Here’s the beginning of an article of mine that’s in this month’s Yes! Magazine: If Christmas is about presents, then in 2007, my little family and I had no Christmas. I mean, we had the caroling and the uncle playing the piano and the cousins running around with my three-year-old, Isabella, and the grandfather coaxing her to sit […]
consumption
Would we shop the planet’s resources away if there was more fun to be had?
This is a guest post by Ruchira Shah aka Ruchi aka Arduous. I’m a recent transplant to London, and I had plans to check out the neighborhood around Ladbroke Grove. But as I sat riding the Tube, the rain started to pour down, and suddenly an afternoon of walking outdoors didn’t seem like the best […]
On buying more than status
What follows is a passage from the draft of the book about my No Impact project. I thought you might enjoy a glimpse into my progress. The draft, by the way, is turned in and I await comments from my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This passage is about some experiences we had in […]
“Why your happiness matters to the planet”
The headline is the title of an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how consuming fewer planetary resources may, instead of making us deprived, make us happier. We’ve discussed this so often here on No Impact Man. The article, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, points to yet another study that shows that material consumption above […]
Spin, counter-spin, counter-counter-spin and on and on
Watch the short video above. At first, you think, that proves it. If cell phones can make popcorn kernels pop, the claims that cell phones cause brain tumors must be true (read here for nonspin background on this possibility). The industry denials, the video seems to confirm, are just spin. But then you go to […]
From work and spend to work and, well, more work
This little essay is a work in progress. It may is a little rough, but I’m letting you have it all the same. I guess, when it comes down to it, what I’m trying to say is that the cost of living and leisure time rewards of environmental living are harder to reap if you […]
Who needs appliances anyway?
Yesterday, we talked about whether replacing old but perfectly good and working appliances with new, more energy-efficient models made sense (see here). We crunched numbers to do with the “embodied energy” and environmental impact of the manufacture of the new appliances versus the amount of energy potentially saved. [This just in: I majorly screwed up […]
Living in gratitude instead of desire
Click the image above for a larger version This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude […]