So, it’s been a year. Twelve months ago, 52 weeks ago, 365 days ago, my little family–one wife, one toddler, one dog, one husband–embarked on a project to live with as low as possible an environmental impact for one year, smack bang in the middle of what some people think of as the most polluting […]
Happiness and Life Satisfaction
Environmentalism means less deprivation
People ask me if the reduced use of consumer conveniences that goes with the No Impact project doesn’t mean a lot of deprivation. I say that I spend more time with my family, eat more healthily, get more exercise and am a better dad. Then I ask: “Was I more deprived before or am I […]
What No Impact feels like after ten months
Unremarkable. Life as usual. Isn’t that strange? You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more […]
Living in gratitude instead of desire
Click the image above for a larger version This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude of thankfulness. But […]
Happier people, happier planet
I harp on a lot about the opportunities in our environmental crisis. If there is one resounding lesson I’ve learned during No Impact Man, my one year experiment in extreme environmental living, it’s that being kinder to the planet can also mean being kinder to ourselves. Eating local and seasonal, part of the experiment, also means eating more healthily. […]
When what you have beats what you want
Lest I get too heady with all my talk of radical political acts and trusting wisdom before science, I thought you might like to know where No Impact Man goes body surfing while the rest of NYC wrestles their cars out the Long Island Expressway to the Hamptons. Fort Tilden, a former military base that […]
Doing stuff instead of watching stuff
A while back I went to Shabbat dinner at my friend Rabbi Steve Greenberg’s house. At a certain stage, he handed out booklets and we all sang together. I’m not Jewish so it was new to me, in a wonderful way, and I felt jealous that we did not all sing together in my house. […]
How to be an extreme, green take-charge-of-your-life machine
Somehow I got invited to be part of the LifeRemix network of talented bloggers who write mostly about productivity and other elements of how to live your life (I provide the environmental contribution). Once a week we write a group-authored post, and this week it was about—you guessed it—productivity. Each of us had to offer […]