One of my most avid readers is, well, my mom. Since I’ve never quite been the best at staying in touch, she tells me that, because of the blog, she feels closer to me than she has in years (love you, mom). Needless to say, the post she liked the most was the one about entertaining my […]
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If rich people don’t buy stuff, how do poor people make a living?
A while back, I got an email from Emily Hauser, an OpEd writer for the Chicago Tribune, who rightly said, essentially: It’s all very well saying plastic bags are the devil, but what about the jobs of all the people who work in plastic bag factories? What do we do about them? Yesterday, here on No Impact Man, we […]
The No Impact sustainable eating plan
There’s been a bit of press backlash against eating locally lately (see here and here). It’s too bad because such spin and counterspin has the effect of everybody being confused about what to do and therefore doing nothing. Michelle, my wife, calls it “stasis through obfuscation.” Others refer to it as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), a marketing method that weakens […]
Waste less food, make less greenhouse gas
Since we’ve been discussing the ins and outs of worm composting here on No Impact Man, I thought we might take a look at the important whys and wherefores of diverting food from landfills. According to the EPA: “The decomposition of food and other waste under anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) […]
Preserving veggies
One way we keep our local food diet—which we do to keep down carbon-producing “food miles,” among other reasons—is by getting our veggies from the West Village CSA. A CSA—community supported agriculture—works by a bunch of people buying “shares” in a farm’s crop. If it’s a good year, you get lots of stuff. If it’s not so good, you […]
Free bikes all over New York?
“Congestion pricing came to a halt after a head-on collision with Albany on Monday,” wrote David Haskell, founder of the New York Bike-Share Project, in an OpEd entitled The Path of Least Congestion in Wednesday’s New York Times. “The New York State Senate decided not to take up Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge a fee to drivers entering the […]
Slimy pets to eat your garbage and entertain your kids
When I first told my wife Michelle I was going to keep worms in a bin to turn our food scraps from garbage into compost, she said no way. She was like “Worms in my kitchen? Forget it.” But guess what? We have a bin full of worms in the kitchen and have had for several months. Isabella, my […]
What am I for?
There are some big questions that used to keep me up at night when I was a kid, before I made the mistake of learning how to ignore them. Why was I born? Where is it that I’m hurrying to before I die? What is the thing in this life that has true value? Does anything endure? […]