I was talking to a friend who said that the problem for the general public with environmental living is that it is so complicated. How do you know what stores to go to? How do you know what products are okay for the environment? How do cut through the green spin machine that is roaring […]
Consumerism and Materialism
Happiness versus consumption
This graph (which will get bigger if you click on it) comes courtesy of the scientist in me (believe it or not, I have a PhD in engineering). The point is to show one of the things I learned from being No Impact Man–the relationship between quality of life and the consumption of our planetary […]
The garbage game
Here’s a little fun: “What did you throw in a trash can today? You probably did not give it much thought. But this week New Yorkers threw away 64,000 tons of garbage. That comes out to almost 7 billion pounds of garbage every year. Whisking off the detritus of our daily lives costs the city more than […]
Update from the land of the gray
Readers have been clamoring for updates on how we’re living in the No Impact household now that the official year is over. We’re in the stage, as I’ve said, where we’re no longer accountable to the rules but only to our consciences. First of all, let me say that the philosophy I hope to adhere […]
No Impact reentry and the lie of stuff
One thing Michelle and I really looked forward to as the No Impact year of environmental living came to an end was going to the movies. I’m not even a hundred percent sure why we cut out movies. Partly because we consumed them like, well, consumers. Partly because I was more interested in forms of […]
Picking up poo for Christmas and other sustainable gifts
I’m a big fan of Rachel of the original San Francisco Compact (the buy nothing new group), and not only because she is the only person I’ve ever known who has given, as a Christmas gift, the promise to pick up a certain number of piles of other people’s dog poop. To contextualize, Rachel walks […]
The human costs of consumption–a cool, new cartoon
Well, it’s not really a cartoon, but waste activist Annie Leonard‘s funny, hard-hitting and informative new animated short The Story of Stuff, about the effects of rampant consumption both on human health and the planet, does make you wonder if we’ve all gone Loony Tunes. Today’s No Impact Man homework is to watch the film […]
Toyota proves that winning eco-customer loyalty takes more than one green product
If you ask me, as the price of fossil fuels helps push sustainability into the mainstream, the eco crowd looks a lot like today’s early adopters for tomorrow’s mass market. That’s why, a couple of weeks back, I wrote (here and here) about how companies could win over the eco-conscious (hint: by not making uninhabitable […]