“The green transportation hierarchy is the basic concept behind transportation reform groups all over the world, including Transportation Alternatives. The hierarchy puts city-friendly cyclists and pedestrians first. It rewards their low cost, space efficiency, and zero environmental impact. Trucks are not last because they perform vital commercial functions in cities. An important part of the green transportation hierarchy is that trucks […]
No Impact Man
What our cities could be
I’ve written before about opportunities in the environmental crisis. Getting cars out of New York City and other communities that ought to put people before cars would not only cut down on greenhouse gases and improve air quality but would offer us the opportunity to have much nicer places to live. Imagine the city as […]
The mistaken rhetoric of environmentalism
The No Impact experiment in environmental living means that, as part of trying not to harm the planet, we eat better (local food), exercise more (biking everywhere) and waste less time on screen addiction (using no mains electricity). A list of the benefits we’ve noticed, abridged to only the health-related, includes: Twenty pounds off my gut, […]
The ultra-cool reusable shopping bag
We’ve talked before about how plastic bags are the devil. On the other hand, a brand new reusable canvas bag has its own environmental impact. So…no plastic bags, but you don’t want to buy something new, what do you do? The other day, my friend Gary dropped off a couple of reusable cloth bags he’d […]
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 […]
The most radical political act there is
The other day I posted about turning New York into “one big vacation” by reducing the traffic that make our streets dangerous and our air filthy, making the rivers swimmable, building more parks and planting more trees. A couple of commenters responded by saying that I should be realistic. I am not realistic. I never want […]
Wisdom trumps science
The other day, the environmental blogosphere was atwitter (Treehugger’s reader forum and Ask the EcoGeek, for example) when a report in the Times suggested that, because of the environmental impact of growing the food that fuels our bodies, walking is worse for the planet than driving. When science can say a thing like that, and we take it seriously […]
To give or not to give
Once you start questioning the fabric or your life—as we have had to for the No Impact Man project—the inquiry never ends. You find yourself examining all your living assumptions, in this case, whether or not to give money to homeless people—street charity. For many years, my answer to this question was no. But I’ve changed. Why? As it […]