I’ve been working on my book and today I was just feeling irrelevant and down and thinking that I just didn’t have anything much to contribute to the whole discourse on human health, security and happiness as it depends on the well-being of our habitat. I just couldn’t get any writing done. So, for a […]
Best of No Impact Man
My most amazing No Impact experience yet
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 […]
Forgive me if I sound too pious
I have a friend, a Zen teacher, who lost his daughter a decade or so ago. Years passed, and he asked his own teacher, “I have been meditating for many years, but underneath, I still feel an abiding sadness. Am I doing something wrong?” His teacher told him, “What you feel is Universal Sadness.” When […]
Time to live in the gray
So, it’s been a year. Twelve months ago, 52 weeks ago, 365 days ago, my little family–one wife, one toddler, one dog, one husband–embarked on a project to live with as low as possible an environmental impact for one year, smack bang in the middle of what some people think of as the most polluting […]
What No Impact feels like after ten months
Unremarkable. Life as usual. Isn’t that strange? You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more […]
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, […]
Too bad our planet isn’t disposable
Back in the 1920s, a group of executives migrated to General Motors from Dupont, the chemical and dye-making giant. At Dupont, they had learned from their customers in fashion and textiles—America’s third largest and fastest growing industry—the strategy of making customers want this year’s products by making last year’s products look outdated, even though they […]
Thoughts that come when immediate gratification has gone
From my journal during the time when we were first avoiding making any sort of trash: In my imagination, people used to live like this: you had most of the bare necessities but then every so often a relative managed to get hold of, say, some coffee or some salt and pepper or a guava […]