No Impact Man

Designers: If it isn't life-enhancing, can it really be sustainable?

Consider, first, that reduced resource use and sustainable lifestyles, on both the cultural and the individual level, need not mean deprivation.

As an individual-level example, studies show that bicycle commuters are happier than car and transit commuters. As a cultural-level example, people who live in pedestrian-friendly areas like villages, where cars are used less frequently, tend to have more friends, the research shows.

In both cases--how a  person chooses to travel and how a culture develops its land--the scenario that uses fewer resources results in better quality of life. The happiness of people, therefore, does not depend on energy and material use. It depends upon whether materials and energy are used effectively to improve well-being.

Perhaps the designer of truly sustainable products and systems must ask, therefore, not just whether the product or system has the lowest possible energy and materials input. Perhaps the designer must also ask whether use of those valuable ecological resources can be justified in terms of quality of life improvement.

In other words, as I'm defining it, the "environmental effectiveness" (E) of a product or system might be mathematically represented by an equation that looks something like:

E = life enhancement / ecological resource use.

The more life enhancement (pleasure, health, contentment, security, community, connectedness) delivered per unit of resource, the higher the environmental effectiveness, the more sustainable the product. In other words, even a conventionally-grown apple has a higher environmental effectiveness than organically-grown tobacco.

And if you think about it, products like sugary sodas, when they contribute to childhood obesity, wouldn't score so well either. Carrot juice, on the other hand, even in the same throwaway container, even using the same resources to produce, because it delivers important nutrients, would score better.

Why is life enhancement so important in evaluating sustainability? Because we have become so short on environmental resources that we can no longer afford to be wasting them on things that don't even improve our lives.

When to turf out an old appliance for the energy efficient model--The New York Times is wrong [Except that I made a big mistake in my calculations so they may be right]

[This just in on May 13: I majorly screwed up yesterday's calculations causing the embodied energies of the steel to be over-estimated by a factor of five and therefore throwing this whole post off. Ugh. So sorry. The argument is not as straightforward as I had hoped and I will have to look into it more for the future. I'm afraid I'm back, for now, to being unclear about the embodied energy versus energy saved balance. Anyway, this post and its conclusions are, for now, unreliable.]

Fair warning: there's going to be a lot of math in this post, so if you just want to get the gist, skip to the bold bits in the middle and at the bottom.

We'd all like to think that if you walk into a store and see a washing machine that uses 20% less electricity than the one you have at home--yippee!--you get to buy yourself some new home gadgets and at the same time do the environment a favor.

The problem is that the appliance you're thinking about requires a lot of energy to manufacture--"embodied energy." Plus, you have to factor in the habitat damage caused by mining the metals, the water pollution caused by smelting them, the energy of transportation of the appliance and on and on.

Of course, if you've already decided to buy a new appliance, it's best to buy the most energy-efficient model. The question is--and it's a complicated one--is there ever a time when it's actually better to buy a new appliance than to keep an old one that works perfectly well?

That's the question the New York Times tried to answer on Sunday with its story "If Your Appliances Are Avocado, They Probably Aren't Green," by Alina Tugend. According to the story:

“It takes energy to make a product,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “You don’t want to replace perfectly good products.”

He gave me his rule of thumb for refrigerators.

“If it’s avocado or brown-colored, it’s time to retire it,” he said. Refrigerators from the 1970s, the last time I believe those particular appliance colors were in vogue, use three to four times the power of today’s models.

A spokeswoman from the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Energy Star program along with the Department of Energy, told me that, generally, any appliance over 15 years old probably should be put out to pasture.

Tugend then goes on to write:

"It turns out that clothes washers and dishwashers have pretty much the same criteria as refrigerators — they have become much more energy-efficient. So if yours is inching toward 15 years, consider replacing it."

And while she's right about the 15-year-old fridge--replace it--it turns out she's wrong about about the 15-year-old dishwasher and laundry machine--use them till their dying breath.

Because, as you'll see below, only in the case of the refrigerator do the energy savings outweigh the embodied energy and other environmental impacts of manufacture (not to mention the impact of disposing of the old appliance).

To figure this out, I noodled around the internet but was unable to find studies giving the embodied energies of even a single appliance (if you know of a source for embodied energies of appliances, please email me or leave behind in comments).

What I did find, though, is a Australian government study on solid waste management that gives the weights of different materials in a variety of average appliances (154 pounds of steel, for example, for a refrigerator, 55 pounds of steel for a dishwasher, and 33 pounds of steel for a laundry machine). I also found this Tufts University web page which gives a range of values for embodied energy of the production of steel, the major material in most appliances (I'm taking a figure of 40MJ/kg or about 25 kilowatt-hours [5/13: should be 5 kilowatt-hours and that figure should follow throughout] per pound of steel).

In other words, according to these figures, the embodied energy of the steel alone in an average refrigerator is:

154 lbs x 25 kWh/lb = 3,850 kWh.

The embodied energy of the steel in a dishwasher is:

55 lbs x 25 kWh/lb = 1,365 kWh.

And the embodied energy of the steel in a laundry machine is:

33 lbs x 25 kWh/lb = 825 kWh.

If my figures and math are anything near correct, to make it worth replacing your old appliances with new ones, those are the amounts of energy you would have to save, just to recoup the energy used to produce the steel. This, of course, doesn't include the energy of the other materials in the appliances or of the energy of the manufacture or distribution of the appliance itself. The actual embodied energy of each appliance is likely much higher than the figures above.

Now, considering refrigerators, today's models use about half the energy of a 15-year-old model, according to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (the ACEEE). Since, according to the Consumer's Guide to Effect Environmental Choices (a book), today's average refrigerator uses 1,100 kWh per year (suggesting that a 15-year-old model uses 2,200 and that the annual energy savings would be 1,100 kWh per year).

In other words, recouping the embodied energy of the steel alone in a new refrigerator when replacing a 15-year-old refrigerator would take:

3,850 kWh / 1,100 kWh per year = 3.5 years (this means, to be explicit, that the energy savings of your new fridge would have to pile up for 3.5 years before it equals the energy costs of the steel in the fridge you bought).

On the other hand, according to the ACEEE, a modern dishwasher only uses 30% less energy than a 15-year-old one. Since a dishwasher according to the Consumer's Guide, only uses 299 kWh a year, that means a new dishwasher would save only only 90 kWh a year.

In other words, to recoup the embodied energy of the steel alone in a new dishwasher by replacing a 15-year-old dishwasher would take:

1,365 kWh / 90 kWh per year = 15.2 years.

Considering, finally, the laundry machine, the ACEEE doesn't seem to offer a energy efficiency comparison to older models, but I'll assume a 30% improvement over 15 years, the same as for dishwashers. The average laundry machine, according to the Consumer's Guide, uses only 99 kWh a year, which means a new laundry machine would save only about 30 kWh a year.

In other words, to recoup the embodied energy of the steel alone in a new laundry machine by replacing a 15-year-old laundry machine would take:

825 kWh / 30 kWh per year = 27.5 years.

What does all this mean? Well, first of all, let's be clear that the sources of my figures aren't the best and that I'm not a manufacturing analyst and that this analysis should be regarded more as a thought experiment than anything else. On the other hand, since all we're considering is the embodied energy of the steel content of the appliances, it would likely actually take more than the estimates I've made to recoup the energy of the new machines.

Regardless, what I conclude is that, if environmental impact is your chief concern, than your best bet is to keep using all but your most energy intensive appliances until they wear out.

In other words, when it comes to residential dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuum cleaners, and microwaves (the analysis would be different in business or industry where machines are used more consistently) , keep them till they keel over.

For more energy intensive appliances, like refrigerators, stand alone freezers, clothes dryers, hot water heaters  and air conditioners, assuming you make regular use of them and that they're not turned off six months a year such as in a summer home, it may be worthwhile to follow the EPA spokesperson's advice and consider replacing those that are over 15 years old.

Energy scientists, especially, please weigh in on this post. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Meanwhile, tomorrow's post will be not about the science of appliances, but about the approach we're taking in the formerly No Impact household.

Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

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?'"

Living in gratitude instead of desire

Click the image above for a larger version

This could be totally wrong, but I’m guessing that the decline of religious life in our culture has brought with it a decline in gratitude. Not that I am laying some sort of a religious trip on everyone—I am the first to cop to not maintaining an attitude of thankfulness.

But I do feel as though we (and I include me) have come to worship desire. Here in the United States, I sometimes despair that our state religion is consumption and our main prayer is for more.

I’m not even religious, but I sense from people I’ve known who take the spiritual aspects of their religions to heart an emphasis on being grateful for what God or the Universe or the Oneness has given them rather than on what they don’t have. I admire that. I’d like to have more of that in myself, because I, too, often find that my prayer, if I’m not careful, is for more.

Here is what I think: that being grateful for what I have makes me want less. Wanting less makes me consume less. Consuming less makes me treat the planet more kindly. The equation goes, therefore, gratitude equals kindness.

And also, it turns out, gratitude equals happiness. According to the relatively new field of positive psychology (read an article about it in Time here), one way to cultivate happiness is to keep a

“gratitude journal, a diary in which subjects write down things for which they are thankful. [Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky] has found that taking the time to conscientiously count their blessings once a week significantly increased subjects' overall satisfaction with life over a period of six weeks, whereas a control group that did not keep journals had no such gain.”

Notice how the blurb at the top of this post (courtesy of Time Magazine via Authentic Happiness, by the way), doesn’t mention anything about getting more stuff to make us happy? Instead, among other things, it gratitude at the top of the list (and I’m not suggesting this for the underprivileged or the poverty stricken). So by my reckoning, cultivating gratitude is another case of happier people, happier planet.

PS If you're a regular reader, you may notice this is a repost. Sorry. Isabella has brought me home another doozy of a cold.

Dear Clorox, Please reuse your Brita Filters

You probably didn't know that Brita, America's number one pour-through water filter, was owned by Clorox.

Now, the great news about Clorox's Brita filters is that they help make Americans feel good about tap water from our excellent municipal water systems, move off the throwaway plastic bottles (wanna try my ultra-cool reusable water bottle, by the way?), and stem the insidious privatization of drinking water. The bad news about Brita is that the filters themselves are disposable--throwaway--when they don't need to be.

Indeed, in Europe, the German company Brita, which sold its American operations to Clorox in 2000, takes back its cartridges. It shreds the plastic for reuse and reactivates the inner components--charcoal and "ion exchange resin"--for reuse either in more filters or wastewater treatment plants.

How cool is that? That's what you call treating resources with respect in a way that makes both the planet and its people happier. No poison fumes coming from incinerated Brita filters in Europe. Imagine how cool it would if we could say that here in the United States?

So why doesn't Clorox take back its Brita filters?

That's the question being asked by a group calling themselves Take Back the Filter, started by Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish, the blog about getting away from all things plastic. They want Clorox to start taking back Brita filters for processing and reuse in a Clorox facility (not for pawning off to some massive waste management conglomerate that will just ship them to developing world).

Already, Take Back the Filter is closing down on a thousand signatures on a petition, and people are taking it upon themselves to send used filters to the CEO of Clorox. It's been enough already to warrant a phone call to Beth from a Clorox executive.

See, we really can make a difference! And if you join in, we can make more.

Here's how you can help Take Back the Filter:

1. Sign the petition.
2. Write a letter to Clorox executives.
3. Send us Take Back the Filter your used filter cartridges.
4. Spread the word!
5. Read more at Take Back the Filter
   

No one, by the way, is saying Clorox is bad. We're just offering them support in changing their business to a more sustainable model. The CEO has a lot more ammunition at his board meeting if he has a dump-truck full of consumer-returned filters to show. And dump-trucks full of filters will make great TV images, too (think of it: your old filter on TV!).

Lastly, you may be wondering, Brita filters? Why bother? Aren't there bigger fish to fry?

No way! The journey of a thousand miles and all that.

What Beth and her pals have started is the best kind of consumer activism. This campaign has the benefit of aggregating individual consumer power in one place. Its message has a much bigger corporate audience than just Clorox. Successful or not, Take Back the Filter shows all American companies that American citizens are ready to band together to demand better.

Go Beth! Go Take Back the Filter! Go all of us!

LV GRN: 42 ways to not make trash

In the last, for a while, of the LV GRN posts about how to bring No Impact measures to your own life, I've decided to list 42 ways we adopted to avoid making trash. If you've been reading for a while, you'll have seen these before. But I thought the newer readers might like to take a look. The list is in no particular order:

1. No soda in cans (which means we’re probably less likely to get cancer from aspartame).
2. No water in plastic bottles (which means we get to keep our endocrines undisrupted).
3. No coffee in disposable cups (which means we don’t suffer from the morning sluggishness that comes from overnight caffeine withdrawal).
4. No throwaway plastic razors and blade cartridges (I’m staging the straightedge razor comeback).
5. Using non-disposable feminine-hygiene products that aren’t bad for women and are good for the planet.
6. No Indian food in throwaway takeout tubs.
7. No Italian food in plastic throwaway tubs.
8. No Chinese food in plastic throwaway tubs.
9. Taking our own reusable containers to takeout joints (except that now we’re eating local so this tip is out for us).
10. Admitting that we sometimes miss Indian, Italian and Chinese takeout.
11. Hopping on the scale and celebrating the loss of my 20-pound spare tire since I stopped eating bucketsful of Indian, Italian and Chinese takeout.
12. Buying milk in returnable, reusable glass bottles.
13. Shopping for honey and pickled veggies and other goods in jars only from merchants who will take back the jars and reuse them.
14. Returning egg and berry cartons to the vendors at the farmers’ market for reuse.
15. Using neither paper nor plastic bags and bringing our own reusable bags when grocery shopping.
16. Canceling our magazine and newspaper subscriptions and reading online.
17. Putting an end to the junk mail tree killing.
18. Carrying my ultra-cool reusable cup and water bottle (which is a glass jar I diverted from the landfill and got for free).
19. Carrying reusable cloths for everything from blowing my nose to drying my hands to wrapping up a purchased bagel.
20. Wiping my hands on my pants instead of using a paper towel when I forget my cloth.
21. Politely asking restaurant servers to take away paper and plastic napkins, placemats, straws, cups and single-serving containers.
22. Explaining to servers with a big smile that I am on a make-no-garbage kick.
23. Leaving servers a big tip for dealing with my obsessive-compulsive, make-no-garbage nonsense, since they can’t take the big smile to the bank.
24. Pretending McDonalds and Burger King and all their paper and plastic wrappers just don’t exist.
25. Buying no candy bars, gum, lollypops or ice cream (not even Ben and Jerry’s peanut butter cup) that is individually packaged.
26. Making my own household cleaners to avoid all the throwaway plastic bottles.
27. Using baking soda from a recyclable container to brush my teeth.
28. Using baking soda for a deodorant to avoid the plastic containers that deodorant typically comes in (cheap and works well).
29. Using baking soda for shampoo to avoid plastic shampoo bottles.
30. Using the plastic bags that other people’s newspapers are delivered in to pick up Frankie the dog’s poop.
31. Keeping a worm bin to compost our food scraps into nourishment that can be returned to the earth instead of toxins that seep from the landfills.
32. Switching to real—meaning cloth—diapers which Isabella, before she was potty-trained, liked much better.
33. Not buying anything disposable.
34. Not buying anything in packaging (and count the money we save because that means pretty much buy nothing unless it’s second hand).
35. Shopping for food only from the bulk bins and from the local farmer’s market where food is unpackaged and fresh.
36. Forgetting about prepackaged, processed food of any description.
37. Being happy that the result is that we get to eat food instead of chemicals.
38. Giving our second-hand clothes away to Housing Works or other charities.
39. Offering products we no longer need on Freecycle instead of throwing them away.
40. Collecting used paper from other people's trash and using the other side.
41. Using old clothes for rags around the apartment instead of paper towels.
42. Talking with humor about what we’re doing because making a little less trash is a concrete first step everyone can take that leads to more and more environmental consciousness.

LV GRN: Why recycling is nowhere near enough

People used to to ask me, essentially, why I was making such a big dig about not making trash during the No Impact project. They'd say, "I mean, it's recyclable, right?"

As Annie Leonard says in Story of Stuff, "Recycling reduces the garbage at [the landfill and incinerator] end and it reduces the pressure to mine and harvest new stuff at [the production] end. Yes, yes, yes, we should all recycle. But recycling isn't enough."

Annie goes on to point out that for every garbage can of waste we put on the curb, industry created 70 garbage cans of waste to manufacture it. Even if we recycled every garbage can's worth coming out of our house, it wouldn't make a scratch in the 70 cans created upstream.

Besides, as writer Dan Rademacher points out in his article "Manufacturing a Myth: The Plastic Recycling Ploy," plastic bottles, for example, are not recycled to make more plastic bottles. They are "downcycled" into, say, fleece jackets or a park benches or toothbrush handles, all of which eventually ends up in the trash.

That means that new plastic is required to make every bottle and every bit of plastic used to make that bottle--even if you end up wearing it or brushing your teeth with it for a while--ends up in a landfill or an incinerator. That's not true recycling.

Even the rates of what passes for recycling are often abysmally low. PET water bottles only get recycled at the rate of 14%. The rest ends up in the landfills and incinerators, according to the Container Recycling Institute.

Meanwhile, producers who advertise their products as "recyclable," even if their products do not end up actually getting recycled, may get a boost in demand. The paradox? That this can cause an increase in the use of resources consumers expect recyclability to prevent (and if that's not green-washing, I don't know what is).

In my view, true recycling between producer and consumer occurs, for example, when a glass milk bottle is returned to the dairy, washed and refilled. Even then, using it is not free of environmental impact. There remain the environmental costs and carbon emissions associated with washing it, refilling it, and transporting it.

This is why, during the No Impact project, the object was to produce no trash at all, not even so-called recyclable trash (not newspapers, milk cartons, magazines, junk mail, not packaging of any sort, not really much of anything that would end up getting tossed).

LV GRN Tip #2: As the saying goes, "Reduce, reuse, recycle." Recycling is at the very end of the list. That doesn't mean it isn't worth recycling. It does mean that recycling is not without environmental cost, though it has less cost than just throwing stuff away.

Top of the pyramid is reduce. That means, even in our post-No-Impact life, we still work hard at not consuming what we don't need to. Then comes reuse, which means once we have it, use it as often as you can before we get another. And finally comes recycle, which we've talked about enough.

PS For those of you who don't dig the LV GRN posts, never fear! "Big issue" tomorrow.

LV GRN: Our life in the trash

Trash tends to be a bit of the underdog of environmental concern these days. Perhaps that is because we think of the issues of trash to be limited to water and air quality problems arising from toxins leaking from landfills and dioxins and other poisons pumped into the air by incinerators (both of which are plenty bad enough).

But the trash issue is not just limited to the problem of disposing with our refuse--it is much larger. The fact that we have so much trash--4.5 pounds per person per day--points to the fact of how many resources we waste.

And what concerns me more than the waste of stuff that goes from my apartment to the downstream landfill is the waste of the upstream resources (the energy, the materials, the natural resources, the labor) used or destroyed to produce stuff I was planning to throw away anyway. For example, for every pound of trash I throw away, 70 pounds of materials were trashed during its manufacture.

It is as though the raw materials are dug out of one hole in the ground--a mine or an oil well--only to be transferred to another hole in the ground--a landfill--with a very short stop at my house in between. Indeed, in 2006, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, some 28% of our our municipal waste, by weight, was packaging and containers.

Does that mean 28% of the material, the cost, the labor and greenhouse gases associated with manufacturing can be attributed to packaging and containers we didn't even want, that we throw away the first chance we get? The math, I'm sure, is not that straight forward, but you get my point.

If what we threw away was stuff that we actually had enjoyed and used and cherished, that would be one thing. But actually, much of what I found in my trash, after I saved it for a week and dug through it, was not stuff I cared remotely about.

Not only that, it was stuff I actively didn't want in my or my family's life. My trash, mostly, was the detritus of ordering and eating a lot of take out food. It was sesame noodle and stir-fried spinach covered plastic tubs, unused plastic utensils, paper napkins, plastic bags and--oh yeah--baby diapers.

The diapers we'll talk about another time, but what I discovered in my trash when I saw the mountain of greasy plastic tubs was a life I didn't want, a life in the trash. We didn't want to eat unhealthy take out food every night. It wasn't good for our bodies or our wallets. Nor did we like the rushing lives around which all this take-out trash seemed to revolve.

In other words, the trash in our apartment was the worst kind of waste because it was, really, stuff we didn't want in the first place. And that's where eliminating trash started in the No Impact project. We started by eliminating the activities we didn't even want in our lives that produced waste. We started home cooking fresh food.

In other words, from the very get-go, the No Impact project was about happier planet, happier people. Far from depriving ourselves, reducing waste in our lives would move us closer to rather than farther from the lives we actually wanted.

Personal lifestyle tip #1 in the LV GRN series: If you want an easy and life-enhancing way to reduce the trash you create and the resources you waste, save your trash for a week. Then, go through and see what the biggest amounts of trash are caused by (take out for me). Are there any sources of trash in there that don't even make you happy? Choose one and eliminate it.

Make a comment by clicking below and let me know what you find out.

And just as interestingly, are there areas at the cultural or structural level where we could eliminate materials waste and end up improving the lives of our citizens? Put your thinking cap on. Be specific. Let me know what you find out about that, too.

PS The next few posts in the LV GRN series, when they come, will be about eliminating material waste on both the personal and cultural levels.

The "needle exchange" approach to planetary damage

There are two ways to reduce the harm to the planetary habitat we depend on for our health, happiness and security. One is to reduce the amount of resources we consume or degrade--air, forests, atmosphere, water, etc--and the other is to make the consumption of those resources less harmful.

In other words:

Resources Used x Environmental Harm  = Total Planetary Damage

Strangely enough, I adapt this equation from a paper published by Robert J. MacCoun in the American Psychologist in 1998 about the then new "harm reduction" paradigm for treating drug addicts. The somewhat controversial harm reduction movement in drug treatment arose out of the need to decrease the prevalence of HIV cases, about a third of which were among intravenous drug users in the United States.

Central to the harm reduction paradigm, according to MacCoun, "is the belief that it is possible to modify the behavior of drug users, and the conditions in which they use, in order to reduce many of the most serious risks that drugs pose to public health and safety."

HIV transmission among intravenous drugs users is caused by sharing needles. The idea was, that if you can't get addicts to stop using drugs, then at least you might be able to prevent transmission of the virus by providing new needles, educating them on "safe use," or getting them to take their drugs orally instead of by injection.

So in drug treatment, the equation goes:

Total Drug Use x Average Harm per Use = Total Harm

What intrigues me about this approach is that when you accept that the message of "just say no" simply isn't going to reach all drug users, you can begin to develop methods of reaching those who are intransigent. You can help them try to prevent their own deaths and the spread of disease. It doesn't mean that you don't promote abstinence, but it means you can reduce the harm caused to and by those who will never abstain.

The same message applies to consumption of resources. There is no question that excess consumption both causes damage to the planetary habitat and has the potential to make people less happy. A "reduce consumption" message is good for the planet and good for the people.

But some people aren't ready to hear it. The message of "just say no" to consumption simply isn't going to reach all consumers, or for that matter, producers. On the other hand, we may be able to convince them to take approaches that do less harm.

We may not be able to get some individuals to clean with vinegar and baking soda, for example, but we may get them to switch to Clorox's new brand of household cleaners Green Works (no pun intended). I'd like us to get away from disposable products, but I accept that we may not get Kimberly Clark to stop using trees to make tissue. We may, though, one day, get them to manage forests sustainably.

In other words, in my equation at the top, we may not be able to get them to reduce their resource use, but we may be able reduce the Environmental Harm and, therefore, the Total Planetary Damage.

Some people resist the harm reduction paradigm to consumption. Just as in the drug treatment world, they are worried that a harm reduction approach waters down the message of abstinence.

But the fact is that many drug treatment agencies, particularly in Europe, have found that once they develop a relationship with users through the needle exchange program, they are then able to help the users to move from needles and onto oral use. From there, with a relationship developed, they can help some of them decide to completely abstain, people they never would have reached under the "just say no" model.

Perhaps we can do the same. Perhaps, by introducing consumers and producers to the idea of reduced harm, we will get them to thinking in such a way that will eventually get them to thinking about reduced resource use. Perhaps we will help them to move from recycling to reusing to reducing.

Conspicuous UNconsumption

If you've been following the story of the No Impact project at all, you'll know that my little family did not start out as Birkenstock-wearing, reusable-bag-toting environmentalists. In fact, Michelle and I made a habit of crying for the polar bears while blasting the air conditioners.

I, in particular, was a liberal shlub who had never bothered to put my lifestyle where my money was. And Michelle, well, you've probably read about the pair of Chloe boots she bought when she saw our no shopping project rising over the horizon. Not buying anything new did not come naturally to her.

So the other day, Michelle's friend Lizzie showed up wearing a new coat that Michelle had pined for. Lizzie said she'd bought the coat at a sample sale, marked down 700%.

Michelle had known about the sample sale. She could have gone to it. She could have had the coat. But she already has a similar one, and even though there are no longer any strict No Impact rules to follow, Michelle has made a commitment to herself not to indulge in retail therapy. It's not good for her bank account, she says, it's not good for her spirit, and it's not good for the planet.

All the same, seeing Lizzie in the coat sent Michelle into a tail spin. This, by way of saying lifestyle change ain't always easy.

The thing is, some people feel that individual action is not only not the most effective way to go, but downright damaging to the cause. It conjures an unpopular politics of limits, some say. It takes attention off the responsibility of the corporations and the government, other say.

But a couple of days after the coat incident, Michelle walked into our local coffee place, the Grey Dog Cafe, and put her jar on the counter to be filled with coffee, just as she does every morning. We use jars because they turn out to be the most convenient reusable mugs, they don't fall apart like store-bought kinds, they don't leak when you screw the top on, and glass is the most pleasant material to drink from (unless of course you like to take plastic with your coffee).

Anyway, the woman behind the counter said to Michelle, "I just want you to know that you and your husband really make me think. I've joined an environmental group because of you and this week we're starting to compost." This woman, by the way, doesn't know about the semi-famous No Impact project. She just sees Michelle and I coming in most days, refusing to use disposable products.

Michelle came home last night and told me this story. And she told it to me again. And again. "That made my day," she said.

I like to think that when any of us UNconsumes conspicuously, it helps motivate and give permission to other people, too. We need a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach and a side to side approach. If you want to get everyone eating ice cream, you need a lot of flavors.

So I emailed Michelle at work just now and asked her: "Would you rather have the coat or the experience with the Grey Dog woman?"

She wrote back: "Can I have both? Just kidding. The Grey Dog girl, for sure. I'm OVER that coat. It's an old habit with me. Sometimes it gets triggered, phantom like."

It's a nice story, don't you think, about giving each other the courage to change? It's about one woman who questions her culture's priorities, and who worries about their effect on the planet (or at least gets dragged in that direction by her overbearing husband), and who begins UNconsuming.

Even though she struggles with her change of habits and never preaches, the fact that her UNconsumption is conspicuous enough for a barista to notice it inspires another woman to change. And the fact that the Grey Dog woman decides to change, in turn, inspires Michelle to keep moving forward.

PS I'm planning to go see my congressional representative on Friday or Monday afternoon as part of the 1Sky campaign. Anyone in the New York area want to come? There's power in numbers. Email me using the "contact me" button at the left side of the blog.