You may remember a while back when I posted about what our cities could be. I said that there were tremendous opportunities in our environmental crisis to make life better for ourselves while saving the planet. For example, planting trees in the cement maze that is New York City have the environmental benefits of: Keeping […]
No Impact Man
A herd of student no-impacters
You’re all invited to a public talk I’ll be giving at New York University on Monday night, November 12. You’ll find the details at the bottom of this page. Please come. And if you plan to throw tomatoes, please make sure they’re local! One of the hard things about the No Impact experiment is the […]
Sometimes it’s like riding against the traffic
When you ride your bike around New York City, you get frustrated by the number of cars parked in the bike lanes, forcing you to ride out into the traffic. It’s particularly frustrating when the car happens to be driven by a law enforcement officer. Today, I rode home from giving a talk up at […]
Kicking the waste habit
I’ve heard it said that our culture will never be able to live sustainably because “people are just too selfish.” But I don’t believe that people are selfish. They may not concern themselves with the far-reaching consequences of their actions as much as they do with the local consequences–on their children, on their friends, […]
Never mind CFLs, says LA Times, eat less meat
Thought you all might be interested in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, “Killer Cow Emissions,” related to sustainable eating. Basically, the article says that livestock is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (in the form of mostly methane and nitrous oxide), more than the entire transportation sector, and that, to add to the bad […]
It pays to be charitable
Around the time I started the project, I became friends with a professor at Syracuse University named Arthur Brooks. Arthur had just come out with the book Who Really Cares, his study of charitable giving that showed, among other things, that people who give to charity end up wealthier. In other words, to generalize, it is in our best […]
Winning enviro-conscious customers part 2
About the green market place, marketing guru Seth Godin wrote: “The richest and best-educated people in our economy are shifting, and pretty quickly. They’re just as willing to spend money as they always were, but now it’s not focused on fancy organic stuff at the Whole Foods Market or giant bulletproof cars from Germany or private jet travel. […]
Save the planet–a job creation scheme
People talk about how increased retail consumption will lead to the trickling down of wealth to the underprivileged. This old, scrap-off-our-table approach to economics not only doesn’t work but it’s wrecking the planet by wasting its resources. But one of the priorities adopted by Saturday’s Step It Up 2007 national action on climate change–together with […]