I harp on a lot about the opportunities in our environmental crisis. If there is one resounding lesson I’ve learned during No Impact Man, my one year experiment in extreme environmental living, it’s that being kinder to the planet can also mean being kinder to ourselves. Eating local and seasonal, part of the experiment, also means eating more healthily. […]
Activism and Social Change
A day in our life
One of the questions people ask me again and again is to describe a day in the No Impact life. I always think it’s a funny question, because I’m so used to it now and it seems so routine. All the same, I thought I might as well answer it: If I get it together, I wake up […]
The power of one
People ask me this a lot: what is the point of one person trying to reduce their consumption to help the environment? Isn’t that a meaningless drop in the bucket? No. It’s only meaningless if we think it’s meaningless, because if we think it’s meaningless, we’ll do nothing. Optimism, as I’ve said before, is the […]
Using less
A lot of people are talking about improved energy efficiency as a means of solving the climate crisis, which is great. But I am not convinced that technology will bring us quite enough increased efficiency to make the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. I think, too, that the climate crisis—not to mention the planet’s numerous other environmental problems—calls […]
Real environmental heroism
For all our talk of polar bears and melting icebergs and “possible” future catastrophes, there are many, many people around the United States and the rest of the world who are already living in the midst of environmental disasters. Often, these people are poor and they lack the political power to stop our power plants, our garbage dumps, our […]
Have fun!
As I write, I’m getting ready to ride my bike out to the South Bronx to meet my local environmental hero Kate Zidar, who works, among other places, at the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. We’re going to paddle around the Bronx River and look at one of NYC’s ten worst combined sewer overflows (CSOs), which regularly dumps […]
Why eating less meat helps the environment
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s November, 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options”: 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock (more than from transportation). 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon was cleared to pasture cattle. Two-thirds (64 percent) of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which contribute significantly to acid rain and acidification […]
Getting traffic off our city streets
I’ve written recently about how the environmental crisis offers us the opportunity to make life in our cities more pleasant while reducing our greenhouse gas emissions—a win/win situation. Part of the way for cities to do that is to adopt policies based on a green transportation hierarchy, which puts pedestrians, bicyclists and public transit users before automobiles (people before cars). […]