No Impact Man

Figuring out how to live

Figuring out how to live. Isn't that what we're all trying to do? To that point, here is some correspondence from my Facebook page to do with someone trying to figure out how to live in their own special circumstances:

To Colin and friends:

How do I become No Impact with an Autistic son? He eats good but I buy a lot of mixes (lke bread, pancakes, rice flour..etc) all of these come in little plastic bags. He is on a gluten free, casien free, egg free and soy free diet. I make mostly everything from scratch, but being no impact is ...difficult. He is 5 and still no potty trained, so he is still in pull-ups. If there is anyone out there who can give me suggestions (I am trying to potty train, but he is non-verbal so it is a challange). Thank you--Kathy

Hi Kathy--
I don't know anything about your situation but I will tell you a story. There was a woman from Egypt who wrote me and said that she ran an orphanage. She said that she had bought her 100 children presents and then she suddenly realized they were made from plastic. What should I do, she asked?

To me, No Impact has another meaning. It means to be gentle. To be kind. Sometimes, being gentle and kind has some environmental impact, but that is GOOD environmental impact.

There is no way to make no environmental impact at all. So to my way of thinking the question is, What are we making the environmental impact for? If the result outweighs the impact then, it's worth it. So I thought the Egyptian foster mama and her kids should have a ball!

At the same time, probably the Egyptian woman wanted to demonstrate some solidarity with people who are trying to live No Impact. So the trick then, to my mind, is to find some way of doing it that didn't cause the children problems--in some other part of her life.

Like me with Michelle, my wife. I can bang my head against the wall trying to get her to do all the eco things I want. Or I can just put more effort into areas where she does not resist.

Hope that helps. All the best to you and your son!
Colin

No Impact Man's environmental how-tos

I thought it might fun to feature some of the old posts on the blog that give explicit directions on how to do things ecologically. Here they are:

Cut out home heating oil–Japanese Style

Get your child to eat almost any vegetable

Get news about No Impact happenings

Skip the work travel, have a more leisurely life and save the planet

Live a $4 a gallon lifestyle in the coming $5 a gallon world

Talk to people about human health, happiness and security (or what some people call “the environment”)

Eat seafood sustainably

Solve climate change and end poverty (politically speaking)

Fill the craving to shop

Be an extreme, green take-charge-of-your-life machine

Help make the planet a better place for all of us

Negotiate a marital eco-fight

Avoid making trash

Brighten your day

Vote for the planet rather than a party

Make the top 10 changes in your lifestyle

Save money while reducing your impact

Understand the basics of a climate bailout

Keep landfills empty, in 20 steps

Eliminate 40% of manufacturing-associated greenhouse gas

Get on the personal path to green

Actually DO something

Participate in your Democracy

Compost the right way

Make your own household cleaners and avoid health risks

My rickshaw returns!!!

As you know, my famous rickshaw was stolen from outside my building. I blogged about its loss. Tonight, I got home and someone (Catherine T) had left a comment on the blog saying they saw it on 8th Street and Broadway. So I went over there, and sure enough!

Sadly, it's pretty screwed up. For some reason the robbers bent the forks. But I was able to roll it home and lock it up. Tomorrow, the amazing bike genius George Bliss is going to find a new pair of forks and fix it up. Soon, Isabella and will ride again!

Thanks Catherine!

Have you seen my stolen rickshaw?

I'm so sad to say that I woke up this morning to find that my faithful old green rickshaw had been stolen from outside our apartment building.

This was the rickshaw built for me nearly three years ago by the amazing New York bike genius George Bliss. Because it was during the No Impact Man year, I could buy nothing new, so George built my rickshaw--the No Impact SUV--from entirely second-hand parts. The plywood that made the seat was taken out of a dumpster.

The rickshaw, and biking in general, made New York City a way better place for me and my family. We get all over town more pleasantly and more quickly than by any other means.

For nearly three years, my little girl Isabella and I rode in the rickshaw around the City. Often, I'd ask Bella what she wanted to do and she would say, "Let's see what happens." That meant let's just ride around on the rickshaw and see what the day brought.

It's said that a major reason people don't turn to biking as their commuter option is fear of getting their bike stolen. But let me say that, even though my rickshaw is gone, the purchase cost means that I rode it for three years for way less than the cost of two daily subway tokens.

Even though it's gone, I'm still financially better off than if I'd never bought it.

But I'm really sad that it's gone. If you happen to see it, can you let me know? I'd love to have it back. Stranger things have happened.

Put the fun back in the holidays--spend less, enjoy more

I wanted to let everyone know about a nationwide event my No Impact Project is undertaking with the Center for a New American Dream.

During the two-weeks of the historic UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (December 7th-18th), we’re bringing people together to talk about the impact of holiday spending on their lives and the environment.

Every year, growing numbers of us are unhappy with the shopping frenzy that surrounds the holidays but most of us don’t know how to get off the treadmill. What if we worked together to find another way to celebrate? 

The No Impact Project and Center for a New American Dream have partnered in organizing a nationwide program of community screenings of the documentary No Impact Man, together with post-screening discussions about how to simplify the holidays this year.

To find a screening near you, click here. To host a screening in your community or to learn more, contact us.

How Obama could permanently strengthen our well being

Thanks to @denadu8pbb for tweeting this old post of mine. When I reread it I thought it bears reposting. One thing about a single-payer health care system. People say that it will cause an unhealthy relationship between people and the government. But my question is this: Doesn't the fact that we currently depend on major international corporations for our health care mean that we already have an unhealthy relationship with the corporations, one that requires us to continue to consume if we want the providers of our health care to survive? Isn't there something backwards about this? That's what this post is about.

Back in July, I posted the above diagram under the title Exchange of Love. The point of the diagram is that economic policy in the modern world is generally about strengthening the bonds between corporations and individuals, rather than the other, potentially more meaningful, relationships.

Under the current paradigm, this is important because it is from corporations that we get our health care, our salaries, our retirement benefits.

The problem is, that when the economic tide goes out, the corporations shrink and--by a variety of mechanisms including layoffs and plunging stock prices--so do the benefits our relationships with them offer. Because the relationship between the corporation and the individual is entirely fiduciary, loyalty and longstanding relationships don't really factor.  A decision at far-away head office suddenly decimates an entire community.

Meanwhile, because we have invested so much in the relationships with  corporations, the other relationships are weakened, which means that they can't provide sustenance when the corporate bond breaks. Why would neighbors help neighbors when they barely even know each other?

So what if, instead of investing government money only in corporations to bolster that bond, President Obama also invested in strengthening local community and familial relationships? Suppose he invested in local farming and local business and general strengthening of bonds between people at the proximate level?

If he did that, when the crises came, and the corporations shrunk, wouldn't that mean that we might have the relationship with family, friends and local business that allowed us to rely on each other? Wouldn't that mean, too, that even if the boom money went away, we would still have the enduring satisfaction and support of a strong community?

And if we had those strong relationships, isn't there a chance that we wouldn't require so many planetary resources in form of "stuff" to have a good quality of life? In other words, if we could play more and rely more with and on each other, wouldn't we need fewer planetary resources and things to feel satisfied with our lives?

Lose weight with the trash-free food diet

I was just at a trash summit put together by the Alice Ferguson Foundation.

The Foundation teaches kids about the outdoors and environmental stewardship, but the problem was that they were getting all this trash washed up on their property on the banks of the Potomac River. So they started the Trash Free Potomac Watershed with the goal of making it trash free by 2013.

Anyway, at their trash summit, someone was talking about the big problem of finding bags full of cups and what not from the big chain restaurants that people just turfed out of their cars after chowing down a fast food meal from the drive through.

I thought: no one was complaining about the litter resulting from food that is actually good for you. Nobody was finding or complaining about the Potomac being choked up by heads of lettuce or apple cores or carrots--you know food that fortifies without making us fat.

And it suddenly occurred to me that only food that is bad for us has any trash associated with it. Only food that is bad for us needs packaging. So I've been thinking about a new healthy eating diet. All you have to do is never eat food that has packaging associated with it and you'll automatically end up healthy and skinny!

Healthier people, healthier planet. Yay! Because it turns out that what trashes the planet trashes ourselves.

PS Can you think of other examples of what trashes the planet trashes ourselves? Leave the thought behind here. Thanks!

How to go No Impact

You may have heard that over 4,700 people went No Impact via the NoImpactProject.org's No Impact Week, hosted last week on the Huffington Post.

Missed it?

No worries. The NRDC's website Simple Steps is getting ready to host our week one more time, starting November 15, as period of non-consumptive mindfulness in the run up to the holidays. You can register here.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for a little motivation, read what a few folks said about the No Impact Week at Huff.

Or you can watch the video by one No Impact Week participant below:

The world acts as one

Last Saturday, citizens from 181 countries gathered in 5245 separate actions to demonstrate for a global agreement that called for no more than 350 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

When have so many people from so many countries ever agreed on anything?

Eco-conflict in an eco-marraige

From my favorite press piece on No Impact Man, an article by AP report Samantha Gross:

Toward the end of the experiment, Conlin would talk about how much she wanted a dishwasher again. But when they flipped the power switch, the machine stayed dead. There was no way to fix it, and an attempt to buy a used model flopped. So Conlin did her research and found a new one that seemed the most responsible purchase.

But when they got to Home Depot and saw it, she couldn’t stop thinking: All those shiny new parts. The huge box it would come in. All that packaging.

“I just couldn’t pull the trigger,” she says now, sitting in her apartment, all the lights turned off in favor of the afternoon sunlight wafting through the windows.

Still, she says, “I foresee myself at some point in my life having a dishwasher.”

Her husband looks at her in some surprise: “What has to happen before you can do that?”

“We’ve had so many arguments about the dishwasher,” he says, laughing. “So basically the subtext here is don’t let Colin for a minute think that he’s won this fight.”

“When I want one, I’ll get one,” she says with a smile.