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 Rather Be In Japan, to check in with us every so often. I thought we might be able to learn a little something about […]
environmentalism
Are we just a green bubble that has burst?
Recently, The New Republic published an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute calling the trend towards lower consumption coupled with the search for meaningful life no more than a public opinion bubble that has burst. They argue that individual lifestyle change–of which I am one of the chief national proponents, […]
Open-source environmental activism
One of the things I’m into is cool tools that allow people to easily take environmental action. What if you wanted to recruit volunteers get trees planted in your neighborhood? Or if you wanted to clean the trash off your local riverbank? What if, on the other hand, you wanted to join other volunteers to […]
Forget the stuff. Let’s just get happy.
A quote from a TED talk given by Dan Gilbert, the Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness: Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness […]
Environmental conundrum
You may remember that we got a community garden plot of our own this year. The rub was that the person who had the plot before us had allowed a young tree to take root in it (you aren’t supposed to let trees grow in the garden), which made it unusable for growing vegetables. The […]
Environmentally-conscious packaging? Think ice cream cone.
It contains the ice cream. It biodegrades. It provides calories. In other words, it has value all by itself. It is not wasted resources. If we must have packaging, why can’t all of it be designed in such a way? In other words, let’s make sure the resources we use deliver value instead of just […]
The role of television in American resource use
At a certain stage during the No Impact project, we got rid of the television, which kept making use feel that spending less and using fewer resources made us losers compared to the people we saw on the screen. Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, said something that caught my eye (thanks for sending Rosa!) […]
Individual action vs collective action
Lest you all think, that with my recent calls for collective action, that I have abandoned individual action, please read my post at WorldChanging about how the two are in separable. Leave your comments there but leave them here too! A continuing debate erupts within the environmental movement about the relative merits of individual versus collective […]