In the two summers before the No Impact experiment, we went to France and Italy for three weeks each. We rented cars and had the time of our lives. This year, though the No Impact year is over, we’re continuing to make what, for me, is the difficult decision of keeping it closer to home. […]
Happiness and Life Satisfaction
An end to the musical chairs
Yesterday I posted an interview with Van Jones, who reminds us that the way things are for the poor in America makes environmentalism their last concern. Then, Anne, from Not So Big Blog, left behind a comment suggesting that the way things are for the middle class in America isn’t so great either. Compared to […]
An argument for a zero impact culture
Alex Steffen, of WorldChanging, writes: “The idea of zero impact ought to be non-controversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable […]
Greening my city makes me happier to live in it
Part of the No Impact project is to have a positive impact to offset the unavoidable negative impact of, well, being alive, and part of that has been to the work of environmental organizations. As a result of that, Wednesday night was a mega-proud night for me because I got invited to be a member […]
Little old me
A few weeks ago, at NYU, I was asked to give a short talk in response to a talk by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute (you may remember that Michael and I had an email debate here on the blog a few weeks ago). You can watch my little talk by […]
An alternative American dream
I came across a passage in Jerome M. Segal’s Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple of Living that articulates, for me, the kind of real progress that I envision. It goes like this: “The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to […]
To escape city life, embrace it
Making cities excellent for living in, by the way, is a crucial step forward if we are to maintain the planetary habitat that people depend on for their health, happiness and security. Indeed, “smart growth” and compact living are central pillars in the energy policies of many environmental organizations. To make such policies successful, though, […]
More on community versus consumption–smart growth
There is an ad I saw at the movies. A man wakes up, presses the snooze button, gets up late and arrives at a work meeting disheveled and disorganized. All his colleagues frown. Cut to the scene replayed. The alarm goes off. The man scoffs down a Pepsi. He jumps out of bed, puts on […]