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 […]
Environment
Why we enviros should be THE target market
People may not want to live the way we enviros live but they do want to buy the things we say it’s okay to buy. That is part of the power of the individual action of living environmentally many people underestimate. People want to associate with it. Enviro is in. We’re the cool ones. Companies that start […]
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 […]
Triggering an environmental avalanche
Doing the right thing in a world that doesn’t can feel like shouting into an empty canyon. Some people feel helpless to change because they feel like all that effort spent swimming against the current will never change the current. Eliminating my annual 20 puny tons of carbon dioxide emissions won’t cause the ocean levels to rise one inch less. […]
Why own a car when you can share one?
Tomorrow I leave with my daughter Isabella and the cameraman of the documentary about the No Impact project on a 200-mile trip to my hometown of Westport, MA, a trip I haven’t made for nearly a year because of the project. But now that the rule-based phase of the project is formally over, even my […]
NYT ethicist Randy Cohen on the ethics of transportation
Thanks to Clarence Ekerson of StreetFilms for emailing me Open Planning Project Executive Director Mark Gorton’s interview with New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen. It’s about the ethics of transportation in New York City in particular and in big cities in general. During the interview, Cohen says (slightly paraphrased): Ethics is about the effects of […]
The No Impact Dear Santa letter
Dear Santa, I was thinking about how much I love playing with my little girl Isabella and talking to my wife Michelle and joking around with my best friend Tanner. You know what I realized? There is nothing more fun than just laughing with the people I love. There isn’t a gadget or a game […]
An organization that wastes not, global warms not (and saves money, too)
If every car in the United States idled 5 minutes less a day we’d save 13 million tons of CO2. If “smart” power outlets stopped delivering current to electronics sucking up juice in standby mode, we’d save 10% of household electricity use. Okay, maybe reducing waste won’t solve the climate crisis, but it makes a […]