I had coffee today with a fabulous blogger from Melbourne, Australia named Gala Darling who is in town in hopes of eventually transferring her life here. I’d never met her before except by email. We connected some time ago because my blog software told me she had linked to No Impact Man and I wrote […]
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Designers: If it isn’t life-enhancing, can it really be sustainable?
Consider, first, that reduced resource use and sustainable lifestyles, on both the cultural and the individual level, need not mean deprivation. As an individual-level example, studies show that bicycle commuters are happier than car and transit commuters. As a cultural-level example, people who live in pedestrian-friendly areas like villages, where cars are used less frequently, […]
Not until I let go of “us” and “them”…
…will the violence ever stop.
Day off for me and a present for you
Click on the image to enlarge. I’m too tired to write much, but the artist Pamela Talese today made me an email present of this painting by her colleague Valeri Larko. Pamela thought I would like it because we’ve been talking about when to turf out appliances this week, and I figured you’d like it […]
So much for the polar bear
Tomorrow, Friday, May 16, is Endangered Species Day. To celebrate, the Bush Administration has made the historic decision to list the polar bear as endangered while promising to do absolutely nothing substantive about it. Here is what Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition, had to say about it on their Stop Extinction […]
350: The number the whole world needs to know
The problem: 350. One great solution: 350.org. 350. I should write it 350 times. We should all write it 350 times. Everyone on the earth should get out a pen, write down the number 350, and send it to their head of state. 350 times. Now let me explain. For the next two or three […]
Who needs appliances anyway?
Yesterday, we talked about whether replacing old but perfectly good and working appliances with new, more energy-efficient models made sense (see here). We crunched numbers to do with the “embodied energy” and environmental impact of the manufacture of the new appliances versus the amount of energy potentially saved. [This just in: I majorly screwed up […]
When to turf out an old appliance for the energy efficient model–The New York Times is wrong [Except that I made a big mistake in my calculations so they may be right]
[This just in on May 13: I majorly screwed up yesterday’s calculations causing the embodied energies of the steel to be over-estimated by a factor of five and therefore throwing this whole post off. Ugh. So sorry. The argument is not as straightforward as I had hoped and I will have to look into it more for the […]