No Impact Man

How to help make the planet a better place for all of us

If you’re reading this early enough and you want to tune in, you can catch me on Good Morning America between 8:30 and 9:00 this morning. As for all the Good Morning America viewers who watched and are now dropping by, welcome! Today's offering is a list of  posts and links about how each of us can make the planet a better, healthier place for all us.

First off, let me say this. To really make a positive impact, we need both to make an effort as individuals and as a culture. Below, you'll find tips for individual lifestyle changes. But to clean up our power generation or to develop efficient transportation systems, for example, we need regulatory and governmental change.

For that we need to elect politicians who make cutting greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental concerns a central part of their platform. You'll find a  good guide to where the candidates stand on making our planet better, healthier and safer at HeatIsOn.Org.

As for personal changes, the first key to cutting emissions is reducing our use of energy resources. Driving less, flying less, using less power is about the most important ways we can each do that. It also links to list of other environmental actions you can take, and explains a little about buying carbon offsets, which is a way of making up for your unavoidable emissions. My favorite carbon offset provider is Native Energy.

Another thing you can do at home is to buy your electricity from renewable sources—like wind, hydro or solar. You can find your local provider of renewable electricity at this Department of Energy website. You’ll be faced with a number of choices. The greenest of the green is generally wind power. It's also good to choose a provider that is certified by Green-e or the Environmental Resources Trust.

If you can't buy green power, you can also find “renewable energy certificates” on the DOE website. RECs work like this: the credit for the green benefits of renewable electricity is traded like a commodity. In other words, wind power, for example, provides two products: electricity and green benefits, which are sold separately. Thus, if you can only buy gas power in your area, but you buy RECs equal to the amount of power you use, you still get credit for using green energy (complicated but true).

On this blog, you can also read about:

• Consumer choices that most affect the environment
• Saving trees by stopping your junk mail
• Saving wildlife, petroleum use and litter by avoiding plastic bags
• Why personal lifestyle choices are important to the environment
• What you should ask for from your elected representatives
• Links to other sites with more hints for helping the environment

PS I'll be off after today until January 2. Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2008.

If you’re reading this early enough and you want to tune in, you can catch me on Good Morning America between 8:30 and 9:00 this morning. As for all the Good Morning America viewers who watched and are now dropping by, welcome! Today's offering is a list of  posts and links about how each of us can make the planet a better, healthier place for all us.

First off, let me say this. To really make a positive impact, we need both to make an effort as individuals and as a culture. Below, you'll find tips for individual lifestyle changes. But to clean up our power generation or to develop efficient transportation systems, for example, we need regulatory and governmental change.

For that we need to elect politicians who make cutting greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental concerns a central part of their platform. You'll find a  good guide to where the candidates stand on making our planet better, healthier and safer at HeatIsOn.Org.

As for personal changes, the first key to cutting emissions is reducing our use of energy resources. Driving less, flying less, using less power is about the most important ways we can each do that. It also links to list of other environmental actions you can take, and explains a little about buying carbon offsets, which is a way of making up for your unavoidable emissions. My favorite carbon offset provider is Native Energy.

Another thing you can do at home is to buy your electricity from renewable sources—like wind, hydro or solar. You can find your local provider of renewable electricity at this Department of Energy website. You’ll be faced with a number of choices. The greenest of the green is generally wind power. It's also good to choose a provider that is certified by Green-e or the Environmental Resources Trust.

If you can't buy green power, you can also find “renewable energy certificates” on the DOE website. RECs work like this: the credit for the green benefits of renewable electricity is traded like a commodity. In other words, wind power, for example, provides two products: electricity and green benefits, which are sold separately. Thus, if you can only buy gas power in your area, but you buy RECs equal to the amount of power you use, you still get credit for using green energy (complicated but true).

On this blog, you can also read about:

• Consumer choices that most affect the environment
• Saving trees by stopping your junk mail
• Saving wildlife, petroleum use and litter by avoiding plastic bags
• Why personal lifestyle choices are important to the environment
• What you should ask for from your elected representatives
• Links to other sites with more hints for helping the environment

PS I'll be off after today until January 2. Happy New Year everyone! See you in 2008.

Germane (at least to me)

There is only one thing we will be remembered for when we die--how we lived.

What makes me feel proud of myself? What makes me feel warm? What makes me feel caring? What makes me sleep well at night? What makes me able to look my friends and family squarely in the eye?

How, in short, do I want to be remembered? How shall I live?

I ponder these questions because, well, that's me, but also because I just read the blog of a guy who is going to die soon. In the scheme of things, we are all going to die soon.

Be careful. Before we know it, it will be too late to live according to our values and priorities.

On not hurting ourselves

The other day, I visited the Dharma Field Zen Center, here in Minneapolis, where I'm spending Christmas. I enjoyed Buddhism: It's Not What You Think, by Steve Hagen, the head teacher there, so I thought it would be fun to drop in and taste the flavor of the temple.

One Soto Zen tradition Steve showed me during my visit was that during walking meditation, the hands are kept in shashu. In this position, the left fist is held in the right hand, but what is important is that the left thumb is actually folded into the palm of the left fist instead of being held on its outside.

As Steve explained it: "If you try to punch someone with your thumb inside your fist you will break your thumb. So we keep our hands in this position to remind ourselves that you can't hurt someone else without hurting yourself."

This environmental thing. It's not about saving someone or something else. It's about living a better life for ourselves. Because when we live in such a way that hurts someone else or the planet, it hurts us too. Or course this goes for so much of life--not just ecology. You can't hurt someone else without hurting yourself.

Don't save the planet

The title is unabashedly stolen from a post by George Marshall on Climate Change Denial. His point is that begging the world's population to "save the planet" is a downer and not a message that will ever translate into real social change.

He's right, and that's one of the reasons why I hold forth on opportunities in the crisis and the chances we have to make the planet happier while making the people happier.

Marshall writes:

"Even if you hate this kind of ad-marketing language, read this and seriously tell me that it doesn’t work better than pleading with people to ‘give it all up and save’.

A lighter lifestyle is the smart, cool, intelligent and healthy way to live. Don’t be tied to outdated and dangerous 20th century ways of living. Live light because it will make you feel complete and free.

When you choose to live light you are setting the pace for the 21st century. You will see the people all around you trying to catch up. And when they do we can all work together to build a world that is cleaner, fairer and happier and that you will be proud to leave to your children."

Earning a living helping people keep it green

We found a great clothing store in Minneapolis, land of the 10,000 lakes, where I am for the holidays (more about the travel in a later post). The store is called Birch, and its owners are committed to carrying only fair wage and sustainable products.

Co-owner Marti Markus explained to me a system of standards that she insists all her suppliers adhere to. Plus she can help customers decide for themselves which standards are most important: fair trade certification or local manufacture or production from, say, hemp. Marti can tell a customer the benefits if each and let them make their own ethical choices.

What impressed me most was not so much the collection of sustainable products but the service. Her store had the feel, strangely, of the old fashioned bookstore. You know, where you go in and the owner knows what you like and can tell you what to read next. Birch is like that, but for clothes.

There is so much room for this kind of business, not just for the products but for the educational and de facto certification service it offers. If small boutique retailers can find a way to help consumers navigate the issues, then customers will flock to them. Because we all feel confused about what to buy and what not to buy. And there's room for this model, I think, for everything from clothing to furniture to household supplies.

Want to start a business anyone?

PS To find retailers that may offer these services near your, try the website of the Organic Consumers Association.

PPS Hello to the world's best niece, Ellie Rudd, who gave up her bed so we could sleep in it!

The world's simplest, best, most effective environmental living tip

I was talking to a friend who said that the problem for the general public with environmental living is that it is so complicated. How do you know what stores to go to? How do you know what products are okay for the environment? How do cut through the green spin machine that is roaring through the market place?

I'm sure that's true of some of you who are dropping by the blog. You'd like to do something but don't know how to get started.

The thing is, you don't have to know much beyond common sense. Consider this: it's great to do the market research on, say, a really fuel efficient water heater, but the first thing to do is just use less hot water and turn the thermostat down. If you are having to mix cold water with your hot when you take a shower or bath, your thermostat is way too high. It's silly to make water so hot that you have to then cool it down to use it.

Here is another in-action example of the environmental living tip I am about to give you. Suppose you have a few friends that work in the same area and live in the same area. Instead of each of you driving your cars, why not car pool? This saves resources and money.

These are two instances of my 100% guaranteed-to-be-ecological, absolutely no green spin added, utterly free, won't cost you a thing, simple green living tip. With this tip, you don't have to know what store to buy in, you don't have to understand which chemicals are okay for the environment and which are not, and you don't need to know where to sign up for renewable electricity (though educating yourself in these areas is a good thing too).

Not only that, but I promise that, if you apply this tip in one or all areas of your life, then you will have less trash, less plastic crap, more quality, more room and more money (because you will be more discerning and spend less of it). Also, this tip will make you think fondly of your grandparents because they probably always told you this in the first place (before you realized how wise they were).

And finally, applied comprehensively, this tip will help you reduce your trash, reduce your air pollution, reduce your greenhouse gas emissions, and reduce your toxic load on the water supply. Even better, it will work in residences, places of business, and in government.

In fact, you know how physicists are looking for the unifying theory that explains everything? Well, what I am about to offer you is the unifying theory of environmental living. All that is required is to actually apply the tip and move beyond just talking about it.

Now for the drum roll, please! Here it comes, the world's simplest environmental living tip...

Don't waste.

Greening the planet by making green profits and creating green jobs

One of the arguments against capping our greenhouse gas emissions is the effect it will have on the economy. Renewable resources cost more, hit the bottom line, mean less profit, and lower standards of living, the wrongheaded argument goes.

Then there are the businesspeople who see the incredible opportunities in our crisis. It's simply a matter of a paradigm shift.

In March, 2007, at bicycle industry conferences in Taipei and Washington, DC, John Burke, CEO of Trek, delivered for the first couple of times a slide show he developed that showed that the environmental crisis provided huge opportunities for his industry (it's 25 minutes long but you can watch it here).

He talked about four trends:

• Increasing childhood and adult obesity around the world that will never be solved by treatment but can only be solved by prevention
• Traffic congestion that meant people spent 7 billion hours and wasted 5 billion gallons of fuel in traffic jams in 2003
• Limited transportation infrastructure to deal with the daily 180,000 people the United Nations estimates moves into cities every day
• Emission of greenhouse gases and air pollution, 60-70% of which is caused by vehicles.

A partial solution to all of these problems, Burke pointed out, is provided by a single, already-existing technology: the bicycle. Riding bikes burns 500-700 calories and hour, gets people through cities like London faster than cars and public transportation, takes up far less road and parking space than vehicles, and emits no greenhouse gas.

The trick, Burke said, is to convince policy makers of these advantages in order to encourage them to build more bike paths and facilities to make cycling feel safe and convenient. "The best opportunity for the bicycle industry is to create a bicycle friendly world," Burke said. The point of his talk was to convince bike companies to spend a little less on marketing and product development and a lot more on political bike advocacy.

The pay off?

Americans currently take 0.5% of their trips by bike. If that number increased to 5%--and by the way in the Netherlands it's over 30%--bike industry revenue would go from $6.2 billion to $31 billion.

There are so many other industries for which there are also incredible opportunities for green profits and jobs:

• Tens of thousands of construction industry jobs would be created in weatherizing the buildings in New York City alone
• An increasing public transportation infrastructure affords huge possibilities for profit and jobs (the New York MTA, for example, already can't find as many buses as it needs)
• The renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, according to the Environmental and Energy Studies Institute, created 8.5 million jobs in 2006.

What opportunities for green profits and jobs exist in your industry? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Happiness versus consumption

This graph (which will get bigger if you click on it) comes courtesy of the scientist in me (believe it or not, I have a PhD in engineering). The point is to show one of the things I learned from being No Impact Man--the relationship between quality of life and the consumption of our planetary resources, by which I mean everything from emitting greenhouse gases to putting toxins in the water.

Anyway, the overarching point of the image is to show, first of all, that there comes a point where using more resources actually reduces your quality of life.

Think, for example, of just before I started the No Impact year. I lived life as a stressed-out, New York resource hog. Every night we ate take-out for dinner, plopped ourselves in front of the TV because we were too tired to do anything else, and bought stuff and trips on credit cards. The result was that we we lived pay check to pay check, stressed about money, ate unhealthily and never exercised. You get the point.

This is Zone 3 on the graph. Zone 3 represents a lifestyle where your life and your mind are crowded with what you have and what you do and you are overwhelmed. In this area, the more you have and the more you do, the worse you feel.When we consciously began using fewer resources, we found ourselves with more time to spend together, eating more healthily, and less worried about money. We moved from right to left and up the curve. In other words, consuming less gave us a better quality of life.

In Zone 1, which is where we lived in the last months of the project, with no lights and no electricity, we found that we had restricted our resource use to the point where we were making ourselves unhappy again. Not having light after 4:30 made me depressed and caused us stress because we didn't have the daylight we needed to get our jobs done. Doing laundry by hand is hard work and time consuming.

Zone 2 was the middle ground, the place I want to live. The interesting thing about Zone 2 is that beyond a certain amount of resource consumption (at the top of the curve) there is very little effect on quality of life. In other words, it is an area where there is just no reason to consume more resources. Zone 2 is the area of waste and habituation.

It's the area of waste because, for example, leaving unused lights switched on wastes resources but causes no improvement in life quality. It is the area of habituation because this is where you get used to having or not having things and they don't, once you've acclimatized, make much difference to your happiness.

This would include, in our case, not using the air conditioner. Using it would have consumed a lot of electricity. Not using it, once we'd adjusted, had very little effect on our happiness.

Finally, there is the point on the graph which I have marked as"the goal." This point, to me, is the Holy Grail of balance between quality of life and resource conservation. This is the place where you get to go out to a restaurant with friends once or twice a week, but you don't waste resources in a way that doesn't even improve your lifestyle by, say, eating out every night because you've fallen out of the habit of grocery shopping.

This point, "the goal," is really just the place where you are really conscious of what you use. You don't take things for granted. You understand that your actions have consequences for other people and the planet. It is the point between asceticism and waste, between self-denial and self-indulgence. It is the place of balance.

 

Forgive me if I sound too pious

I have a friend, a Zen teacher, who lost his daughter a decade or so ago. Years passed, and he asked his own teacher, "I have been meditating for many years, but underneath, I still feel an abiding sadness. Am I doing something wrong?"

His teacher told him, "What you feel is Universal Sadness."

When I first heard this story, I didn't get it.

But not too long ago, Michelle, my wife, had a miscarriage. She, of course, was distraught, and I felt terrible for her. What surprised me, though, was my own awful sadness (I had felt very ambivalent about the pregnancy).

The sadness walked around with me for a few days, and I kept thinking, "How do people live in the face of things like this? How can people function, knowing tragedy can strike as quickly as a you can step off the curb without seeing the bus?"

Then, one day, it struck me. Probably a million women had miscarriages on the same day as Michelle. A million husbands quietly grieved while they stayed strong to comfort their wives. The tragedy was not mine alone. We all had it. We're all struggling to get by. Life, for everyone, is precarious.

For just that moment, my heart broke open for the world. The sadness was not just mine. We all have it. We all suffer from it. I understood for those few seconds what my friend the Zen teacher meant by Universal Sadness. It means we are all in this thing together.

And when a moment like that comes, living environmentally, living for a purpose larger than yourself and having the things you want are not in conflict at all. They are not in competition. Because when you have--even for a moment--the experience that your sadness is Universal, what you want is not more things. Instead, you get a glimpse of simply wanting to help.

Painting entitled "Compassion" by Dan Wicks.

Why I won't sleep tonight

I'm not one for delivering bad news here on the blog. I think it's counterproductive. But I'm also not one for pretending to be happy when I'm not. And tonight, I'm not.

It's American behavior at the UN conference on climate change that's getting me down. It looks like fairly certain that the governments around the world, by insistence of the United States, are going to leave without agreeing any specific emissions reduction targets.

According to a New York Times article entitled "Bitter Divisions at Climate Talks":

The goal of the Bali meeting, which is being attended by delegates from 190 countries and which is scheduled to end Friday, is to reach agreement on a plan for a future deal to reduce greenhouse gases...

...“The best we hoped for was that the U.S. would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit American organization. “Our delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation.”

The only good news, as far as I can tell, is that the people of the United States are represented, as the Times points out, not only by our intransigent government negotiators but also by American activists who have swarmed to Bali, including former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Republican New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg criticized both the Bush administration and Congress for not being aggressive enough in addressing global warming.

“There’s a belief that the United States should not do anything until all the other governments are willing to go along and do it at the same time [meaning India and China],” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We should be doing this regardless of whether the world is following or not.”

PS On a lighter note, here is a nifty new meta-blog that collects all the eco-news and light-living blog posts in one place. Totally worth checking out. Thanks Megan from Fix!