Something a regular reader of this blog may have been able to guess about me: I suffer, at times, from anxiety and depression. I’m not talking about the worst kind of anxiety and depression. I’m talking about the kind that takes the edge off the gratitude I should be feeling for a good life. Not, […]
Consumerism and Materialism
Health care and the environment
You’d think that the environment and the debate over universal health care weren’t connected, right? But what I’ve been thinking is that for all of us to begin to choose lifestyles that might be both better for us and better for environment, we have to be able to unplug from the Matrix. We have to […]
Why living No Impact contributes to happiness
I have a college professor friend and today he conjectured as to the reasons why choosing a life with less impact contributed to my family’s happiness during the No Impact year. He said that important contributors to happiness are: Meaning: I got a lot of satisfaction out of living a life that seemed connected to […]
What we’d gain if we built things to last
Lots of nights we have talks about Teddy. Isabella wants to know about when her mom was little and how she played with Teddy, too. As things age, they collect stories. Stories of our families that connect us to them. In my own case, I have a pair of my grandfather’s cufflinks and his watch. […]
Another way to fill the craving to shop
Shopping is an American social pastime, but the problem is that shopping from “want,” instead of from “need,” causes the use of planetary resources we can’t afford to burn. We talked about this a little here. Yesterday, I mentioned how much fun my daughter Isabella had running out to a farm field to harvest vegetables. […]
Taking Personal Responsibility for Climate Change
The following is a post by my friend Leslie Berliant. Leslie is a partner at BLU MOON Group, a cause marketing and communications firm. She writes the GoingGreen column for pnn.com and is also a contributing writer at SolveClimate.com, EnergyBoom.com, DesmogBlog.com, the LOHAS Journal and other online and print publications. This weekend, I went to a […]
Remembering My Mom’s Lessons About Waste
As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emission than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Sakamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I’d Rather Be In Japan, to check in with us every so often. I thought we might be able to learn […]
What does success mean to you?
A friend told me of an experiment today. He said that a researcher would leave a four-year-old in a room with a marshmallow and tell the kid that he would be gone a few minutes. The kid was allowed to eat the marshmallow, but if it was still there when the researcher got back, the […]