No Impact Man

Healthier planet, healthier people

One thing I go on about on this blog is how in many ways we benefit rather than sacrifice when we change our lifestyles and public policies in order to treat the planet more kindly (see here and here, for example). Because very often, making the planet more healthy makes the people more healthy, too.

My little family and I have found this, for example, in eating unpackaged, local, seasonal and vegetarian (you can read why this helps the environment here). The result of altering out diet for the sake of the planet is that we eat no processed food and a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables. Our eating is much healthier than it used to be.

This graphic, provided by Transportation Alternatives, shows that similar benefits come from biking, walking and using public transportation. What it shows is that when we use our cars less--one of the most important things we can do to help the planet-- and other modes of transport more, we end up skinnier and healthier.

Go figure. What's good for the planet is good for us, too.

Changing our behavior

During World War II, posters like this persuaded us to ration, save food, conserve gas, turn our electric lights off at night and not talk about where our soldier relatives were deployed.

With a little leadership, we changed our behavior for the sake of the common good. We changed the social norms.

So my question is this: while we wait around for an elected politician who shows real leadership on the environment, why don't the big tent environmental organizations take the message straight to the people.

Why don't they post messages like this on billboards all over the country advising us to drive less, turn our heaters down to 68 degrees and use less power? Why, while we wait around for the legislators to finally act, can't we work on changing social norms?

What No Impact feels like after ten months

Normal. Unremarkable. Life as usual.

Isn’t that strange? You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more than a day or two of food around the house.

All this and then they turn around and say it’s life as usual?

Probably it feels that way because, according to the boffins who research what makes for happiness, the “positive psychologists,” people quickly get used to almost any set of conditions. Within a few years, lottery winners and people who become paralyzed tend to return to the same level of happiness they had before their change in circumstance.

What people can’t get used to, though, is the loss of one of the main factors positive psychologists find does have a lasting affect on happiness: community. In fact, in may be that breakdown in community in the United States is one reason that, although material wellbeing has increased hugely in the last 50 years, rates of depression, substance abuse and teen suicide have skyrocketed.

We move away from our families and friends. We stay in the office until all hours. We travel endlessly on business trips. We spend our spare time in front of screens instead of with each other. All these things, we do because we think they will ultimately make us feel better, but in fact, they undermine our connections to each other and make us feel worse.

In the No Impact experiment, as I’ve written before, without all the mod cons to distract us, we spend more time with each other, our friends and our neighbors and actually feel happier.

So what if, as a society, we worried less about a booming economy which drains the planet of its resources? If, as the positive psychologists suggest, having more stuff isn’t going to make us happier, shouldn’t we worry more about things like building a culture that emphasizes personal connection and community?

If the results of the No Impact experiment are anything to go by, not only is that an approach that would help cure our environmental crisis, but it would also help cure our unhappiness.

A race to save the planet

When my friend Elizabeth drops her son off at school in Connecticut, the moms gather in the courtyard to chat. There is a cool new feature to their SUVs which allows them to lock the doors while leaving the engine on. They stand around, a bunch of them, having a nice chat, while their motors idle in the parking lot, keeping air conditioners going in cars that have no one in them and are going nowhere.

I write this without judgment. People have grown up striving all their lives to be successful in a culture that tells us that a sign of our success is to waste with impunity. "I've worked all my life not to have to worry whether the car engine is on ten minutes more than it has to be," the thinking goes. I get it. You worry about the pennies wasted and then you find yourself in a position where you don't want to worry anymore. You don't want some environmentalist telling you to start biting your nails again.

So it's all very well to argue that responsibility for pollution in our society belongs to the consumers and that we have to alter consumer behavior. The problem then is how to you convince people like the moms outside my friend Elizabeth's school to change? That's why other people believe that its the companies and the Government we have to tackle. That, in turn, begs the question of how you get government to change when the Democrats, for example, decided not to include fuel efficiency standards for cars in the recent energy bill.

There should be no argument about which route to take--no fighting across the ideological divide between personal and government responsibility. The problem we face is too big for infighting. The answer, I think, is to pursue all of it. There should be a race between the people trying to green Government, the people trying to green consumers and the people trying to green companies. As soon as one of use crosses the finish line, we all win. 

A letter from Bill McKibben

Dear Friend--    

There are occasional moments in history when we desperately need leadership, and this is one of them. If we’re going to deal with global warming, then we need to go beyond politicians who say the right words and find champions who will actually do the tough work to transform our energy economy.

And you could play a key role in bringing those leaders to the fore. This is an invitation to take one Saturday this fall and use it to build a movement, a movement strong enough to finally put this issue on the table where it can no longer be ignored.

Here’s the idea. On November 3, a year before the next election, we’re asking people to organize rallies large and small in their communities. Each one should take place in some spot that commemorates great leaders of the past. People have already committed to climbing New Hampshire's Mt. Washington and gathering in Nashville's Wilson Mall. Others will gather at the Rhode Island church where John F. Kennedy was married, or in front of a site honoring Navajo elder and activist Roberta Blackgoat. But we need hundreds more, gatherings in places that bear the names of national leaders or of locally celebrated men and women who did the right thing in a moment of great need. You’ll know the person that makes sense in your city or town—they don't need to be saints, just true leaders, the kind who, faced with the great issues of their day, didn't punt or compromise.

A movement needs to keep moving, and calling for real leadership is the next logical step.    

Once you've got your rally registered on our website, we'll help you gather a crowd, and invite the politicians from your neck of the woods. We want to ask every Senator and Representative, and every candidate for those offices, to come to these rallies, along with state and local officials. Once they're there, we'll present politicians with the three "1 Sky" priorities prepared in the last few months by climate campaigners across the country. They are: an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and a Green Jobs Now mobilizing our society to help fix homes and businesses so those targets can be met. Basically, we want to find out who is simply a politician, and who's ready to be a leader.

We know these gatherings will be effective. In April, with the help of thousands of people (most of them brand new to organizing) from across the country, we organized 1,400 rallies in places that showed how climate change would affect our lives. Those events were key in putting the demand for real action--80% cuts in carbon emissions by 2050--square in the middle of the Washington debate. But a movement needs to keep moving, and calling for real leadership is the next step.

Don't worry if you've never organized anything before--you're not putting together a March on Washington, just a gathering of scores or hundreds in your town or neighborhood. It needn’t be slick; homemade is just fine. Put your imagination to work: what  would  Lincoln do? How would Dr. King take on this challenge? This is a celebration of leadership, and a celebration should be joyful—as focused on the new economies and communities we can create as on the threats we must avoid.

These rallies will be local, but they’ll also have national impact. The website will help draw people to your action, and then on Nov. 3, we'll be gathering pictures and video from around the country so that by nightfall we'll have a good online slideshow of how America feels. We'll do our best to make sure that every candidate is firmly on the record about their plans. By the time the day is done, you'll have helped change the political landscape.

The best science tells us we have barely a decade to start the fundamental transformation of our economy and to lead the world in the same direction or else, in the words of NASA's Jim Hansen, we will face a "totally different planet." (He went on to say that the "1 Sky" priorities "describe just the kind of trajectory we need" to start solving the problem). A decade's not very long—we've got to get going.

I know you’ve already done the obvious things, like changing some of the lightbulbs in your house. Screwing in a lightbulb is important; screwing in a new federal policy to deal with climate change is crucial, especially if we’re ever going to regain enough credibility to help lead the world toward a stable climate. November 3 will be a powerful day, and you can play a vital role. Please sign up on the website to start or join an action—and thank you so much for caring enough to be a leader yourself.                    

Bill McKibben and the StepItUp2007.org team                    

P.S. One more thing. Please forward this email as far and wide as possible, to anyone you know who might possibly be interested. We’re not really an organization, and we don’t have lists of names—we depend on people like you to take the initiative.

A company I’d buy from—part 2

I was talking yesterday about how a company could make a loyal customer out of me by being the first to make a good-faith effort to clean up its own environmental mess. The example I used was a way to easily return CFL bulbs, which contain toxic mercury, for recycling and disposal in a non-crushable tube through the postal service.

(And by the way, a reader let me know that Good Magazine touted a similar idea of its own. The problem with that version, however, is that the packaging appears to be crushable, which is not so “good” when you’re talking about mailing glass bulbs filled with toxins.)

Lots of folks wrote in with a variety of other CFL disposal schemes, but what I didn’t include in my post yesterday is the aspect of the return-by-post idea that would be good for the business that implemented it: the development of a two-way relationship with customers. You see, if a company has us return our used products directly to it, then it has another chance at developing our loyalty.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I like the idea of the returnable product—not just for bulbs but for bottles and cars and electronics and many other things. A two-way relationship companies could depend on would allow them to design their products with disassembly and reuse in mind, which means (hopefully) less resources pulled from the earth and less pollutants pumped into it (returnability of some products is already mandated by law in Europe).

Second, companies may eventually begin taking responsibility for the environmental consequences of their products because it is the right thing to do, but I think they’ll do it faster if they see that they can profit from it. And there is no question that returnable products and the two-way relationship offers selling opportunities. My point here is that doing the right thing for the planet may also mean doing the right thing for the bottom-line.

A company I’d like to buy from

The way I see it, if a company makes a product with toxins in it, then that company should take responsibility for making sure that, once the products are used, the toxins don’t end up in the environment. About as likely as a dog cleaning up after itself, right? Maybe. But I’ll tell you this: if a company adopted that attitude, it would quickly find itself with a bunch of loyal, environmentally-conscious customers—like, say, me.

For example, by now, we’ve pretty much all heard that if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star approved compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), the United States would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

The problem is that we’ve also heard that carbon fluorescent bulbs contain, according to Umbra at Grist, “roughly four milligrams [of mercury], or an amount the size of the period at the end of this sentence.” Mercury is a neurotoxin. That doesn’t mean that using CFLs is dangerous, but it does mean that thousands upon thousands of them in our garbage stream would not be good (read about the problem here, for example).

We’re told that CFL bulbs should be taken to a hazardous waste disposal facility. Great! Do you happen to know where your local hazardous waste facility even is? The Environmental Protection Agency’s webpage gives a hint (and I literally mean hint). And here in Manhattan, there is exactly one hazardous waste drop off center, and it’s pretty far out of the way for most people. I don’t think we’re going to see eight million New Yorkers stampeding over there to drop off their bulbs.

What about this, though? What if GE or Sylvania or the other companies sold their CFL bulbs in little, post-office-approved, mailing tubes (made from a strong, recycled cardboard, say)? What if they included in the tube, along with the bulb, an adhesive prepaid mailing label? What if that prepaid mailing label stuck on the tube, with the burned-out CFL bulb safely placed inside, directed the bulb to a central CFL bulb disposal center? That would turn every mailbox in the country into a good, safe place to dispose of our CFLs.

Personally, I’d be impressed. I mean, I’d prefer a bulb without the mercury (coming in the future, I’m told), but in the meantime, I’d definitely pay a little more to buy from the company that at least made a stab at cleaning up after itself.

Image courtesy of hyerluv.com.

To hell with the polar bears

I don't really mean to hell with the polar bears, of course, but I got you reading, right? What I am thinking more and more about is the fact that we have present environmental problems that are already affecting the health of all of us--and most especially our children.  In particular, I've been thinking about high child asthma rates in certain parts of the country. Aren't little kids as cuddly as polar bears?

You may recall that my little girl was in the emergency room the other day, and that another little girl from the South Bronx was there at the same time, suffering from an asthma attack.  I have also been writing about the fact that one in four kids in the South Bronx suffers from asthma, thanks largely to the 12,000 diesel trucks a day that crawl through the area.

Anyway, a documentary film-maker named Savannah Teller Brown (great name, right?) from Portland, Oregon, where diesel particulates are also high, has been sending me some outtakes from her forthcoming film Living Diesel. Of most interest to me is the fact that--and I know nothing more about this than I've seen in Savannah's film--low-sulfur diesel fuel combined with retrofitted diesel particulate filters can remove nearly all the particulates from the exhaust.

[Since I posted this, Savannah has emailed me to let me know that federal standards now require that all fuel for on-road vehicles be low sulfur. But we still need the filters.]

Asthma problems around the country solved! Well, you know, at least kind of.

So my question, in these times when so many problems seem to have no solution, when we just don't really know how to move forward, how great would it be if we didn't put legislation in place to solve this one problem? How about if, while we figure out how to love the polar bears, we show a little (or a lot of) love to American school children? How about if we just made it law that trucks use low-sulfur diesel and get retrofitted with diesel particulate filters?

Watch the bit of Savannah's film on solutions to the diesel problems below (or click here if you're reading this on email):

Time for reconciliation

Because I had no religious upbringing, I like to say that I belong to all religions. I read texts from Judaisim, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, humanism and others, too. What grabs me in each is the call to mystery, the reminder that fundamentally, my existence is bigger than I understand.

That is important to me in my environmental learnings. Because if I my existence is bigger than I understand, then it must, too, be bigger than my material desires. There is something bigger going on here than the fact that I want an iPhone.

For the secularists in the crowd, I don't meant that this bigger thing has to be God (though, of course, it could be). It could simply be an infinite universe, by contrast to which my large-seeming desires are infinitesimally small.

Maybe pursuing material comforts--and all the commensurate damage to the planet that our indulgence in this area has caused--is not what's most important. Put another way, if I can't take it with me when I die, is it worth wrecking the earth for?

Anyway, in the Jewish calendar, this is the time of Sukkot (and if I get things wrong here, I apologize in advance). Sukkot, as explained to me by my wonderful friend Rabbi Steve Greenberg, is a time for reconciliation or--and this is my word--atonement or at-one-ment. Sukkot means, having taken stock of our wrongs, now making them right. Sukkot is coming together with everyone and everything. It is, Steven tells me, the most joyous of Jewish holidays.

Below, I'm posting two very short videos of Steven talking about Sukkot (if you get this blog by email, click on the links). In the first, he talks about the big reconciliation that needs to be made is with the planet. In the second, he talks about a person--uh, well, me--whose work he thinks speaks to this reconciliation.

Splish splash, I was taking a bath

I get to the Hudson River near Battery Park City at, like, 8:00 AM on Saturday morning for the Manhattan Island Foundation’s “Cove to Cove” swim in the Hudson River (read the background here and here). It’s freezing. Well, not freezing, but you know, if you’re going to swim in some of the same water that New York City annually dumps 40 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into, you want a little warmth. You feel you deserve a little warmth.

Anyway, I walk up to one of the organizers, and joke with her that my strategy for distinguishing myself in the swim is to come in last place. She points to a rather rotund man, already walking around in a bathing suit with his sweatshirt unzipped, proudly displaying a belly that looks not unlike the full moon. “See him,” the organizer reassures me, “you’ll never be able to swim slower than him. He always comes in last place.”

Meanwhile, I look around at the other swimmers. Most of them are doing the swim as part of a triathlon. There are a 150 swimmers altogether, 148 of them with the bodies of people who can run a gazillion miles before breakfast, plus me, plus Mr Full Moon Belly, who, pathetically, I’ve zeroed in on as my nemesis, the one I’m going to beat.

Someone says on the bullhorn that we need to strip off our clothes and walk in our bathing suits and our shoes the half a mile down to the start line. My tummy and I, self-conscious and white, looking like a manatee, lumber along with what seem to be 148 gorgeous male and female underwear models to the start, where I become friendly with this woman named Peggy.

We jump in the water and wait for the starting pistol. It’s much warmer than I thought it would be. Quite pleasant, actually. Peggy says, “Let’s swim over here, away from the crowd.” Little do I realize she is nudging me 50 yards further away from the finish line. Making my prospective swim longer, she might as well be trying to drown me.

Anyway, the start sounds, Peggy disappears like a shark through the water, and I am left looking at the back of a 148 yellow-swimming-capped heads. I swim straight into a floating log. Then some orange piece of trash. Then a lot of salty-tasting water from God knows where goes in my mouth. Then I find myself drifting away from the sea wall and out further towards the middle of the river, thinking how much I used to love being alive, when the fear of embarrassment injects me with a new-found energy.

I swim, I swim, I swim (though some people might call it drifting in the same direction as the current). I’m having a lot of fun looking at Manhattan from this perspective (what I call fun, by the way, my doctor the next day called time to have a tetanus shot). I’m swimming and I’m thinking how grateful I am to all you readers for sponsoring me—more than $2300 for charity, thank you, thank you—and I’m thinking Mr. Full Moon Belly is nowhere in sight. Him, at least, I’m going to beat. Sucker!

Suddenly, I’m climbing out of the water and it’s over. Someone puts a medal on a ribbon over my head that says “Finisher” (as opposed, I guess, to quitter). I look behind me for Mr. Full Moon Belly, but he’s nowhere in sight. I guess I really whopped his butt. Then, I turn around and there he is, already dressed (cheater!).

What’re you gonna do? It was a hell of a lot of fun. And as I said, to those of you who sponsored me, thank you. Thank you.

Photo by David Nager / Courtesy of the Manhattan Island Foundation