First thing, wanted to remind you that I also twitter here and I friend my readers on Facebook here. Onwards… As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I’d […]
Society
Urban gardening time is here!
During the No Impact project, I helped my friend Mayer Vishner with his vegetable plot in the Laguardia Community Gardens here in New York. For those of you who don’t know, a community garden is a public piece of land broken up into a checkerboard of plots and a different gardener tends to each plot. […]
What is true progress?
Because of my stance on consumption, I get accused sometimes of being anti-progress. This is interesting to me, because I am very pro-progress. I want so much progress. It’s just that I’m not sure that the societally accepted definition of progress is correct. Heading in the same direction we’ve been heading for the past 100 […]
The difference between hell and heaven
My dentist Gary is one of my best friends, and I visited his office today. I joked with him, “Why do you have to make your living by tearing my mouth apart?” Actually, he’s great at his job, but that’s another story (email me if you’re looking for a great New York dentist). The point […]
To participate in the real economy
This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto who writes the blog I’d Rather Be In Japan. You can read his previous post on No Impact Man here. “Thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.” —The New York Times I keep reading about how saving is the worst […]
What makes me happiest doesn’t cost the planet
My little girl Isabella and I just spent the weekend at a gathering at the Providence Zen Center, the head temple of the Kwan Um School of Zen, where I meditate. There were five or six other kids there and from the moment we arrived Isabella ran around having fun and paying almost no attention […]
To save the planet, we’ll have to bury the party political hatchet
I’m sick of inter-party animosity. I’m tired of progressives who won’t listen to a person who identifies as conservative. I’m tired of conservatives who won’t listen to a liberal. How unlikely is it, anyway, that either the classical liberal or conservative ideologies provides the best policy solution for every situation? Doesn’t it make sense that […]
Some good news, some bad
Yesterday I watched a video of Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman’s talk at the 2007 TED (you can watch it here). Goleman discussed brain research which says we are hardwired for empathy and compassion. If we see someone in pain, we automatically want to help. Unless we aren’t paying attention. Goleman said that we get so […]