Now that I’ve finished the draft of my book, we’re finally on holiday. What we used to do, before the No Impact project, was fly to France to stay with friends. But the long haul flight made enough carbon emissions to equal the average American’s entire year of driving, and we had to rent a […]
Consumerism and Materialism
Business People: Forget the fallacy of the zero sum game
Zero sum game: A situation or interaction in which one participant’s gains result only from another’s equivalent losses. Sometimes, we imagine business works that way. But what a sad, sorry way to look at the world. And if we do look at the world that way, does it make us happy? Let me explain: The […]
Waste
I talk so much about waste of resources here on this blog, but what’s really important is not waste of resources but waste of life. We’ll waste a lot of life if we keep wasting so many planetary resources–climate change, oceans fished out, lakes dead from acid rain, children with asthma. And there is waste […]
Oil addiction
Remember that song that went something like “your foot bone is connected to your ankle bone?” Well here’s a cool video from Good Magazine that makes the same sort of connections all the way from dinosaurs to oil to high food prices. You could get the crazy idea that breaking our reliance on fossil fuels […]
A great life need not cost the earth
I could spend my time working to pay for and watching things like this: Or I could take that same time–as I did this weekend–and spend it with my three-year-old Isabella doing stuff instead of watching stuff: The politicians and so many others worry that using fewer planetary resources means deprivation and that deprivation won’t […]
What’s good for the planet is good for your baby’s butt
Remembering back about Bella in diapers and thinking how, if you bring up cloth diapers, people always want to talk about the study that show that the environmental impact of manufacturing plastic diapers is no worse than blah blah blah. Even if I trusted the objectivity of a study funded by Procter & Gamble, who […]
Saving resources, improving lives, securing your corporation’s future
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote: “If the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, no matter how renewable its materials, really be called sustainable? Because isn’t using resources to make things we don’t even need the definition […]
Spin, counter-spin, counter-counter-spin and on and on
Watch the short video above. At first, you think, that proves it. If cell phones can make popcorn kernels pop, the claims that cell phones cause brain tumors must be true (read here for nonspin background on this possibility). The industry denials, the video seems to confirm, are just spin. But then you go to […]