No Impact Man

The auto industry's trick is no treat

Thanks to Jonathan, a reader, who alerted me to the Halloween action by the Pew Campaign for Fuel Efficiency. They're delivery candy and fact sheets to members of congress to let them know that what the auto industry is trying to do to the Energy Bill is is a trick not a treat.

From the Pew Campaign's Spooky Truth fact sheet:

"In June, the Senate passed a strong, bipartisan compromise to raise mileage for cars and light trucks to an average of 35 mpg by 2020.  This is the first Congressional increase in fuel efficiency in 30 years, and yet the auto industry is pushing a proposal which would weaken and delay the Senate compromise.  Their "tricky" proposal would only require 32 mpg by 2022 and actually cap American innovation on mileage improvements at 35 mpg.  The spooky truth is that just a few years and a few miles do matter when it comes to making a difference for America. In 2020:

Barrels of Oil Saved Per Day:
    - 500,000, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - 1.2 Million, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise
Consumer Savings at the Pump:
    - $11 Billion, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - $25 Billion, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise
Emissions Reductions
    - 85 mmt CO2, Auto Lobby Proposal
    - 206 mmt CO2, Senate Fuel Economy Compromise

* Data from the Union of Converened Scientists, "Energy Bill Must Guarantee Real Oil Savings" Sept. 2007."

While the Pew campaigners are handing out candy and facts to members of Congress, the rest of us can support a strong energy bill--and a step towards American sustainability--by showing our representatives that we care. Automatically send emails to your members of congress at SaveOurEnvironment.Org.

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.

Our squatters' park on Seventh Avenue

Here it is: the little park we made last Friday on Seventh Avenue, right outside the Whole Foods on 24th Street, which has no place for it customers to sit and eat. As you can see, they came and ate with us instead! Over 100 people hanging out in a 12 by 8 foot park that wasn't there the day before, we estimated.

Our park was part of Park(ing) Day, an international action in which squatters-for-a-day took over parking spots, rolled out some sod, erected a bench, and showed passersby what it would be like if street space was dedicated to people instead of cars.

For me, organizing a Park(ing) Day spot was part of the positive impact part of the No Impact experiment:

reduced negative impact + increased positive impact = no impact

Get it?

From Wild Green Yonder, by fellow environmental blogger Adam Brock who helped with our Seventh Avenue Park:

"Before yesterday, I’d thought Park(ing) Day as a statement more than anything else: I wanted to get people thinking about how we prioritize cars over people. But once I got there, the event felt like much more of a block party than a protest.

"As I sat on the grass, eating local apples in the company of good friends and interesting strangers, all the commotion of the city melted away - and I realized that, despite the fact that I was literally sitting in the street, this was the most relaxed I’d been all week. For me, and for everyone else who stopped by, our little patch of turf was a very real relief from the pressures of city life.

"You can’t help but wonder: if one 8-by-12 foot impromptu park can make that much difference in the street life of a neighborhood, how would it feel if the whole street was lined with green space?"

Watch the Street Films video of Park(ing) Day 2007 below, featuring an appearance by yours truly towards the end. If you have the blog delivered by email, click here for the video.

PS If you missed my appearance on Friday's Good Morning American, you can watch it here.

What makes biking so cool

If you read this blog regularly then you know that the enforced biking of this project is one of the happiest adaptations we’ve made. We get to exercise, go places wouldn’t otherwise, get there faster and just plain have fun. That’s why I dedicated my spot on Good Morning America today to biking. But it’s not just me who thinks biking is cool. Here are some stats that say so too:

• Biking for transportation improves peoples lives. Studies show that bicyclists are the happiest among commuters.
• Bicycling is a great alternative to short driving trips. 25% of trips that are made within a mile of the home, and 40% are made within 2 miles of the home. 
• Just increasing bicycling a tiny bit will do wonders for the environment. Today, only 1% of US trips are done by bike but increasing this to1.5% would save 462 million gallons of gas per year.
  Biking is a great exercise.
• At an easy pace, it burns 500 calories per hour, 25% more than walking.
• Making biking safer for everyone is just a matter of get pedaling. Every time number of bicyclists triples the rate of accidents reduces by half.

In other words, biking can be an excellent no-impact alternative to the automobile. But as my friend Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives emailed me, “To make it easier for Americans to ride bikes, communities need ‘complete streets.’  Complete Streets are streets that in addition to having car lanes, also have bike lanes. The best kind of bike lanes have a barrier than protects bicyclists from traffic.

“There are hundreds of local groups nationwide that are working to create complete streets and make communities more bicycle-friendly. Join and support your local bicycle group because in addition to working for complete streets, they can also be a great resource for tips to help you start bike commuting.  (how to park and lock your bike, how to wear your helmet properly, ride safely, etc).” 

The group here in NYC, of course, is Paul’s own Transportation Alternatives.

PS If you are interested in reading about how biking has become the trend among the ritzy, upper crust women of New York, go here.

PPS If you saw me on Good Morning America and you liked my new trike (new but made from entirely from second-hand parts, that is), you could always get one of your own. It was made by New York’s bicycling activist, genius and pioneer George Bliss, who you can contact here.

 

Park(ing) Day

In case you were wondering what I’ll be doing Friday, as part of the positive impact part of the project, I will be squatting in a New York City parking space and, with a group of friends, transforming it into a mini-park as part of an effort to demonstrate what cities could be if they were dedicated to people instead of cars. I’ve written before about how the current environmental crisis also offers us the potential to have, not only more planet-friendly cities, but cities that are more pleasant to live in (read here and here).

Anyway, our little parking stunt is part of an international action known as Park(ing) Day. Please drop on by and see us. We will be outside the Whole Foods on Seventh Ave at 24^th Street. There will be some 20 other Park(ing) spaces here in New York, too. Read more about Park(ing) Day here or watch the video below (click here to be taken to the video if you read this blog by email).

PS Also, earlier on Friday, I’ll be on Good Morning America talking about the benefits of biking, if you’d care to tune in.

Happier people, happier planet

I harp on a lot about the opportunities in our environmental crisis. If there is one resounding lesson I've learned during No Impact Man, my one year experiment in extreme environmental living, it's that being kinder to the planet can also mean being kinder to ourselves. Eating local and seasonal, part of the experiment, also means eating more healthily. Getting ride of TV means a lot more time spent playing charades and scrabble with friends and family. The list goes on.

It works the other way around too. It turns out that world leaders who put the happiness of their people before the growth of the economy—an economic philosophy know as "hedonics"—often find that their happiness policies also turn out to be planet-friendly policies. This is no surprise, since the hedonics model tends to emphasize people before cars and community before consumption.

One world leader who follows hedonics is Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, who is currently running again (Bogota's constitution does not allow consecutive terms).

According to June 25's Globe and Mail, Peñalosa has "helped to transform a city once infamous for narco-terrorism, pollution and chaos into a globally lauded model of livability and urban renewal," in part through his emphasis on putting people before cars. "His ideas are being adopted in cities across the developing world. They are also being championed by planners and politicians in North America, where Mr. Peñalosa has reinvigorated the debate about public space once championed by Jane Jacobs."

Some measures adopted by Peñalosa include:

• Dia Sin Carro or Car Free Day. The Banning of cars, after a vote among Bogota’s nearly eight million citizens, every February 1, since 2000.
• Increased gas taxes and prohibiting car owners from driving during rush hour more than three times per week.
• Handing over prime space on the city's main arteries to the Transmilenio, a bus rapid-transit system based on that of Curitiba, Brazil.
• Shifting the budget away from private cars so that Mr. Peñalosa was able to boost school enrollment by 30 per cent, build 1,200 parks, revitalize the core of the city and provide running water to hundreds of thousands of poor.

The result?

According to the Globe and Mail, at first, "Bogotans almost impeached their new mayor. Business owners were outraged. Yet by the end of his three-year term, Mr. Peñalosa was immensely popular and his reforms were being lauded for making Bogota remarkably fairer, more tolerable and more efficient."

Asked to advise planners in Los Angeles last year, according to the Globe and Mail, Peñalosa "told them to let traffic and congestion become so unbearable that drivers voluntarily abandon their car habits. And when Manhattan held a conference in October asking for a prescription for the gridlocked streets of New York, Mr. Peñalosa cheerily suggested banning cars entirely from Broadway." He got a standing ovation.

"There are a few things we can agree on about happiness," Peñalosa says. "You need to fulfill your potential as a human being. You need to walk. You need to be with other people. Most of all, you need to not feel inferior. When you talk about these things, designing a city can be a very powerful means to generate happiness."

And also, it turns out, a powerful means to generate environmental friendliness.

Photo of Bogota courtesy of RJ Matter.

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.”

Getting traffic off our city streets

I’ve written recently about how the environmental crisis offers us the opportunity to make life in our cities more pleasant while reducing our greenhouse gas emissions—a win/win situation. Part of the way for cities to do that is to adopt policies based on a green transportation hierarchy, which puts pedestrians, bicyclists and public transit users before automobiles (people before cars).

Finally, I posted a wonderful photograph of Park Avenue, when it was literally a park and before it was “improved” to allow for car traffic, which I thought might inspire us all towards an ideal where cities are livable, safe and free of the terrible air pollution that makes the air so awful to breathe.

Today, all I want to say is that this ideal of a livable city is not as pie in the sky as it might seem. A first step towards it might come for New York City if the New York State Assembly ultimately adopts Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s proposed “congestion pricing,” one solution for reducing traffic in urban centers.

According to Environmental Defense:

“The idea of congestion pricing is simple: Use price to signal when drivers should consider taking mass transit, reschedule their trip or pay a higher fee for driving. An electronically-collected toll system charges drivers more to use the most congested roads at the most congested times. Like airline ticket prices, prices can be cheaper at off-peak times.”

Bloomberg’s congestion pricing proposal is to reduce traffic in Manhattan’s central business district by charging tolls of $8 for cars and $21 for trucks that drive below 86^th Street during workdays. The amazing thing about congestion pricing is that we know that it already works in London, Singapore, Stockholm and three cities in Norway.

London, for example, has experienced:

• 30% average drop in congestion
• 25% average increase in traffic speed
• 22% and 18% drop in particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, respectively 
• 20% decrease in fossil fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions

And according to Environmental Defense:

“A key lesson in the London experience is that traffic has not overflowed onto neighboring roads…A final measure of London's success is the satisfaction of those involved. Seventy-eight percent of people who pay to enter the cordon area are satisfied with the system.”

Watch the excellent StreetFilms video below. If you happen to be a New York State resident and you feel inspired to support Bloomberg’s plan, why not call New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (518 455 3791) and let him know?

What our cities could be

I've written before about opportunities in the environmental crisis. Getting cars out of New York City and other communities that ought to put people before cars would not only cut down on greenhouse gases and improve air quality but would offer us the opportunity to have much nicer places to live.

Imagine the city as one big park! Don't believe me? Look at the pictures of New York's Park Avenue below. Which do you like? New York with cars or New York without?

PS For more on policy solutions to the urban car crisis, see The Green Transportation Hierarchy.

New York's Park Avenue before 1922 (courtesy Aaron Naparstek)

New York's Park Avenue after 1922 "improvements" to accommodate automobile traffic  (courtesy Aaron Naparstek)

New York's Park Avenue today (courtesy of BuddhaCab)

When what you have beats what you want

Lest I get too heady with all my talk of radical political acts and trusting wisdom before science, I thought you might like to know where No Impact Man goes body surfing while the rest of NYC wrestles their cars out the Long Island Expressway to the Hamptons.

Fort Tilden, a former military base that is now a state park.

I’ve been to beaches all over the world and this was one of the nicest. Swear to God! An abandoned white sandy beach right in New York City. The water was clean, the surf was up, and we saw a grand total of five people in two hours.

We went because I couldn’t stand another day away from the ocean and because Michelle had some time off work. Since we use no carbon-producing transportation, we rode bikes—it took two and half hours.

For lunch, we enjoyed a farmers market special: a bread, cheese and tomato picnic. To drink, we rinsed our palates with NYC's wonderful tap water carried in ultra-cool reusable water bottles, filled from Fort Tilden's public drinking fountains.

The thing is, we never would have enjoyed this gem of a picnic on this gem of a beach if it weren't for the "deprivation" of the No Impact Man project. No Impact teaches us to enjoy what we have instead of wasting our time up trying to figure out how to get what we want.

Photo of Fort Tilden beach by Kyoko Hamada and courtesy of New York Magazine.