If you’ve been following the story of the No Impact project at all, you’ll know that my little family did not start out as Birkenstock-wearing, reusable-bag-toting environmentalists. In fact, Michelle and I made a habit of crying for the polar bears while blasting the air conditioners. I, in particular, was a liberal shlub who had […]
climate change
Like falling off a log
I hadn’t heard this before, but Story of Stuff’s Annie Leonard, who I had dinner with the other night, told me that Paul Hawken said that living sustainably should be as easy as falling off a log. In other words, it should be the easiest, normalist, most natural thing to do. But it’s not. This […]
An end to the musical chairs
Yesterday I posted an interview with Van Jones, who reminds us that the way things are for the poor in America makes environmentalism their last concern. Then, Anne, from Not So Big Blog, left behind a comment suggesting that the way things are for the middle class in America isn’t so great either. Compared to […]
An argument for a zero impact culture
Alex Steffen, of WorldChanging, writes: “The idea of zero impact ought to be non-controversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable […]
Greening my city makes me happier to live in it
Part of the No Impact project is to have a positive impact to offset the unavoidable negative impact of, well, being alive, and part of that has been to the work of environmental organizations. As a result of that, Wednesday night was a mega-proud night for me because I got invited to be a member […]
Little old me
A few weeks ago, at NYU, I was asked to give a short talk in response to a talk by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute (you may remember that Michael and I had an email debate here on the blog a few weeks ago). You can watch my little talk by […]
What would Jesus drive?
As I’ve worked my way through the No Impact project, I’ve forged connections with “conservatives” and orthodox religious types in whose company a “secular liberal” like me might not normally be welcome. But what has interested me is that, when we drop the labels, we find we share so many values in common. I’ve written […]
Why the debate about climate change so falsely rages
There is plenty of science saying there’s climate change. Many of the mitigating measures to do with climate change are things we ought, for a plethora of reasons from national security to child health, to do anyway (use energy way more efficiently, move to renewable power generation, consume fewer planetary resources to ameliorate the other […]