No Impact Man

Changing the message

Recently I wrote that "if a few big environmental organizations start shouting from the rooftops about the power of one, that each one of us can make a difference, more of us will come to believe it and will act as though it is so."

In response, Barbara reminded me of a series of public service announcements, from the Keep America Beautiful campaign, that ran during the 70s and 80s. Each one asked us to treat the environment more kindly. They stuck in my (then) young mind, especially the Forest Service's "give a hoot, don't pollute" campaign.

They worked then, why wouldn't that kind of ad work now? Since Congress neglected to put automobile efficiency standards in the recent energy bill, why couldn't we just run ads asking people not to buy SUVs and not to waste carbon-producing electricity?

Below, you'll find first the video that I personally remember from my TV screen, followed by the video Barbara sent me:

I killed a pigeon

The other week, when I was riding my bike to the South Bronx to go canoing in the polluted Bronx River with kids from Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (see here), an old man was feeding pigeons right in the middle of the bike path. I was running late and worried about time and I didn’t want to slow down and I figured the pigeons would move, and they did.

But not fast enough.

There was a terrible sound. It was the cry of either a pigeon’s pain or an old man’s dismay. I’m not sure which. Either way, a pigeon was dead, and the old man was devastated. I felt terrible.

Now, I haven’t written much about this, but I have a regular meditation practice. I find that meditation both makes my life easier to live and helps me to treat the world better (just as many other people have equally wonderful but different practices that do the same for them). The problem is that lately I haven’t been able to meditate as much as I’d like. As a result, my mind is less clear.

And I can’t help thinking that this is why I ran over the pigeon.

As I approached, at speed, the old man and his feathered friends, my thoughts did not go to what I could do to make sure the pigeons would be safe. Instead, faced with my worry about being late, I felt a flash of anger at the man’s feeding them in the middle of the bike path. Caught up in my irritation, I was not clear enough to realize I needed to slow down.

Recently, I wrote that “having no peace in myself means that there is no peace in the world around me.” I’ve also heard it said that:

A peaceful mind makes a peaceful man.
A peaceful man makes a peaceful family.
A peaceful family makes a peaceful village.
A peaceful village makes a peaceful country.
And a peaceful country makes a peaceful world.

Taken in reverse, if I’m not at ease, I can't pay attention. If I don’t pay attention, I could kill a pigeon...

I hate to think how it must have traumatized that old man who, having taking the trouble to feed the pigeons, instead ended up seeing one killed.

I’m so sorry that I killed that pigeon. I’m so sorry to have upset that old man. And I see, yet again, that if I want to hurt this world less, I must also do what I can to keep my mind peaceful, and to pay attention, and to not get distracted by petty concerns from what is really important.

Maybe they'll understand...

PS This "change the message" ad is completely available for reposting or sending around. Please put it wherever you want.

PPS This could be just the first in a series of change the message ads. If you feel like making your own and emailing it to me, maybe we can post it here on No Impact Man.

Are we too selfish to change?

A hundred years ago, waste was considered immoral. Throwing out something that still worked was just plain wrong.

What changed that? Marketing. Factory owners wanted to keep their production lines churning and factory workers wanted to keep their tummies full. Repetitive consumption seemed like the answer.

Slowly but surely we convinced ourselves that new was better than old. It became ok to throw things out. It became ok to waste. In fact, out with the old and in with the new kept the economic wheels turning. Buying became downright patriotic.

The result of this old messaging is that, now, everybody wants the newest iPod, the biggest SUV, a huge vacation. And no one is going to give these things up voluntarily, right? Wrong.

Because history shows us that acquisitiveness, a twentieth century phenomenon, is not based on selfishness (which presumably would have been present from the Stone Age). Instead, our consumption arose because of newly-learned social norms and values.

So, we can change the message.

For many years, in this country, smoking was trendy. Now it’s not. The message changed. When I was young, people threw their wrappers on the New York streets without a thought. Now people sneer if you drop your trash. The message changed.

Why wouldn’t the same be true of our use of planetary resources? For many years, as a culture, we thought it was great to get more and use more, and that was the message.

People argue that changing course is impossible. You can’t, they say, change human nature. But we don’t have to change human nature.

All we have to do is change the message.

Image courtesy of Lifehacker.

A day in our life

One of the questions people ask me again and again is to describe a day in the No Impact life. I always think it’s a funny question, because I’m so used to it now and it seems so routine. All the same, I thought I might as well answer it:

1. If I get it together, I wake up before the girls when my wind-up alarm clock goes off (no electricity) and take a little quiet time to meditate. If not, I wake up with Michelle when Isabella, the two-and-a-half-year-old, makes the short, two-foot trip from her toddler bed to our bed (we live in a one bedroom). How I miss the cage…I mean, crib!
2. Michelle and I contort our bodies to fit into the space allowed us. We sleep on one quarter of the bed; Frankie, during the night, progressively takes over three-quarters. When Isabella arrives and insists we don’t touch her, our share reduces by another half.
3. Eventually, after noisily sucking her thumb for a while, Isabella gets up and starts running around after Frankie. The windows are open (no air conditioning) and Michelle can’t bring herself to believe that the window guards—which could stop a gorilla—are strong enough to prevent Isabella from cart-wheeling out. We have to get up, too.
4. We brush our teeth (baking soda) using a cup of water (rather than letting the faucet run). We may or may not take a bath—one at a time in the same water—depending on whether it is bath day (we’re in the water conservation stage). We use homemade unscented beeswax soap to wash and baking soda for shampoo.
5. Breakfast consists of marvelously fresh cantaloupe and toast, both from the farmers’ market. I haven’t been able to bake my own bread for the last few weeks because the combination of a 400 degree oven, 90 degree weather and no air conditioning could potentially overwhelm my family’s ability to live with me.
6. One of us—depending on who wins the “discussion”—walks Frankie down the nine flights of stairs, around the block and back up the nine flights of stairs (no non-self-propelled transportation which means no elevator).
7. We all get dressed in clothes that are just this side of fermented (thanks to the combination of perpetually putting off washing our clothes by hand and our attempts to conserve water).
8. We stumble down the stairs, Michelle carrying the bags and bike helmets and Isabella riding on my shoulders.
9. We stop at the Gray Dog with Michelle’s reusable cup and my glass jar. The no coffee part of the local food stage has fallen by the wayside. Michelle couldn’t cope with the caffeine withdrawal. I couldn’t cope with not hanging out in coffee shops.
10. One of us delivers Isabella to her new Montessori nursery school, using either the tricycle rickshaw or a seat on the back of my bike. Sadly, Isabella this week left her childcare provider of two years (We love you and miss you every minute, Peggy). Thankfully, the nursery school is on the ground floor (But we don’t love your six flights of stairs, Pegs).
11. Michelle rides up the very substandard Sixth Avenue bike lane to work on the rickshaw, eliciting smiles and comments all the way. I ride over to the Writers’ Room, where I work.
12. Michelle gets a pass and takes the elevator to her office because she works on the 43^rd floor. The Writers’ Room is only on the 12^th Floor. I take the stairs to the 11^th and then take the elevator the last flight because there is no reentry on 12. My brain wonders every time whether that is idiotic (my legs are quite sure it is).
13. At the Writers’ Room, I sit very quietly tapping on my keyboard and giving the impression to anyone else that I am working instead of procrastinating. Then I actually get some work on the book done. Then I procrastinate some more. At Michelle’s office, she produces about fifteen articles to every one page I manage to write.
14. After lunch (generally fruit and cheese which we both bring from home), I go up and down about 563 more flights of stairs in order to shop at the farmers’ market, take the food home, take Frankie for her walk and get back to work at the Writers’ Room.
15. I write the next day’s blog post and make phone calls to friends about how slow the book writing is going (To my editor: Just joking!).
16. One of us picks up Isabella, again on our respective bike. If it’s me, Isabella and I either “see what happens”—which means we ride around searching for adventure—or we go to the Hudson River and watch the sunset.
17. We meet Michelle back at the apartment when it’s just getting dark. Dinner consists mostly of salads and eggs or cheese (simple fresh food that makes us happy and thin). We chat around the table. We spark up the one solar-powered lamp and read.
18. Michelle and I flip to see which of us will wrestle Isabella into her bed. Isabella says she’s not tired. We ask when she will be tired. She says, “Not today.”
19. If I lost the toss, I sit on Isabella’s bed and tell her stories: about the day she was born, about the day we got Frankie from North Shore Animal Rescue, about pretending to go alligator fishing with my favorite uncle when I was a kid. “Another story, please…another story, please,” Isabella says.
20. Michelle and I brush our teeth by beeswax candlelight. We talk a bit. One of us humps Frankie out. We talk some more until, by 9:30, our bodies, apparently cued by the darkness, tell us bedtime has arrived.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, “And so it goes.”

On not throwing the baby out with the bathwater

A few months back, I was at the farmer’s market with Michelle, and a gorgeous woman with a mane of blonde hair rode by on a tricycle with a bench for her child on the back. Michelle had noticed the woman a bunch of times before and had told me about her. “There she is!” Michelle now said.

I ran up to her and asked where she got the bike and we had a long talk and it turned out that the woman was a regular reader of No Impact Man. I said that I wished I could get a bike like hers but that because of the No Impact Man project I could buy nothing new. “Well, I have another one you can borrow,” the woman said, and that’s the rickshaw we’ve been riding Isabella around in.

Anyway, it turns out that the woman we met in the market, who loaned us the rickshaw, was the famous fashion designer Lela Rose (and the New York Observer just featured her in a story about women who bicycle in New York). She has since, I am grateful to say, become a friend. As a result, this morning, Michelle and I went to Lila’s very ritzy and fancy fashion show (it is fashion week here in New York).

As you know if you read this blog regularly, I am the first to say that our culture’s emphasis on consumption is at the root of our environmental problems. And the change-your-wardrobe-every-season fashion industry is more than a little culpable for promoting consumption for consumption’s sake.

But when I saw Lela’s show—I’ve never been to a fashion show before—I was amazed by the thought and meticulousness and the beauty of it all. So much amazing human talent on display.

What I couldn’t help thinking about is how the wonderful human drive to create is the first link of a long chain of events that eventually leads to over-consumption. I thought about that and about Lela and about me too—because this blog and my forthcoming book come partly out of my own drive to create.

We all have this drive. And I think that, at times, conspicuous consumption can even be the result of people’s appreciation of creative talent. So for me, as I left Lela’s wonderful show, the question became: how can we reduce the use of resources without squashing the creative drive I think we should celebrate? How can we not throw the baby out with the bath water?

Photo compliments of Lela Rose.

The power of one

People ask me this a lot: what is the point of one person trying to reduce their consumption to help the environment? Isn’t that a meaningless drop in the bucket?

No.

It’s only meaningless if we think it’s meaningless, because if we think it’s meaningless, we’ll do nothing. Optimism, as I’ve said before, is the most radical political act there is.

Back in World War II, millions of Allied citizens changed their consumption patterns to help the war effort. They (largely) obeyed rationing rules, forwent metals and rubbers needed by the armed forces, taught their children not to waste valuable and scarce food, and even carpooled to save gas.

What made them believe their individual actions mattered? Why did they bother?

Because being told so by the powers that be—see the poster above—helped them see that one person trying to do the right thing makes a difference. If I remember my chaos theory correctly, one butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can set off a chain of events that leads to a hurricane.

Recently, our Congress passed an energy bill that had no fuel efficiency standards for newly manufactured cars. I am personally appalled.

On the other hand, we the people are not helpless. We the people don’t need Government to tell us to do what is right. We the people can stop buying cars with poor fuel efficiency. We don’t need the government or the automobile manufacturers to do a thing. All it takes is for us to believe that how we purchase and how we act can really make a difference. And it can.

What I’d like to see are the big environmental organizations taking the place of the governments of World War II to remind us all that we can make a difference. I'd like to see Greenpeace and Sierra Club and Environmental Defense billboards all over our country saying: “Do your grandchildren a favor: drive a car that gets 40 miles per gallon.”

Because if a few big environmental organizations start shouting from the rooftops about the power of one, that each one of us can make a difference, more of us will come to believe it and will act as though it is so. And if more of us refused to drive cars that got less than 40 mpg, you better believe the auto manufacturers would not wait for the Government to tell them to improve their efficiency standards.

Watch the video below of the ping-pong ball and mousetrap chain reaction. We never know which of us will be the ping-pong ball that sets the others off. We never know which of us will start the chain reaction. But one of us will.

Using less

A lot of people are talking about improved energy efficiency as a means of solving the climate crisis, which is great. But I am not convinced that technology will bring us quite enough increased efficiency to make the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

I think, too, that the climate crisis—not to mention the planet’s numerous other environmental problems—calls for us to use less. Use less power, use less oil, use less stuff.

As I write, it’s dark out. There is one100-watt equivalent, solar-powered LED light on in the living room of our apartment. There are no other lights. When we want to read in bed, we’ll move the light in there. There’s a beeswax candle in the bathroom for tooth brushing.

No TV is blaring. No video game is bleeping. No air conditioner is humming. Last month, we got a nearly $400 rebate from the electric company—they finally got around to reading our meter after sending us estimated bills for a few months.

We have radically reduced our resource use over the last year. It’s not so bad at all. In fact, as I've written, in some ways it's better.

I’m not saying that the whole United   States should live like our No Impact household. What I am saying is that, if my little family can be relatively comfortable using so much less, then it really is possible for our culture to be comfortable and happy making the more modest reductions that may well be required, in addition to improvements in technology, to help our sickened planet.

 

Real environmental heroism

For all our talk of polar bears and melting icebergs and “possible” future catastrophes, there are many, many people around the United States and the rest of the world who are already living in the midst of environmental disasters. Often, these people are poor and they lack the political power to stop our power plants, our garbage dumps, our sewage treatment plants, and our expressways from being built in or through their neighborhoods.

These are the neighborhoods, in other words, that bear way more than their fair share of the environmental burden for the way our culture lives. We’re not talking global warming here (though the problems that harm these neighborhoods often also contribute to climate change). We’re talking air that is already too dirty to healthily breathe and waterways that are so polluted that they can make your eyes sting. Not in the future, but now.

One of those neighborhoods is New York’s South Bronx, where some 39 percent of the 500,000-strong population lives below the poverty level (according to the South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study). Although they make up only 6.5% of New York's citizenry, the residents find themselves living alongside some 45% of the City’s private waste transfer stations (which process their portions of 20,000 daily tons of commercial trash).

Additionally, the South Bronx is home to the Hunts Point Terminal Market, the largest produce market in the world. It is the distribution point for all New York City’s vegetables. As a result of the waste transfer stations and the market, every day, some 3,000 trucks roar through the South Bronx, either carting New York City’s food out or carting its garbage in.

This makes the South Bronx, as one resident teenager said to me the other day, “the asthma triangle of death.” It has some of the highest asthma rates in the country (which combines particularly badly with residents' particularly poor access to health care).

In addition, the South Bronx’s waterways—the Bronx River, Harlem River, Westchester Creek and the Upper East River—suffer high levels of pollution, from PCB’s to “floatables” (the many varieties of garbage that makes its way into the sewers and then floats).

The water pollution is thanks largely to the wastewater treatment processing plants, which also grace the neighborhood, and the particularly bad “combined sewer overflows” (CSOs). CSOs, which I’ve written about before, protect the wastewater plants from being overwhelmed by purging storm water and raw sewage out of the system and into the waterways when it rains.

Anyway. All this is a long preamble to what I really want to say.

Last Thursday, my friend Kate Zidar and some young people involved in the organization where she works—Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice—took me on a canoe ride along the Bronx River. Encouraging recreation on the river is a YMPJ project with the goal of raising awareness to put local water pollution issues on the political agenda.

But what really impressed me—besides for the stunning resilience of wildlife in the polluted water—was the YMPJ young people. YMPJ’s youth development program centers on training them in community leadership in the hope that they will be inspired activists who will help to rebuild the South Bronx.

One incredible 18-year-old woman, with whom I shared my canoe, told me:

“My parents’ definition of success it to make a lot of money and to get out of the neighborhood. But I want to go to college and come back and make a difference.”

That, to me, is the definition of real environmental heroism.

PS If you think so, too, maybe you would care to make a donation to Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice? You can do so here.

PPS Sorry for the long post.