In the two summers before the No Impact experiment, we went to France and Italy for three weeks each. We rented cars and had the time of our lives. This year, though the No Impact year is over, we’re continuing to make what, for me, is the difficult decision of keeping it closer to home. […]
Consumerism and Materialism
LV GRN: 42 ways to not make trash
In the last, for a while, of the LV GRN posts about how to bring No Impact measures to your own life, I’ve decided to list 42 ways we adopted to avoid making trash. If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll have seen these before. But I thought the newer readers might like to […]
LV GRN: Why recycling is nowhere near enough
People used to to ask me, essentially, why I was making such a big dig about not making trash during the No Impact project. They’d say, “I mean, it’s recyclable, right?” As Annie Leonard says in Story of Stuff, “Recycling reduces the garbage at [the landfill and incinerator] end and it reduces the pressure to […]
LV GRN: Our life in the trash
Trash tends to be a bit of the underdog of environmental concern these days. Perhaps that is because we think of the issues of trash to be limited to water and air quality problems arising from toxins leaking from landfills and dioxins and other poisons pumped into the air by incinerators (both of which are […]
The “needle exchange” approach to planetary damage
There are two ways to reduce the harm to the planetary habitat we depend on for our health, happiness and security. One is to reduce the amount of resources we consume or degrade–air, forests, atmosphere, water, etc–and the other is to make the consumption of those resources less harmful. In other words: Resources Used x […]
First to green wins, Clorox decides
I’ve written before that the big companies should make enviros the target market. To be enviro, these days, is to be cool, ethical, caring and driven by values. And as people become aware that enviro-concerns are really human concerns, that toxins in our environment mean toxins in our bodies, and that a happier planet makes […]
Conspicuous UNconsumption
If you’ve been following the story of the No Impact project at all, you’ll know that my little family did not start out as Birkenstock-wearing, reusable-bag-toting environmentalists. In fact, Michelle and I made a habit of crying for the polar bears while blasting the air conditioners. I, in particular, was a liberal shlub who had […]
An argument for a zero impact culture
Alex Steffen, of WorldChanging, writes: “The idea of zero impact ought to be non-controversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable […]