As the story goes, I never really convinced my wife, the “Prada wearing, Four Seasons loving” Michelle, to embark on the year-long no environmental impact lifestyle experiment with me. Instead, one day when she came home from work, she lay on the couch exhausted, wanting nothing more than for me to keep quiet so she […]
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A word on sustainable design
I visited the Greener Gadgets conference on Friday and attended the panel on new forms of mobile renewable energy. Among the presenters, one talked about a mini-windmill you could strap on your arm to charge your cellphone and another spoke of longer-life laptop battery. To get the windmill to charge your cellphone for a whopping, […]
Commenting guidelines
Dear commenting community– You guys are the lifeblood of this blog. You help me so much that I want you, as a group, to stick around and keep me honest. For that reason, there are guidelines for discussion (see towards the top on the left hand side of the main page). In the interests of […]
More on community versus consumption–smart growth
There is an ad I saw at the movies. A man wakes up, presses the snooze button, gets up late and arrives at a work meeting disheveled and disorganized. All his colleagues frown. Cut to the scene replayed. The alarm goes off. The man scoffs down a Pepsi. He jumps out of bed, puts on […]
What makes us happy is not stuff but each other
In a nutshell, the degradation of our planetary home is caused by overconsumption of resources. We in the developed world consume so many resources–we feel we need so much stuff–in part because we are alienated from each other and need consolation prizes. If we build proper communities, not only will we help the planet by […]
A balanced approach to climate change policy
OK. The title sounds over-grand, I’ll admit. But below you’ll find the last installment in my debate with Break Through author Michael Shellenberger, which I’ve just realized sums up my position on what we need as a culture. As you know, he has been arguing that reducing our cultural carbon footprint is not the way […]
Too many Big Macs?
As you know, the eating part of the No Impact project required my family to switch to eating only local, seasonal, vegetarian food. We are lucky in that local food is not difficult to get in New York City and swearing off meat has not been too hard on our palates. If you’re wondering what […]
Another installment in the environmental tiff
As you know if you read this blog, I’ve been involved in an email quasi-debate with Michael Shellenberger, co-author of Break Through: The Death of Environmentalism and the Politics of Possibility. Scan below to the non-italicized text, for the latest installment, Michael’s second email to me. You can read the first two installments here and […]