After my post about Kant and No Impact, an assistant professor of philosophy at Indiana State University, Brian Morton, wrote me a very long email telling me what he thought philosophers from Locke to Sartre would think of the No Impact Experiment. Fascinating! This post is my edited summary of what Brian had to say about the intersection of some […]
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A green hipster’s PDA
I’m going to tell you about my new recycled index card-based personal organizer, but first let me give you the back-story about me and my relationship to my old electronic personal digital assistant (PDA)—may it rest in peace. Michelle complained that I loved my PDA more than her. Maybe even more than Isabella the two-year-old life guru (who thinks […]
Kant’s views on No Impact living
Now I am no expert on philosophy, but my friend Eden tells me that Kant considered the best test of morality to be the Formula of Universal Law. He wrote, “act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law.” Or to translate, each of us should live […]
Getting concrete
One of the hard parts about the No Impact experiment is that it is not part of any tradition or culture. That is to say that because we are not part of any community, we have to make things up as we go along. That’s why I like this new project launched by Miranda at Simple Living and […]
Balancing a toddler bed on a rickshaw
We put off buying Isabella’s first toddler bed as long as we could. One reason is that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of room in our one-bedroom apartment for an actual bed (if only reports of our being multi-millionaires were true!). Another reason is, to be honest, that I like the containment aspect of the crib. […]
Living in the gray
We have this great picture of Isabella that Michelle had blown up on poster board some time back. Strictly speaking, of course, the poster is not in the No Impact project’s non-consumption rules. I bit my tongue. Then, we had to mount the poster. Michelle came home with some of that sticky putty, which was, again, new and not […]
Update on No Impact land
Union Square Cabbage season has ended! We spent the winter eating it boiled, steamed, fried and baked. No more. Spring has finally brought kale, chard, sweet peas, broccoli rabe and all sorts of other yummies to the farmers’ market. Yippee! We’re still waiting for in-season tomatoes and a lot of other goodies, but who’d have thought six months ago […]
Why I make environmental action personal…
…partly because news items like these make me worry that making it governmental will be too long in coming. From Dana Milbank’s “As the World Warms, The White House Aspires,” commenting on the President’s new global warming (so-called) initiative in the Washington Post on June 1: “…the plan the White House outlined yesterday listed no concrete targets or dates, […]