I get to the Hudson River near Battery Park City at, like, 8:00 AM on Saturday morning for the Manhattan Island Foundation’s “Cove to Cove” swim in the Hudson River (read the background here and here). It’s freezing. Well, not freezing, but you know, if you’re going to swim in some of the same water that New York City annually […]
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Two kids in an emergency room
Everyone wants to know about my sponsored swim in the Hudson on Saturday and it’s coming—I promise—but what’s more on my mind is the ambulance ride and the emergency room visit that came the night before: About ten o’clock on Friday, Isabella is in bed asleep and a funny noise comes from her and I pick her up and […]
How to save the planet in five easy paragraphs
Click the illustration to enlarge If you happen to know any presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens or dictators who are interested in saving the world, please email the following to them. It is my easy guide to averting climate catastrophe, a quick summary of “Carbon Crisis” by Bill McKibben, which included the graphic above and […]
Saturday I swim…
…in the Manhattan Island Foundation’s “Cove to Cove” swim in New York Harbor, and I just wanted to let you know why it is that I am choosing that my sponsorship money goes to the Bronx-based Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ). It has nothing to do with polar bears or ice caps or people suffering from rising water […]
Living in gratitude instead of desire
Click the image above for a larger version This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude of thankfulness. But […]
Sometimes it’s hard
This afternoon I got an email from Michelle: “What should we do about dinner tonight? I think we might be out of food.” She was right, we were. Yesterday I forgot to go to the farmers’ market, and today it was a choice between picking up food at our CSA (community supported agriculture group) or […]
The positive impact of positive impact
It’s impossible to reduce one’s negative environmental impact to zero, so the conceit of the No Impact project has always been to reduce our negative impact as much as possible and then to increase our positive impact. In other words, we reduce the harm we do to the planet and increase the good we do in the hope that, […]
Our squatters’ park on Seventh Avenue
Here it is: the little park we made last Friday on Seventh Avenue, right outside the Whole Foods on 24th Street, which has no place for it customers to sit and eat. As you can see, they came and ate with us instead! Over 100 people hanging out in a 12 by 8 foot park […]