uneasy feeling.

I tried to explain that feeling to a friend. But I couldn't really make any sense of it.

I thought about it for a while. My first thought was: Maybe I'm just wrapped too tight to accept a compliment in the spirit in which it was offered. My second thought was: Maybe I'm so stuck up that I have to discount honest praise from others.

Either of those two thoughts might be accurate. However, I'm inclined to dig a little deeper.

In my working life, I've often found myself humming a favorite Dylan anthem of my adolescence, particularly this verse:

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They say “sing while you slave” and I just get bored.
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

Of all the privileges I enjoy today—and there are many—the most valuable to me is the privilege to be just like I am. That, more than anything else, has made being self-employed worthwhile.

But what does it really mean “to be just like I am”? And how does that idea square with the intention to be like a pebble in the stream, to become molded and rounded by rushing waters—a thought on which I meditate often?

Trying to think through that conundrum, I happened on a possible reason for my occasional uneasy feelings about praise.

Actually, I'm not conflicted about getting praise for anything I do or accomplish.

I do get uneasy when labeled with an inherent value or characteristic, whether presumably positive, like being articulate or thin, or presumably indifferent, like being tall or bald.

Because characteristics and labels seem somehow to trivialize the personal history or process that is still in motion.

Now, that history or process might be self-generated, through long habit or practice or study or exercise or other self-cultivation. Or not—history and process can be evolution and happenstance, like the pebble in the stream.

Either way, it's not a static, fixed attribute. It's the the process still in motion, and not any fixed characteristic, that makes me just like I am.

This absurd combination of advertisements hangs over the platform on the Lake Merritt BART station.

It's absurd because we're pouring scarce public dollars into private corporate coffers to exhort people to eat better—and at the same time, allowing other private corporations to tell people to eat more fast food.

It's absurd because rather than give our people more resources and better choices, the public health gurus think it makes more sense to put up billboards to tell them how to live their lives.

It's absurd because these self-styled do-gooder ad men (and women) seem to think you can really change these kinds of behaviors through advertising “impressions” — a proposition with scant evidence to support it.

It's absurd because we see the same failed approach in pollution prevention, where — just to give one example — we use advertising to tell people to recycle household hazardous waste, but then we don't make the recycling facilities available at convenient times because we couldn't afford to handle all the waste that would come to the facilities if people actually started to use them.

I'm all for public education, and billboards probably have their place in an overall public education campaign.

But any strategy that produces this kind of absurd juxtaposition deserves a thorough reconsideration.