No Impact Man

Take heart! A least one species bounces back from near extinction

We know, of course, that the advent of the automobile in New York City caused the virtual extinction of stick-ball, neighbors sitting together on stoops, fresh air and children playing in neighborhood streets.

What some may not realize, however, is that New York City automobiles also brought one of the world's largest mammalian bipeds--and I don't mean humans--close to extinction.

The good news is that, with the increase of bike lanes and liveable street initiatives in New York (and the potential reduction of automobile use), this species is bouncing back.

Watch below:

A list of companies who supported lies about global warming

Please digg this post or email it in order to spread it around as a way to show the below companies that you refuse to accept their distorting our democracy and engangering us in the process.

On April 23, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times published a story proving conclusively that the so-called Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, knew that they were lying when they ran "an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming."

According to Revkin:

... a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

A working democracy requires a correctly informed electorate. Deliberately lying to the public is a direct assault on the American system of democracy. To use power and money to lie to the American public is to distort our electoral process.

And to do it knowing what is at stake is just unfathomable. We are now at the point where we are near the climate tipping point. Without the efforts of the so-called Global Climate Coalition (GCC), and other organizations like it, we may have been able to get to work on this planetary problem a decade or even 20 years ago.

This is like a health insurance company refusing treatment to a child with cancer, except that we are talking about refusing treatment to billions of children--an entire planet's worth. In the course of it's work, according to SourceWatch, the GCC spent tens of millions of dollars on ad campaigns trying to stop action on global warming and made millions of dollars of contributions to politicians to influence their decisions.

The companies who exhibited this gross disregard for human life continue to wield power in the ongoing discussion about how to ameliorate the climate crisis. It is important to know, therefore, exactly which companies are prone to lie and distort the truth so we know not to believe them in the future.

For that reason, here, according to SourceWatch, is the list of members of the so-called Global Climate Coalition, who tried for so long to mislead us. I hope you'll digg or stumble or email this post around to make sure it is seen and read and to show these companies that we won't accept this kind of this behavior:

• Air Transport Association
• Allegheny Power
• Aluminum Association, Inc.
• American Automobile Manufacturers Association
• American Commercial Barge Line Co.
• American Farm Bureau Federation
• American Forest & Paper Association
• American Highway Users Alliance
• American Iron and Steel Institute
• American Petroleum Institute
• American Portland Cement Alliance
• Amoco
• Association of American Railroads
• Association of International Automobile Manufacturers
• Atlantic Richfield Coal Company
• Baker Refineries
• Bethlehem Steel
• BHP Minerals
• Chamber of Shipping of America
• Chemical Manufacturers Association
• Chevron
• Chrysler Corporation
• Cinergy
• CONRAIL
• Consumers Energy
• Council of Industrial Boiler Owners
• CSX Transportation, Inc.
• Cyprus-Amax
• Dow Chemical Company
• Drummond Company
• Duke Power Company
• DuPont
• Eastman Chemical
• Edison Electric Institute
• ELCON
• ExxonMobil
• Fertilizer Institute
• Ford Motor Company
• General Motors
• Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
• Greencool
• Hoechst Celanese Chemical Group
• Illinois Power Company
• Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp.
• McDonnell-Douglas
• Mobil Corporation
• National Association of Manufacturers
• National Lime Association
• National Mining Association
• National Ocean Industries Association
• National Petrochemical and Refiners Association
• Natural Rural Electric Cooperative Association
• Norfolk Southern
• Northern Indiana Public Serv. Co.
• Ohio Edison
• Parker Drilling Company
• Process Gas Consumers
• Shell
• Society of the Plastic Industry
• Southern Company
• Steel Manufacturers Association
• TECO Energy Inc.
• Texaco
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• USX Corporation
• Union Carbide
• Union Pacific
• Virginia Power
• Western Fuels Association

Urban gardening time is here!

During the No Impact project, I helped my friend Mayer Vishner with his vegetable plot in the Laguardia Community Gardens here in New York. For those of you who don't know, a community garden is a public piece of land broken up into a checkerboard of plots and a different gardener tends to each plot.

Urban vegetable gardening, I think, is hugely important for a variety of reasons--local food production, aesthetic enhancement of the city, absorption of rainwater to help prevent sewage overflows, amelioration of the heat island effect. But what may be more hidden than you'd expect is evident in the very name of what goes on--community gardening.

This year, our little family finally came to the top of Laguardia's waiting list and we got our own plot. Isabella, my four-year-old, has the time of her life in the garden. She runs around talking to people, playing with shovels, squirting herself with the hose.

I knew that she would have fun, but what I hadn't anticipated was how much pleasure she brings to the older population of gardeners. She helps them water or weed, and the oldsters get as much pleasure as the youngster.

Who'd have thought:

In the world's fastest city, it turns out that local food equals community.

Keeping cool with no air conditioner

People always ask what we still do from our no impact year, and one thing is that we got rid of both our air conditioners. There are seven or eight nights in the summer where it's really hot in New York City, but we keep a tub of cold water ready to hop into and that gets us back to sleep.

Today, though, was the first of New York's 85 degree days in 2009 (in April!). What we do is close all our windows during the day and keep all our shades closed so the sun and hot air can't get in. The result? We needed long sleeves in the apartment.

If you decide to take this approach once the summer hits, here's what you have to remember: if you forget to close your windows and blinds on just one hot day, you're pretty much done for. Once the apartment or house gets hot, you can't get it cool again until there is cool air outside.

About the new No Impact Project

You may recall that we are looking for an associate director for the new No Impact Project (click here to read it or here to read it at Idealist.org). I had promised to offer some explanation about what the No Impact Project will be.

Well, here's a little video clip where I explain, at least in part:

PS The Fledgling Fund, mentioned at the end of the clip, is the generous founding funder of the No Impact Project.

One barrier to change

I was talking to one student at Phillips Academy today. She said that she tries not to care. She said it hurts too much to worry about things that seem so much bigger than you--"like the whole planet." So she tries not to care.

How do we get people not to try not to care?

I'm so green I even recycle my blog posts!

I took the train up to Andover to give a talk at Phillips Academy and so won't have time to write a new blog post tonight. But if you haven't checked out the discussion by commenters on yesterday's post about whether happiness is really the aim of life, you should (click here). What a great discussion with so many insightful comments! Feel free to add comments of your own.

If a great conversation about why we're here on earth isn't worth recycling, I don't know what is!

Open Discussion: "You are here to be happy." True or false?

Obviously I've been in the mood for introspection these last couple of days. And I think that introspection is important in the environmental realm, because we must prioritize the use of resources. We must decide what our limited resources are best used for.

That requires introspection.

Because to know what our resources should be used for we should know something about what our lives should be used for. After all, shouldn't resources be used to fulfill the true purposes of our lives? So what is our true purpose?

Perhaps in answer, someone said to me today:

You are here to be happy.

What I'd like us to discuss is whether or not you believe that is true. Is the reason you are here on this earth to achieve your happiness? And by the way, what, actually, does that mean?

Let's talk. Let's discuss. What could possibly be more important to figure out? Please leave your comments here on the blog by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on "comments." You will see a form into which to enter your thoughts.

If you're reading this on email, by the way, you will first have to come to the web page to leave a comment (and please do!). You can get to the web page by clicking here.

Does life have meaning?

In Tolstoy's A Confession (the autobiographical account of his crisis of meaning I wrote about the other day), he argues that, if what we seek to achieve does not endure after our death, then our life itself has no meaning. As Tolstoy's reasoning goes, since everything he strived for in life--riches, fame, pleasure--would ultimately disappear when he died, life was essentially meaningless.

But then he reverses himself:

I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer -- an evil -- was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. And really my life -- a life of indulgence of desires -- was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, "Life is evil and an absurdity," referred only to my life, but not to human life in general.

In other words, Tolstoy determined that his life the way he lived it was meaningless because the achievement of his life goals--riches, fame and pleasure--died along with him. That did not mean that everyone's life was meaningless, he realized. He admired people whose goal it was to be of service to the rest of life. Since the service that they did to the rest of life endured beyond their deaths, their lives had meaning.

When we use planetary resources, in the service of what do we use them? When we live our lives, in the service of what do we live them? Are we using our resources and living our lives meaningfully? Or are we wasting both?

Because if you agree with Tolstoy, whether or not our lives have meaning is determined only by what we use them for.

What is true progress?

Because of my stance on consumption, I get accused sometimes of being anti-progress. This is interesting to me, because I am very pro-progress. I want so much progress. It's just that I'm not sure that the societally accepted definition of progress is correct.

Heading in the same direction we've been heading for the past 100 years does not seem like progress to me. It seems like more of the same. Cell phones that are even better for watching television on seem like more of the same to me. Getting good, safe drinking water to the billion people on the planet who don't have it--now that seems like progress.

Anyway, there is a book by Tolstoy which was apparently one of three by him that were of great inspiration to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others. The book--A Confession--is Tolstoy's autobiographical account of the crisis of meaning he had in his forties, his contemplations of suicide, and the ultimate resolution of the crisis.

I found it interesting that, in this book, Tolstoy himself questioned progress. In fact, he discusses "progress" as a kind of religion in which people blindly put their faith because they are too scared to deal with life's larger questions. We dedicate ourselves to so-called progress, he implies, because we don't know in service of what we should really dedicate our lives.

He makes a particular example of the guillotine, which at the time was thought to be the height of progress because it performed executions without the potential torturous errors of the executioner's axe.

Tolstoy writes:

Life in Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans confirmed me yet more
in the faith of striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same faith among them. That faith took with me the common form it assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was expressed by the word "progress." It then appeared to me that this word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for me to live, in my answer, "Live in conformity with progress," I was like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves should reply to what for him is the chief and only question. "whither to steer," by saying, "We are being carried somewhere."

I did not then notice this. Only occasionally--not by reason but by instinct--I revolted against this
superstition so common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack of understanding of life. . . . So, for instance, during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution [by guillotine] revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I. Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother's death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying. But these were only rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to live professing a faith only in progress.

I love best this line: "therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I." In other words, it is not technological advance that determines progress.

It is our hearts. And us.

And so I find myself asking: What is true progress?