“Bottled water has already turned tap water into a commodity, and corporations are stepping up their efforts to privatize public water systems.” —Letter to the New York Times by Gigi Kellett, campaigns director, ”Think Outside the Bottle,” Corporate Accountability International. “At the same time, to ensure maximum profits, these companies are lobbying to weaken water quality standards, and pushing for trade agreements […]
Consumerism and Materialism
What if this is as good as it gets?
There is an idea that there is always something better to do, something better to have, somewhere better to be, someone better to be with. Solving the problem, I have sometimes allowed myself to believe, just requires buying something (and using planetary resources). The problem is that when I get the better thing, it turns out that there is, […]
If rich people don’t buy stuff, how do poor people make a living?
A while back, I got an email from Emily Hauser, an OpEd writer for the Chicago Tribune, who rightly said, essentially: It’s all very well saying plastic bags are the devil, but what about the jobs of all the people who work in plastic bag factories? What do we do about them? Yesterday, here on No Impact Man, we […]
The No Impact sustainable eating plan
There’s been a bit of press backlash against eating locally lately (see here and here). It’s too bad because such spin and counterspin has the effect of everybody being confused about what to do and therefore doing nothing. Michelle, my wife, calls it “stasis through obfuscation.” Others refer to it as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), a marketing method that weakens […]
Waste less food, make less greenhouse gas
Since we’ve been discussing the ins and outs of worm composting here on No Impact Man, I thought we might take a look at the important whys and wherefores of diverting food from landfills. According to the EPA: “The decomposition of food and other waste under anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) […]
Preserving veggies
One way we keep our local food diet—which we do to keep down carbon-producing “food miles,” among other reasons—is by getting our veggies from the West Village CSA. A CSA—community supported agriculture—works by a bunch of people buying “shares” in a farm’s crop. If it’s a good year, you get lots of stuff. If it’s not so good, you […]
Slimy pets to eat your garbage and entertain your kids
When I first told my wife Michelle I was going to keep worms in a bin to turn our food scraps from garbage into compost, she said no way. She was like “Worms in my kitchen? Forget it.” But guess what? We have a bin full of worms in the kitchen and have had for several months. Isabella, my […]
How we avoid making trash
In case you’re new to the No Impact Man project, you should know that we’ve broken down our lives into six areas and tried to figure out how to live with as low an impact as possible in each area. The six areas are: trash (as in we try to make none), carbon-producing transportation (as in we don’t use […]