No Impact Man

Bottlemania

An excellent new book tells the story of our drinking water crisis by focusing, in particular, on the bitter dispute that erupted between the townspeople of Fryeburg, Maine, and Nestle's Poland Spring, which wanted to bottle their water. Bottlemania, by Garbage Land author Elizabeth Royte, will be out in bookstores in the coming weeks (you can pre-order it at Royte's website, Bottlemania.net).

Royte and I spoke on the phone, yesterday, about the most recent drinking water scare, the Associated Press report that traces of a variety of pharmaceuticals can be found in our tap water (you can find my response to that report here). Here are Royte's thoughts on what can be done about the drugs in the water:

• To put the problem into perspective, there are much higher levels of hormones and antibiotics in our meat and milk.
• None of us should put our unused drugs down the toilet and pharmaceutical companies should institute some sort of take back scheme so drugs are safely disposed.
• Municipalities, with help from the federal government, should invest in existing drinking water treatment technologies that can remove the drugs.
• To offset the costs of the use of these technologies, rain water collection and gray water reuse systems should be established so less water requires treatment.
• Drug makers should be encouraged to reformulate their products to break down quickly and harmlessly in the environment so they can't end up back in our drinking water in the first place.
• Since 90% of antibiotics are used on farm animals, new regulations must be put in place to ensure that antibiotics excreted by them don't end up in our drinking water.

Lastly, here is a paragraph from Bottlemania, which encapsulate Royte's good, balanced approach to the question of public tap water versus privatized bottled water:

"I come away from my investigations," she writes, "with at least one certainty: not all tap water is perfect. But it is the devil we know, the devil we have standing to negotiate with and improve. Bottled water companies don't answer to the public, they answer to shareholders. As Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman write in Thirst, 'If citizens no longer control their most basic resource, their water, do they really control anything at all?'"

LV GRN: Keeping our drinking water fresh

Yesterday, I wrote about "peak water," and how we could eventually pay out our noses for drinking water if we continue to allow water sources to be privatized while letting our municipal water systems degrade.

To help preserver our water systems, one of the things we did during the No Impact project, and continue to do, is try to avoid allowing toxins and sewage from entering our waterways.

Sewage, you say? Yes, sewage. Because here in New York we have a system of nearly 700 "combined sewer overflows" (CSOs) that occasionally dump raw sewage into New York Harbor and the surrounding waterways. The good news is that there are only 70 such emissions a year. The bad news is that that amounts to 27 billion gallons of untreated wastewater in New York City waterways annually.

What happens is that both the household sewage from our homes and the storm water drainage from the streets and rooftops of the buildings come together in underground drainage pipes that take it all to wastewater treatment plants (click on the above diagram for a larger version). During a hard rain, however, those underground sewage pipes get overwhelmed and, to keep the sewage from backing up into our sinks and toilets, it gets dumped, untreated, through the CSOs into the rivers and waterways.

Want to go swimming?

Not in New York, right? Well, it turns out there are a lot of other places you may not be rushing to don your bathing suits either. According to the EPA:

"Combined sewer systems serve roughly 772 communities containing about 40 million people. Most communities with combined sewer systems (and therefore with CSOs) are located in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, and the Pacific Northwest (see map)."

And the discharge isn’t just poo. It can contain industrial waste and just about anything people pour down their toilets or into the sewers: car oil, bleach, ammonia, antifreeze, bug repellent, rat poison and every other toxin you can imagine (picture of a CSO in Pennsylvania courtesy of the Larson Design Group).

Here are some measures each of us of can take to stop the pollution that flows from CSOs:

• Reduce water use so less wastewater enters the sewer system and it is less likely to overflow.
• Manage storm water so that less of it enters the sewer systems.
• Develop “end of pipe” innovations that prevent the overflows.
• Don’t put anything but water, pee and poo and TP down the drain (recipes for low impact soaps and household cleansers here).

Finally, here is my New York City water activist friend Kate Zidar's really cool video project (made in partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy), The Water Underground, a 25-minute student-led exploration of where water comes from, where it goes and what happens along the way.

When what's happening to gas happens to drinking water

Let's start with the fairy tale that came true for the gasoline magnates:

• Once upon a time, a number of companies bought up drilling rights here and oil refineries there and eventually gained control over the USA's gasoline.
• For a while, gasoline hovered under $2 a gallon, and the companies and magnates had to console themselves with--ho hum--tidy profits.
• One day, some people began to worry that there wasn't always going to be enough gas for everyone. "Demand will grow," they said. "Supply will fall."
• But the gas companies and magnates, instead of panicking, began rubbing their hands together. Gigantic, ridiculously huge profits, they knew, come to those who wait.
• Next, developing countries started buying cars and, at the same time, world gas production pretty much peaked. In other words, demand grew. Supply fell.
• Prices skyrocket, people suffered, but the oil and gas companies and magnates made huge, unprecedented profits.
• Peak oil, it turned out, wasn't their worst nightmare at all. It was their happiest fantasy!
• So the oil companies and magnates lived happily ever after.
• Too bad about everyone else.

Now let's look at the future fairy tale that the companies who privatize our drinking water look forward to:

• Nestle, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Suez and a bunch of other companies buy up water rights around the United States and elsewhere.
• For a while, people buy bottled water for less than $2 a gallon (even though tap water is free).
• The water barons console themselves with--ho hum--tidy profits, selling their water for something like a thousand times what they pay for it.
• Then, the phrase "peak water" gets bandied about, but far from worrying that the water will run out, the water barons begin buying water rights up faster than ever.
• Next, in some future scenario, underfunding to the municipal water supplies or pollution in the aquifers means that clean tap water becomes scarcer and scarcer and drinking bottle water is not a choice but a necessity.
• In other words, demand grows, Supply falls.
• Prices skyrocket, people suffer, but the water barons make huge, unprecedented profits.
• Peak water, it turns out, wasn't their worst nightmare at all. It was their happiest fantasy!
• So the water barons lived happily ever after.
• Too bad about everyone else.

You see, it's not just about the plastic bottles. It's not just about the food miles. It's about the fundamental right of access to drinking water. Are we willing for our children to have happen to them for water what is happening to us for gas?

We can make a difference!

• Take action against privatization of water in California here.
• Support federal funding of clean drinking water here.
• Learn how to boycott bottled water here.
• Read about my ultra-cool reusable water bottle here.
• I don't know what else, do you? Please leave your ideas in the comments!

Is it in your nature to try?

Can the way I live really make a difference?

That's one of the things we worry about, right? When it comes to figuring out whether to get involved in the political process or to make our lifestyles more sustainable, we all wonder if, in fact, we will make the slightest bit of difference. Is it worth the effort?

Well, I have a friend, Mayer Vishner, who has been a peace activist since the 1960s. I help him grow vegetables on his plot at Laguardia Community Gardens in New York's Greenwich Village.

I once joked with Mayer, "Hey Mayer, you've been working for peace for 40 years. Don't you think it's time you looked for a new cause? I'm not sure your peace idea has any traction."

You know what he said? He said, "I've given up on worrying about the results. I have a vision of the way the world should be, and I've just come to accept that it's in my nature to keep trying. So I keep trying."

Michael Pollan, in his New York Times article on Sunday, makes a more rational case for taking action:

"If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries."

I completely agree with Michael. I have faith. On the other hand, maybe he's right. Maybe he's not. How can we know for sure?

So sometimes, the question of whether we can make a difference or not may be the wrong question. I think another line of inquiry might just as productively go like this: Do I want to be the kind of person who tries or the kind of person who doesn't?

It took me 42 years to realize it, but I want to be like Mayer Vishner. I want to be the kind of person who tries. Whether Michael Pollan is 100% right or 50% or 10% right, when the game is over, I want to be one of the people who tried. Whether the world is saved or not, whether I'm still alive to see it or not, I want to be able to say I tried.

And I'm not saying I'm perfect or that I'm never selfish or that I don't ever want an iPhone. I'm saying that given my set of circumstances and my temperament, within those limitations, not willing to martyr myself or anything like that, I still want to be the type of person who tries--even if the chance of results look slim.

So today, writing this blog, given all the effort I spend trying to affirmatively answer that question of whether each of us can make a difference, what I'm much more interested in today is this question:

How can I be the kind of person who tries?

PS For those of you who care, I finally have a profile on Facebook. It's here.

First to green wins, Clorox decides

I've written before that the big companies should make enviros the target market. To be enviro, these days, is to be cool, ethical, caring and driven by values. And as people become aware that enviro-concerns are really human concerns, that toxins in our environment mean toxins in our bodies, and that a happier planet makes for happier people, the importance of green products in the marketplace is only going to increase.

Whoever gets there first is going to win in the long term.

I don't say this because I approve of greenwashing, the practice of making products seem green as a cynical marketing tactic. Of course, I abhor the practice and think, from a business point of view, it is an ultimately short term way to work, because it will backfire when customers realize they have been betrayed.

But what I want to say to the designers and product managers who come across this blog is that investment in truly sustainable product design is going to pay off and pay off big. Treating the earth kindly is not a philanthropic exercise but a profitable one (I give a few guidelines, by the way, for what I think will win enviro-customer loyalty, here and here).

And if Clorox's introduction of the Green Works line of biodegradable home cleaners is anything to go by, I'm not the only one to think so. When such a huge consumer brand thinks green is the way to go, you better worry whether it might be the way to go for your business, too.

Back when Clorox took over Burt's Bees, I wrote that I was suspicious of the giant corporation's intentions to maintain the brand's environmental credentials. I wrote that some sort of certification or transparency was needed in order to allow customers to reassure themselves.

Marketing on the basis of environmental ethics requires more than just a product. It requires a way for customers to reassure themselves that you remain true to those ethics. Indeed, I suspect that the skepticism of enviros like me is one reason big corporations have shied away from the market, fearing it could end up working against them.

Clorox appears to have overcome the transparency problem and potential customer skepticism with the endorsement of Green Works by the Sierra Club (see New York Times story here).

That the Sierra Club is taking an undisclosed amount of cash for the endorsement is potentially problematic. By profiting from Green Works sales, Sierra Club finds itself in the position of both running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds. And schemes like this can get watered down if they become widespread.

But I still think this is an important step forward.

This partnership between an environmental organization and a corporation big enough to get green products into the mass market means that a huge amount of toxic cleaning products will be displaced and demonstrates that a major corporation can move green out of the niche. The agenda of the environmental organization moves forward, money is made, and all of us end up with a safer water supply and a happier planet.

This a victory all around, and I hope brand managers and CEOs of the major corporations take notice. If you aren't, like Clorox, the first to introduce truly sustainable products to the mass market in a trustworthy fashion, you're going to lose. If you are the first, you'll win.

Meanwhile, here's the Sierra Club's rationale for making the endorsement:

• Until now, a big stumbling block for families who want to live a greener lifestyle has been the high cost of "green" products. However, Green Works is priced anywhere from 30%-50% lower than the price of other natural products currently available.
• Research indicates that people will likely be more willing to give an eco-preferable product like Green Works a try because they trust that the Clorox name means that it will clean well.
• While most consumers do not have access to green cleaning products because they do not shop in the specialized stores where they are distributed, Green Works products will ultimately be found on the shelves of approximately 24,000 stores, giving most of the public access to these cleaners.

PS All the same, out of loyalty and sentimentality, and because it uses fewer plastic bottles and is completely organic and has no chemicals in it whose names I don't understand, I am still sticking with my Dr. Bronner's based cleaning regime.

Bottled water isn't the answer

On Monday, the Associated Press released a report on the discovery of trace amounts of various types of pharmaceuticals in drinking water around the country.

I got invited to discuss the subject on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show (go here if you'd like to listen). The conversation quickly turned to bottled water as a possible solution, which it is not.

Here's why bottled water doesn't help, according to Food and Water Watch:

• 40% of the bottled water sold in the United States is tap water anyway.
• The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires hundreds of tests each month on municipal water supplies, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates bottled water, requires only one test a week on bottled water.
• Only 40% of bottled water--that which is sold across state lines--is regulated by the FDA in the first place.
• Plastic bottles in the United States require some 1.5 million barrels of oil to manufacture each year--enough to power 100,000 cars.
• 86% of plastic bottles in the United States never get recycled.
• Tap water costs about a penny a gallon and bottled waters costs up to $10 a gallon.
• Chemicals that leach from plastic water bottles may affect our health.
• If people abandon the use of municipal drinking water, then there will be no political will to ensure that we invest the necessary resources in the water infrastructure.
• The United States has some of the best drinking water in the world and we must keep it that way.

The real answer, at least for me, is to:

• Continue drinking tap water. You can contact your local water utility to ask for a copy of your area's Annual Water Quality Report (the EPA keeps many of them here).
• Choose a filter, if necessary, with the help of these Food and Water Watch guidelines.
• Most importantly, ask Congress to provide the funds to keep our water safe.
• Support Food and Water Watch's campaign to create a national Clean Water Trust Fund (similar to the trust fund used to pay for our highways) by clicking here.

Read Food and Water Watch's new report on bottled water here.

Read their argument for a Clean Water Trust Fund here.

Image courtesy of Food and Water Watch.

 

Take the pledge (but drink all the beer you want)!

This is a guest post by Jenna Garland, who works with Corporate Accountability on their Think Outside the Bottle Campaign. Jenna wants us all to sign a pledge to stick with drinking tap water instead of bottled. Here, she tells us why:

The Think Outside the Bottle campaign is asking people to pledge to opt for tap water over bottled, and to support the efforts of local officials who are working for stronger public water systems. We are asking people to sign because:

• water is a human right and not a commodity to be bought and sold for profit;
• bottled water corporations are changing the very way we think about water and undermining people’s confidence in public water systems;
• up to 40% of bottled water in the US and Canada is sourced from municipal tap water;
• some bottlers have run over communities’ concerns and the environment when they extract water and build bottling plants to get local spring and ground water;
• bottled water travels many miles from the source, results in the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels, and contributes to the billions of plastic bottles ending up in our landfills;
• worldwide there is a need for investments in public water systems to ensure equal access to water, a key ingredient for prosperity and health for all people; and
• solutions to ensuring water as a fundamental human right require people acting together and standing up for public water systems.
  

Last year in the US, 17 million barrels of oil were used to manufacture, fill, and transport bottled water. That’s enough to fuel 1 million cars for 1 year (in the US). This is a significant source of global warming pollution – furthermore, it’s becoming a have and have not issue.

As water resources shift with global climate change, water is going to become an even more precious resource than it is currently. Right now, we have more than 1.1 billion (with a b!) people who lack access to enough clean, safe water to meet their daily needs.

By 2025, that’s predicted to increase to more than 2/3 of the world’s population, without taking into account the effects of global climate change. We can’t let this become something that those who can pay for get access to, and those who can’t are left without options. Working for stronger public systems is essential to preventing all these things from happening.

To sign the pledge to stick with tap water and show corporations and public officials that you value it, click here.

Time to make a splash (with your help)

As you know, the idea of the No Impact project is to reduce our negative impact and increase our positive impact in order to have no net environmental impact. Of course, the scientists will tell you that this doesn’t work, but it isn’t intended to work so much scientifically as it is to work philosophically. The real point is to try to live on the planet while doing more good than harm.

Anyway, the positive impact phase has a number of elements, but one that I want to tell you about today is a sponsored swim I am doing around the southern tip of Manhattan on September 29.

Just as biking on city streets is subtly activist (because statistics show that the more cyclists on the streets the safer it is for everyone), so is swimming in the waters around Manhattan. This is part of why Manhattan Island Foundation (MIF) organizes regular swims in our waters: “to raise public awareness of the waters that surround New York by supporting efforts to clean and protect them.”

The more swimmers MIF attracts and the more attention it gets for its swims, the more people will realize that we could have wonderfully clean recreational waters in New York and the more political pressure there will be to get them cleaned up. Therefore, the other day, I threw my 44-year-old body in a YMCA pool and proved I could swim a mile in 45 minutes, which means I qualify to take part in the upcoming “Cove to Cove” swim (MIF apparently doesn’t care if your arms and legs turn to jelly afterwards).

So here is my plea:

If you enjoy the No Impact Man blog, and find it anything like valuable, do you think you might be willing to sponsor my swim for a dollar or two or even ten or twenty? The money will be split evenly between MIF and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice.

You may remember that I recently went canoeing in the very-polluted Bronx River with some real environmental heroes, young people of YMPJ who hope to bring attention to the plight of the Bronx River and to get it cleaned up. YMPJ’s mission is to develop leadership potential in young people with the goal of rebuilding the South Bronx community and “molding leaders who are capable of leading change here and in the world.”

Manhattan Island Foundation and YMPJ, two excellent causes. Want to help me help them, just a little? Want to help me with the positive impact part of the No Impact Man project? Want to make a splash?

Then, to donate online, click here, then click “donate,” then scroll down to “support a swimmer” in the “donation is for” box, and type my name, Colin Beavan. Or you can send a check to Manhattan Island Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 5533, New   York, NY 10185 (and be sure to put my name “Colin Beavan” in the memo portion of the check).

Thank you so much!

PS Please don’t forget to associate your donation with my name or YMPJ won’t get their half!

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.”

Real environmental heroism

For all our talk of polar bears and melting icebergs and “possible” future catastrophes, there are many, many people around the United States and the rest of the world who are already living in the midst of environmental disasters. Often, these people are poor and they lack the political power to stop our power plants, our garbage dumps, our sewage treatment plants, and our expressways from being built in or through their neighborhoods.

These are the neighborhoods, in other words, that bear way more than their fair share of the environmental burden for the way our culture lives. We’re not talking global warming here (though the problems that harm these neighborhoods often also contribute to climate change). We’re talking air that is already too dirty to healthily breathe and waterways that are so polluted that they can make your eyes sting. Not in the future, but now.

One of those neighborhoods is New York’s South Bronx, where some 39 percent of the 500,000-strong population lives below the poverty level (according to the South Bronx Environmental Health and Policy Study). Although they make up only 6.5% of New York's citizenry, the residents find themselves living alongside some 45% of the City’s private waste transfer stations (which process their portions of 20,000 daily tons of commercial trash).

Additionally, the South Bronx is home to the Hunts Point Terminal Market, the largest produce market in the world. It is the distribution point for all New York City’s vegetables. As a result of the waste transfer stations and the market, every day, some 3,000 trucks roar through the South Bronx, either carting New York City’s food out or carting its garbage in.

This makes the South Bronx, as one resident teenager said to me the other day, “the asthma triangle of death.” It has some of the highest asthma rates in the country (which combines particularly badly with residents' particularly poor access to health care).

In addition, the South Bronx’s waterways—the Bronx River, Harlem River, Westchester Creek and the Upper East River—suffer high levels of pollution, from PCB’s to “floatables” (the many varieties of garbage that makes its way into the sewers and then floats).

The water pollution is thanks largely to the wastewater treatment processing plants, which also grace the neighborhood, and the particularly bad “combined sewer overflows” (CSOs). CSOs, which I’ve written about before, protect the wastewater plants from being overwhelmed by purging storm water and raw sewage out of the system and into the waterways when it rains.

Anyway. All this is a long preamble to what I really want to say.

Last Thursday, my friend Kate Zidar and some young people involved in the organization where she works—Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice—took me on a canoe ride along the Bronx River. Encouraging recreation on the river is a YMPJ project with the goal of raising awareness to put local water pollution issues on the political agenda.

But what really impressed me—besides for the stunning resilience of wildlife in the polluted water—was the YMPJ young people. YMPJ’s youth development program centers on training them in community leadership in the hope that they will be inspired activists who will help to rebuild the South Bronx.

One incredible 18-year-old woman, with whom I shared my canoe, told me:

“My parents’ definition of success it to make a lot of money and to get out of the neighborhood. But I want to go to college and come back and make a difference.”

That, to me, is the definition of real environmental heroism.

PS If you think so, too, maybe you would care to make a donation to Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice? You can do so here.

PPS Sorry for the long post.