No Impact Man

One Life, One Cup

As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I'd Rather Be In Japan, to check in with us every so often. I thought we might be able to learn a little something about "happier planet, happlier people" lifestyles from Sean's experience there.

Here is Sean's latest dispatch:

Kawagishi-sensei is a Zen Buddhist monk, and he’s a teacher at the high school where I work. He teaches calligraphy, which is a traditional art in Japan. Like high schools in America, there are many clubs that students here can join.

In the calligraphy club, students practice the art of painting Japanese Kanji, the Chinese characters that make up part of the written language. Painting calligraphy is an old tradition in Japan, and the characters look lovely, even to my untrained eye.

Kawagishi-sensei has been teaching calligraphy for over 30 years. My Japanese isn’t good enough to speak much with him, but a couple of times a week we try to chat. I noticed that every day he drinks his tea in a special teacup on his desk. It’s a beautiful ceramic cup.  The rich, textured colors shine in the light, and I assumed it must be new because it’s so polished.

When I asked him about it, he told me that he’d bought it with his first paycheck as a teacher, thirty-five years ago. It was made in a famous Japanese style called Aritayaki. This cup of his has seen him through three and a half decades of his life. Every day he uses it, and it’s still a gorgeous cup.

What struck me was how much this cup must mean to him by now. It also seemed very kind to the environment to use just one cup in all that time. I know that if you took all the cups I’ve used over the past thirty years, they would probably need their own landfill. How many paper cups, Styrofoam coffees, coke bottles, water bottles...how much glass and plastic have I used and thrown away in the course of my days over the years? Too many to be sure.

Apart from the simplicity of using one cup is the fact that it’s made of clay. It was dug from the earth, molded by hand, glazed and fired in a kiln. It made me think that consumption itself isn’t necessarily bad. There are ways to own things that can be fun, and even meaningful, and also friendly to the environment. What if everything I owned was acquired to celebrate an occasion, and lasted a lifetime?

No Impact Man's Top Ten Eco-Lifestyle Changes

For more ideas and ways to join a community of people who are searching for happier, more eco-friendly lives, got to NoImpactProject.org.

1. Stop eating beef. Worldwide, beef production contributes more substantially to climate change than the entire transportation sector. Plus, a diet with no or less beef is better for you anyway.

2. Give up bottled water. The production of plastic water bottles together with the privatization of our drinking water is an environmental and social catastrophe. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gasoline. Plus, the health consequences of drinking water from plastic are not clear.

3. Observe an eco-sabbath. For one day or afternoon or even hour a week, don't buy anything, don't use any machines, don't switch on anything electric, don't cook, don't answer your phone, and, in general, don't use any resources. In other words, for this regular period, give yourself and the planet a break. Keep your regular eco-sabbath for a month. You'll find that the enforced downtime represents an improvement to your life.

4. Tithe a fixed percentage of your income. Currently, many of our societal health and welfare services, at home and abroad, are tied to consumer spending which, in turn, depends upon planetary resource use. But the idea of buying stuff to help people is crazy, especially when you consider that our consumption is harming the habitat that we depend upon for our health, happiness and security. If you want to help, don't go shopping. Just help. Commit to tithing part of your income to the non-profits of your choice.

5. Get there under your own steam. Commit to getting around by bike or by foot a certain number of days a month. Not only does this mean using fewer fossil fuels and creating less greenhouse gasses, it means you'll get good, healthy exercise and we'll all breathe fewer fumes. A city with pedestrian and bike traffic is a lot more pleasant to live in than a city filled with vehicles.

6. Commit to not wasting. Wasting resources costs the planet and your wallet. Don't overheat or overcool your home--a few degrees make a huge difference. Let your clothes hang dry instead of using the dryer. Take half the trips but stay twice as long. If your old cell phone works, consider not getting another. Repair instead of rebuy. The list goes on and on.

7. Build a community. Play charades. Have dinners with friends. Sing together. Enjoying each other costs the planet much less than enjoying its resources. Let's relearn to joke around and play in ways that cost nothing to our pocketbooks or our planet.

8. Take your principles to work. The old adage "the cost of doing business" can no longer hold true. We must act as though we care about the world at work as much as we do at home. A company CEO or a product designer has the power to make a gigantic difference through their business, and so do the rest of us.

9. Dedicate a day's worth of TV viewing to eco-service each week. The average American watches four and a half hours of TV a day. Take one day off from the tube each week and joining with others to improve our planet. Voluntary eco-service is a great way to find community who support your values and also a great way to learn about environmental issues and the quality of life issues that go along with them.

10. Believe with all your heart that how you live your life makes a difference to all of us. We are all interconnected. We make a difference to each other on many different levels. Every step towards living a conscious life where we consider the consequences of our actions provides support to everyone else--whether you know it or not--who is trying to do the same thing. We are the masters of our destinies. Let's act as though it is so.

For more ideas and ways to join a community of people who are searching for happier, more eco-friendly lives, got to NoImpactProject.org.

LVGRN: Save millions of trees with recycled toilet and facial tissue

Greenpeace wrote to me today. They said:

Greenpeace Senior Forest Campaigner Rolf Skar was on Fox’s America’s Newsroom yesterday morning to talk about Greenpeace’s new “Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide." Megyn Kelly issued a challenge to her co-host Bill Hemmer: Could Bill, with his eyes closed, tell the difference between recycled toilet paper and Charmin brand toilet paper, made from 100 percent virgin fiber (no recycled content)?

In the video below, see how Bill thought the recycled paper was actually the fluffy stuff made from ancient forests. At the 1:19 second mark, after Megyn tells Bill that he thought the recycled toilet paper was actually toilet paper made from 100 percent virgin fiber, he sheepishly responds, “Did I blow it?”

No, Bill, you didn’t blow it. But brands like Charmin and Cottonelle are blowing it when they destroy ancient forests to make disposable tissue products that are used once and then thrown away. Greenpeace’s “Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide” is a credit card-sized shopping guide that helps consumers find the greenest household paper products. In it, Greenpeace gives a thumbs up to brands Green Forest, Natural Value and Seventh Generation, while recommending that shoppers avoid products like Kleenex, Cottonelle, Viva, and Charmin.

The New York Times did a story on this issue last week in an article “Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests.” The reporter, Leslie Kaufman, writes:

But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”

Fox’s Bill Hemmer seems to disagree.

On not putting a kid with cancer in my gas tank

Today, I went to see director Joe Berlinger's new documentary Crude, about the toxic mess left behind when Texaco withdrew from the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1990s. I listened to a man talk about how his little boy died 24 hours after a Texaco oil spill tainted the water supply. I watched mothers crying about their 17- and 18-year-old children with cancer.

People ask me, if one person or family tries to use fewer planetary resources--in this case, oil--what difference does that really make? Well, whether it saves the planet or not, who can say for sure? But doesn't it make you feel better to use less of something when you know that the result of producing that something causes the kind of suffering shown in the photos (courtesy of Chevron-Toxico.com) below?

For Amazon Watch's list of everyday actions you can take, click here. To donate to Amazon Watch, which is fighting to help recover the costs of a clean up--estimated to be in the billions of dollars--from Chevron (who took over Texaco), click here.

 

Rainwater runs off unlined waste pits of crude oil like this one, left behind in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Texaco, into the water supplies. The health effects are catastrophic.

Maria Machay holds a photo of her husband who died when a small sore that "grew and grew" turned out to be cancer.

 

Jairo Yumbo was born with a deformed hand.

 

Rosero Mendez was also born with a deformed hand.

Pamela Ramirez was born with an eye defect.

Ostentatious individual action as a form of activism

Way back when I was first contemplating the possibility of the No Impact Man project, my main concern was with finding ways to bring attention to our environmental crises. I wanted everyone to change.

As I thought of different ways to write about the crises, I began to worry that I would only be preaching to the choir. The liberals read the liberal polemics; the conservatives read the conservative ones; everybody congratulates themselves for sharing ideas with the book author.

In other words, I didn't imagine I could find a finger-wagging approach that would change anyone's mind. That's when I started realizing how many planetary resources me and my little family were unconsciously using up. I thought, if I want to help, maybe I could start with myself.

Then, at a certain stage, people questioned my sincerity, because I was writing a book and a blog and someone was making a documentary. I understand the gripes. It costs resources to make all these things.

But the point is that I wanted to make a point of leading by example. Maybe if I was willing to ostentatiously question my lifestyle choices, others would, in turn, question theirs. More importantly, perhaps my work would show in stark relief the cultural systems that make living sustainably so difficult for the individual.

The question becomes whether the resulting change of minds and actions and engagement in the issue is worth the use of resources? I guess the answer is not really for me to say.

But what I will say is that I think the more each of us is willing to put ourselves on the line and be open about the concerns we have, the farther the ripples travel.

By way of evidence, I'm including an email below, which is typical of many I have received. I don't include it because I want to blow my own horn. I include it because I wonder if this approach suggests a way forward for changing more minds and engaging more people.

What are you thoughts about ostentatious individual action and the ripple effect as an activist technique? What are its limitations? What are its strengths?

Here is the email:

Just wanted to say thank you to you and your wife for opening up your lives in No Impact Man.

I got to sit in the front row at the Library for the Sundance premier of your movie and it did have an impact on me.  It has only been a week since I saw your movie, but in that time:

-I haven’t purchased anything in a package (although I do see a few challenges ahead);
-Started carrying around a handkerchief;
-Got a mini-whiteboard instead of using so many Post-It Notes;
-I’ve told 20 people about your movie (and never mentioned the toilet paper, because it can distract people from the real message…);
-Talked on the local radio station about your movie (last Saturday and yesterday);
-Wore your button yesterday to a presentation I gave to the Park City Council and mentioned your movie in the presentation (last night the Park City Council adopted an updated Environmental Strategic Plan); and
-Have, as you suggested, started living more consciously.

And while you didn’t mention it explicitly in the movie, in the Q&A you did talk about how trying out these alternative behaviors provided you the opportunity to live more consciously.  It is quite a profound feeling -- the power of making different choices.

Keep up the good work.

Diane Foster

House paint that's better for me and, so, better for the environment

If it's better for the planet, chances are it's better for us too. That goes for everything from not using plastic water bottles to riding bikes instead of driving in cars. That's why living environmentally is not about being deprived but about being healthier.

This weekend, I needed to paint the bathroom, so I thought I'd let you in on the fact that eco-paints, which are better for the planet, are way better for me to have in my house, and more importantly, way better for my little girl.

From Treehugger:

Traditional household paints contain many chemicals, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are a large group of carbon-based chemicals that are volatile, meaning that they like to exist as a gas. The type and amount of VOCs in a household paint generally varies with the type and brand of paint, but traditional household paints generally contain many VOCs, including benzene, formaldehyde, and toluene. Some of these VOCs have been linked in scientific studies to bad health outcomes, including eye, nose and throat irritation, nauseau, headaches, and even cancer.

Because VOCs are volatile, they can “off-gas” from the walls into the air as the paint is applied or as it dries. This, combined with the fact that the paint is usually applied to a large area, can cause people living or spending time in these freshly painted homes to have exposures to VOCs that are much greater than normal – as much as 1000 times greater. These potentially large exposures – and resulting smells, headaches, and other potential health effects -- cause many (including you!) to look for lower VOC or chemical-free paints.

I went for a no VOC paint from Benjamin Moore. Anybody got any better ideas?

Meanwhile, here's a list, also from Treehugger, of low and no VOC paints:

AFM (American Formulating and Manufacturing)
www.afmsafecoat.com

Benjamin Moore & Co. (Pristine® Eco-Spec® )
www.benjaminmoore.com

BioShield Paints
www.bioshieldpaint.com

Devoe Paint
www.devoe.com

Duron Paints and Wallcoverings (Genesis Odor-Free products)
www.duron.com

ICI Dulux Paints
www.iciduluxpaints.com

Kelly  Moore

www.kellymoore.com

Old Fashioned Milk Paint Company
www.milkpaint.com

Sherwin- Williams  (HealthSpec® paints)
www.sherwin.com

Individual action vs collective action

Lest you all think, that with my recent calls for collective action, that I have abandoned individual action, please read my post at WorldChanging about how the two are in separable. Leave your comments there but leave them here too!

A continuing debate erupts within the environmental movement about the relative merits of individual versus collective action. Back in 2007, on the subject of individual action, The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote,

You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you don't change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression of, as Dick Cheney would say, "personal virtue."

I heard criticisms like Friedman's constantly throughout a one-year project in environmental living that I took on under the moniker No Impact Man. What difference can one person make? Having had a lot of critics who forced me to look at the issue, I've come to some conclusions.

Firstly, there is one circumstance under which one person absolutely cannot make a difference: if that one person doesn't try. And if we don't try, who among us knows whether we have foregone the chance to influence the people around us? Which one of us knows for sure that, by applying our talents and efforts to what we believe in, whether we might become a Martin Luther King Jr. or a Bobby Kennedy or an Al Gore or a Betty Friedan or a Nelson Mandela?

Not that these great names are necessarily the most important aspects of movements...

Read the rest of the post here.

PS Did you guys know that the man character in this week's Law & Order was apparently modeled after me? Too weird.

Sad pictures of dead bicyclists that I plan to show the Senator

So, New York State Senator Klein and I have rearranged our meeting to discuss bicycling and transportation policy in New York City for this coming Tuesday, October 14. You may remember that the Senator and I had an altercation (read here, here and here) after he nearly veered his black Mercedes into me when I was riding my bike.

So Tuesday we'll talk about--I hope--how policy might be changed to avoid such confrontations between cars and bikes. Some say that people like me want to force everyone to ride their bikes. That's not true. I just want traffic policy that makes the streets safe for those who do ride their bikes--and those who would like to.

Bikers save us carbon emissions, health care costs, transportation infrastructure costs and more. It's not about forcing everyone to ride bikes, it's about respecting the fact that those who do ride bikes are actually doing us all a favor and a service. So how can we make riding safe for them?

Because for now, it's not safe. And that's one of the things I want to tell the Senator. I'm going to ask him to ride a bike in Manhattan with me to see for himself. But I'm also going to show him a few pictures of bicyclists recently killed on New York City Streets, like these (taken from GhostBikes.Org):

Amelia was riding her bike north on First avenue when a minivan crossing 49th street crashed into her (7/11/2008).

Michael Needham Jr. was riding his bike with friends outside the Allerton Library after school on June 5th, when a speeding car struck him.  After 19 days in a coma, he died on June 23rd, 2008. Michael was just about to graduate from the 5th grade from nearby P.S. 76, The Bennington School.

On February 28, 2008, Asif Rahman, was doing what he loved to do -- riding his bike on his way back home from work -- when he was crushed to death by a reckless truck driver on Queens Boulevard. He died instantly from internal injuries. The truck driver was not charged or ticketed.

So sad, right? And it's not that there's really anyone to blame. It's just that we could do better. We could make the streets safer and more livable. We could dedicate the vast public space that makes our city streets, not to the vehicles that drive through them, but to the people that live on them.

And we could make a transportation system based on biking, walking and transit that was so good and so popular that, in cities like New York, none of us even wanted to use a car.

What a vision! A way of being that would be both better for the planet and better for the people.

On buying more than status

What follows is a passage from the draft of the book about my No Impact project. I thought you might enjoy a glimpse into my progress. The draft, by the way, is turned in and I await comments from my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

This passage is about some experiences we had in the "no buying anything new" part of the project. The idea was to try and purchase what we needed without causing any new resources to be taken from the ground or trees to be cut down. So everything we bought was second hand.

As we enter this scene, we had just dropped off some old clothes at a thrift store run by Housing Works:

And when we dropped the clothes off we saw a neat, rocking horse handmade from wood by someone’s grandfather. It had a name stenciled on it: Jake. The name was obviously the name of the child it had been made for, which gave us pause, but we just decided that it would be the name of the horse itself and we bought it for Isabella.

Now we were on the other end of the secondhand stuff cycle, from gifter to giftee. Instead of feeling, as I might have expected, like the used rocking horse was grubby, we felt like it was alive with history and human connection. It wasn’t anonymous and plastic from the toy store. It was the byproduct of the love of some grandfather, presumably, for a grandchild.

To bring it home had a much different feeling than to bring home something from toy store. Instead of giving her a piece of molded goop that had come out of an oil well, we gave her the product of love that had come out of an old man’s heart. Which would I rather Isabella held in her hands and had in her life?

This is the kind of commerce not where you feel like you are parted from your hard-earned money for something you don’t even like and of whose value you are suspicious. This is not the exchange of merely money for goods.

The nostalgic gift of the horse to Housing Works by the parents of children now grown. Our money gladly paid because we know it will go to the homeless. The memory of a grandfather’s love. A respect for planetary resources. My little girl laughing and rocking and trying to get our dog to get on.

This is not commerce. This is not profit extraction where you need to be sure that you are not paying too high a price and worry forever that you’ve been had.

This is not meaningless consumption but meaningful exchange. It is the exchange of human connection. It’s trade. It’s value. This is not buyer beware. It’s buyer be human. This is God’s Grace. This is the meaning of life.

*********

I’m thinking of Steffen Schneider, head farmer of Hawthorne Valley farm would tell me a couple of months later when I went to visit his farm. Hawthorne Valley is “biodynamic.” That is to say, at the center of Steffen’s philosophy of farming is an idea, developed by Rudolf Steiner that the farm is one big living organism. In the case of Hawthorne Valley, the beating heart of that organism is the dairy herd.

The herd grazes all day on 60 acres [this figure is inaccurate, by the way] of grass and once a day the cows are brought in to be milked. The manure collected in the cowsheds is composted and finally will become the only fertilizer for the 14-acre vegetable garden. But as Steffen explained it to me, it wasn’t that the manure just fertilized. There was something more esoteric carried by the manure that synthetic chemical fertilizers could never carry. Life.

First of all, the cows ate the living grass, which carried the life force of the earth, the organisms within the earth, the rain, the clouds, the sun, the entire universe and the grass itself. Then, too, the grass as the cows chewed it and it worked its way through the their digestive tracts collected the life force of the cows themselves. Putting the manure of the cows on the 14-acre vegetable garden concentrated the life force of 60 acres in one place, like focusing the sun with a magnifying glass.

This carrying of life force, maybe explains my little girl’s rocking horse and why I feel so sentimental about it. This means being part of a whole different kind of web.

Later we would find, in a little boutique in a flea market on 26th Street, a Louis Vitton blue and white striped shirt. For Michelle. She needed a little lift, she said, a little hark back to the shopping days. At the market, the boutique owner, a man, said to us “I probably shouldn’t tell you this but the shirt belonged to an old drag queen who died.” She had an act. She was a drag queen. She died.

Michelle wears the shirt and celebrates the drag queen’s life.

How esoteric is this? How corny? But I would just love to find the grandfather who made that rocking horse and throw my arms around him and thank him for his heart. I never knew the drag queen but she conjures a wonderful brew of tragedy and a terrific pulse of life. The tragedy of a difficult path. The pulse that will not be suppressed. I want to hold her too. I want to save her life.

This is not consumption. This is participation.

And when I see Michelle in that striped shirt, and I think of saving the drag queen’s life, I finally realize that when we bought that shirt, we did.

Going on bikes where a car driver can't

So you know, when you're on a carless vacation, one thing you find out is that you're allowed on bikes lots of places where cars aren't.

First off, on the ferry to and from Shelter Island, out here on the tip of Long Island, you can get straight on with a bike while cars wind back in a line that lasts half a mile.

But better than that, on a bike, you can go to any beach you want. Car drivers need town permits for the beaches.

I can go on my bike where car drivers can't.

Just a thought at the end of a long, wonderful day at the beach on a carless vacation.

PS What advantages have you discovered of abandoning the car for the bike?

Photo courtesy of van-gessel.com.