This a guest post by Beth Terry, who blogs about not using plastic at Fake Plastic Fish. If, by the way, you’re an international reader, don’t think the absence of new posts on November 22 and 23 means I’m dead. It’s a holiday here in the USA. Happy Thanksgiving! My dad asked me the other day […]
No Impact Man
Time to live in the gray
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 […]
Take the pledge (but drink all the beer you want)!
This is a guest post by Jenna Garland, who works with Corporate Accountability on their Think Outside the Bottle Campaign. Jenna wants us all to sign a pledge to stick with drinking tap water instead of bottled. Here, she tells us why: The Think Outside the Bottle campaign is asking people to pledge to opt […]
Use less or use better?
One of the debates within environmentalism is this question of whether to solve the planetary crisis we will have to use fewer resources or whether we will just have to use them more efficiently and cleanly. There are those, in other words, who seem to believe that we will get to keep driving around in […]
The truth
I want to give Bill Richardson credit for speaking it–meaning the truth–during the Democratic debate tonight. He said that oil, coal and nuclear are not sustainable, that we need to move to renewables, and something like “and I’m going to be honest, Americans are going to have to make sacrifices and use their appliances less.”
Should I change or should they?
That’s one of the questions lying behind the perceived antagonism between individual and political environmental action. But I don’t perceive the antagonism. Which is better? To me, that’s like asking–apples or oranges–which are better? Change is either top-down nor bottom-up but every which way including sideways. I know there is an argument that one person changing […]
Environmentalism’s crucial challenge
People are worried as hell about climate change, but that worry is combined with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Why? Partly because of the assumptions people have. Look below at these two slides from a talk I gave at Cooper Union last night. Slide One shows what many people believe and why they feel hopeless: […]
Entertaining Isabella without TV
Sorry, if you’ve seen this one before, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll enjoy it… A reader named Chrissy wrote to me and asked how we entertain Isabella without TV or video games: We build towers from a set of wooden blocks and laugh our heads off when the towers fall down. Towards bedtime, we sit […]