What do you get when you combine no throwaway packaging with local food only? Not too many tasty treats, I can tell you. So the other night, I trundled along to a party thrown by the environmental magazine Plenty and bumped into David Kistner, founder of the Green Apple Cleaners, which uses CO2 instead of […]
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Eating local vs organic
A couple of weeks ago, we had a potluck brunch for a bunch of friends and we set them the challenge of bringing only local food. We thought it would be fun to give people a taste of the No Impact experiment since stage two of No Impact Man is sustainable eating, which means, in […]
In which no impact man finally finds recycled notebooks
So I start traipsing around the stationers (since buying online means packaging) and no one has recycled notebooks. Not Kate’s Paperie, not anyone. It’s dispiriting. They don’t have them because there is no demand for them. Meanwhile, here in the USA, we cut down a huge number of trees for paper, most of which ends […]
Politics isn’t working–case in point
Referring to my previous post about not trusting politicians to fix the world, I forgot to mention a case in point: the Democrats folded on the Iraq war and voted for it. So, if I believe that the war is fought for oil–and I do–does it not make sense not to use so much oil […]
If you don’t trust the politicians, take matters into your own hands
One thing I forgot to mention in the introductory posts to this project is how depressed I am about politics in the United States. Winston Churchill said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” The question is, though, whether we still […]
Stopping the junk mail tree killers
It’s two months since I began the no impact man stage concerned with stopping trash, but my recycling bin is still filling up with paper I never bought, never used, and never wanted. The junk mail pours in. Five years ago, I bought my step-mother Beth some flower bulbs. The company has sent me two catalogs a year […]
Day one and the whole thing is a big mistake
My journal entry from Nov 20, 2006, the first day of No Impact, when learning to make no trash was top of the agenda: The first shock is that you can’t buy any individually packed items, walk into Bagel Bob’s and get an everything with tofu to go wrapped in tinfoil, or even get a coffee in a […]
What you need to know
The blog is just launching this balmy February day of 2007—yippee!—but our no impact experiment has been going on for two and half months. So, just a little recap and update to let you know what you need to know to understand what is going on and where we’re at. No Impact Man is my experiment […]