Umpteen people have written to me, because they would like me to go vegan. If I did, they say, I could eat raw, save the carbon produced by cooking on my natural gas stove (which I still haven’t figured out how to get around), and be kinder to animals. They tell me I could eat lots of nuts and […]
Consumerism and Materialism
Can consumption-based capitalism survive environmentalism?
[This post was originally titled “Can capitalism survive environmentalism?” but I’ve since realized that the current title more accurately reflects what I meant to say. I’ve also made a couple of minor adjustments in the body text to reflect this change. NIM 6/23/09] A radio journalist called to talk to me about this question yesterday. I […]
Getting concrete
One of the hard parts about the No Impact experiment is that it is not part of any tradition or culture. That is to say that because we are not part of any community, we have to make things up as we go along. That’s why I like this new project launched by Miranda at Simple Living and […]
Balancing a toddler bed on a rickshaw
We put off buying Isabella’s first toddler bed as long as we could. One reason is that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot of room in our one-bedroom apartment for an actual bed (if only reports of our being multi-millionaires were true!). Another reason is, to be honest, that I like the containment aspect of the crib. […]
Plastic in the food chain
One of the things we’ve been avoiding in the No Impact project is plastic. No plastic bags, bottles, tubs, wrappings, toys, gadgets, clothes, buttons, pipes, plates, cups, forks, spoons, knives, toothpaste tubes, shampoo bottles, dish soap bottles. In other words, just about everything. I’m old enough to remember a time before plastic became so ubiquitous, when people avoided plastic […]
A way forward for capitalism?
“…it is in this space of influencing life style choices that conservation and resource management is a great leveler among societies at different ends of the energy spectrum: an Indian who consumes 600 kWh/annum and an American who consumes over 15,000 kWh/annum have much to learn from one another. Because if one really thinks about it, the energy each consumes […]
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 […]
Worms in the apartment
I just spent the entire day–and I mean entire, as in beginning at 7 AM and ending at 9:15 PM–with a TV crew. They are doing a segment on the No Impact experiment for a major network (details to come). I hope it’s good for the cause and good for the project. Meanwhile, I’m spent. […]