No Impact Man

Be kind to the planet by being kind to yourself

Before we get to the body of today’s post, I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided to remove the appeal for contributions to the running of the blog. My reasons for trying it were best summed up by a commenter calling herself Tiny Inkling who wrote: “I like to imagine he's using [the contributions] to free himself from projects that don't completely support his values so that he can reach larger groups of people with the "you can do it!" message.”

Nevertheless, this blog is all about the exchange of ideas and enough of you didn’t like the contributions thing that I’m nixing it. I really appreciate the well thought out responses on all sides of the discussion. Those of you who find yourself tempted to be—shall we say—“forceful” in your arguments, may I remind you please to read the guidelines for discussion on this blog, the underlying principles of which are courtesy and respect.

Which brings me to an apology I would like to make to Sharon of Casaubon’s Book and Liz of Pocket Farm. Last week, I responded to their comments in a way that I intended to be lighthearted and joking but which came across as rude and unkind. It wasn’t my intention at all. I really apologize to both of them. Now, onward…

Michelle brought to my attention a piece by M.P. Dunleavey in Saturday’s New York Times about convincing people to give up conspicuous consumption and the earn-and-spend treadmill by showing them they could end up happier:

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., studied 200 people who embraced Voluntary Simplicity, a movement focused “less on materialistic values — like wanting money and possessions and status — and more on what we called intrinsic values or goals,” Professor Kasser said. The three main intrinsic values were being connected to family and friends, exploring one’s interests or skills and “making the world a better place,” he said.

He conducted the study in 2005 with Kirk Brown, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The researchers compared the attitudes and behaviors of this group with a matched sample of 200 mainstream Americans.

Although the mainstream group’s income was much higher, an average of about $41,000 a year compared with $26,000 for those aiming to live more simply, “we found the people in the Voluntary Simplicity group were much happier and more satisfied with life,” Professor Kasser said…

… the study found that when people invested more in intrinsic values, like relationships and quality of life, and less in consumption, it seemed to increase their happiness…

...Christopher K. Hsee, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, has observed a similar pattern. He points out that when people use their purchases as a semaphore of status, there is “no natural stopping point;” there will always be a bigger house, a fancier car, a more expensive watch to go after.

When it comes to more basic needs, like food or sleep or friendship, most people naturally reach a point of satisfaction. “Consequently, people who value these types of goods may be financially better off,” Professor Hsee said.

Financially better off, I gather, because they spend less money, which also means the consume fewer resources. One way to reduce our impact, in other words, may be to think of increasing our time for friends and family and meaningful activities rather than to think of depriving ourselves of material things.

I am very fond of this idea that what the planet can freely offer—like the enduring satisfactions of relationships and exploring interests and skills and finding meaning by dedicating oneself to a higher cause—gives much more enduring satisfaction than what it can no longer freely offer—its limited supply of natural resources used to make all the stuff we consume. In other words, leading a green, less consumptive life means not only being kind to the planet but, since it can make us happier, it means being kinder to ourselves too.

The original No Impact men

After my post about Kant and No Impact, an assistant professor of philosophy at Indiana State University, Brian Morton, wrote me a very long email telling me what he thought philosophers from Locke to Sartre would think of the No Impact Experiment. Fascinating! This post is my edited summary of what Brian had to say about the intersection of some of the thinkers and No Impact. Any grammatical errors belong to me. Comments in square brackets are mine.

Confucius focuses on living the life of virtue, and he firmly believes that one person being virtuous can induce others to imitate them. Indeed, his recipe for political change is for good private people to do right until rulers decide to imitate them, and then many, many people will imitate the rulers, and the government will be reformed…For Confucius, the key virtue is benevolence, or humaneness (jen) and it is about being genuinely human, and caring for all other humans.

Confucius would approve of setting up rules to prevent Americans from taking more than their fair share. He would suggest that these rules could be enforced by being made to seem part of politeness. If we treated excess as being vaguely impolite, people would start conforming to austerity more. Confucius is also a big fan of frugality.

Aristotle believed that the key virtue is prudence (sophrosyne) or the wise balancing of many competing interests. Each moral vice always has its opposite flavor on the other side of the mean. Eating too much, so that it harms you health is the vice of gluttony. Eating too little so that your health suffers is over-strictness. Thus, the key virtue of prudence typically manifests as moderation of action.

Aristotle says little of environmentalism, but if he saw a culture where people spent natural resources too freely, he would condemn it as a moral vice, comparable to being spendthrift and urge moderation of action. Indeed, he’d be a little more censorious of others than No Impact Man has been.

But how much spending is too much spending is something that rules can never really do justice to. It takes a human using wisdom or common sense to decide on a case by case basis. Rules are just substitutes for judgment that can be useful guidelines, but are by their nature never quite as appropriate to the situation as a wise human’s judgment.

Aquinas believed that voluntary poverty [and more moderately self-restraint? NIM] is the foundation of perfect love. It is a quite different thing from involuntary poverty which is spiritually dangerous because humans will be tempted to do bad things to escape it. But choosing to be impoverished [or to restrain one’s consumption? NIM] for the sake of love that is a special thing for those in special walks of life.

Aquinas also has a famous doctrine called double effect. What do you do when an action will have both good and bad consequences, like NIM’s breaking his no buying anything new rule to buy sticky putty for the poster? Aquinas says that this is OK sometimes, but there are lots of restrictions.

You have to intend the good part and merely allow the bad part (if you knew a way to get the good without the bad or some comparable bad, you would take that). The action can’t be intrinsically wrong in anyway, but can only be wrong through its effects (a lie to do good wouldn’t pass this hurdle). The hoped for good must be enough to compensate for the bad. The hoped for good must be at least as causally proximate as the bad (you can’t do a bad thing now, in hopes that a good will come of it later, the good and bad must be together).

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By the way, Plug It Out!--Unplugged in NYC and Beyond, which promotes collective monthly unplugged days is having its fourth monthly unplugging event on Saturday. To join in or read more go here.

A green hipster’s PDA

I’m going to tell you about my new recycled index card-based personal organizer, but first let me give you the back-story about me and my relationship to my old electronic personal digital assistant (PDA)—may it rest in peace.

Michelle complained that I loved my PDA more than her. Maybe even more than Isabella the two-year-old life guru (who thinks the best thing to do with a Treo 650 is drool on it) and Frankie the four-legged Zen master (who thinks the best thing to do when the Treo rings is keep sleeping). I got virtually to the point in my Treo obsession where Michelle was more likely to get my attention if she emailed me from her side of the bed so I would receive it on my side. Who knows how many times I opted to return a text message instead of…well, anyway.

Just at the time when I actually needed a PDA—when there was that big publicity explosion around the No Impact project (see here and here, for example)—I smashed my Treo 650. As I rode my bike along East 6^th Street, I heard the aluminum crinkle of what I thought was a Coke can under my tire. A half a block later, when I felt my empty pocket, I knew it wasn’t a can I’d run over. I did a u-turn and rode back. I might as well have been looking at a dead body in the middle of the road. If I had had a brown paper bag with me, I would have hyperventilated in it.

As you know, there is no buying anything new during the No Impact Man project, though I could have bought a used replacement. I figured, first, if I’m so attached to a consumer product that I get heart palpitations when I lose it, having it breaks the spirit if not the rules of NIM. Second, getting a new PDA would not get all the information out of the old one and into the new, so what was the use? Third, techno-trash is a major, major problem for the environment. Fourth, people who talk on cell phones in public in NYC—including the former me—are a major pain in the butt, either walking into you on the sidewalk, forcing you to listen to their high-pitched romantic arguments, or veering perilously close—if not actually hitting you—in their cars.

So, when my friend and book editor Denise gave me a second-hand Treo in an attempt to soothe my withdrawal and shaking hands, I decided to nevertheless go cold turkey (not even under a doctor’s supervision). I would only carry the donated Treo occasionally as a cell phone, not as a calendar etc, and only then as a rare concession to potential emergencies (ask all the people who still haven’t realized and leave frustrated messages on it).

Now what? How would I deal with my email, my phone calls, my schedule? Did this decision mean that I’d left my new found media success on the road along with my crushed miniature electronics?

First off, I decided that I would have to be content with letting my calls go to voicemail and checking my email a couple of times a day. At first, I felt like the world continued on its orbit round the sun but that I had somehow spun off and was left alone in outer space. Then I noticed that I actually could get things done. I wouldn’t get interrupted. No rings, no beeps, no obsessively checking my email to see if anyone still liked me. I would return my calls and emails in batches when I had time and was by a phone or computer.

Suddenly, when I was with someone, I was really with them. When I was in a place, I was really there. Then I found out that lots of time management gurus believe that turning the cell phone and email off is a center-piece of productivity (see here, for example). I turns out that I’m not only green and cool, but I’m focused.

Next, I bought four recycled Muji notebooks and made my own calendar, phone book, journal and day book (for notes of all descriptions). Instead of fumbling with buttons and saying “Could you call me?” to get a person’s number to jump on my caller ID, I just, um, wrote it down. When we turned the electricity in the apartment off, instead of finding a way to charge my device, I just flipped a page.

Now, though, I’ve found an even cooler non-electronic way to organize my life, originally called the hipster’s PDA, but which I call the green hipster’s PDA. The hipster PDA, introduced to me by the popular productivity blog 43Folders.com, involves the use of a stack of index cards and a clip or a rubber band to hold them together (photo above courtesy 43Folders.Com). In my adaptation, I reserve one card for my most commonly used phone numbers, two cards for my next four-weeks calendar, one card for the day’s to-dos, another card for my long-term to-dos, and a whole lot of blank cards for notes and journaling. Instead of carrying three notebooks, I carry one little stack of cards, which can be conveniently filed in any order I choose. You can read about another writer’s system here.

And what makes my system “green?” I use, of course, recycled index cards, and that’s no easy feat. Go to Staples and there are big recycling symbols all over their cards, but dig a little into the facts and you discover the cards contain only 10 percent recycled paper. Finally, I found a source for 100 percent recycled paper cards here. Voila, you have a green hipster’s PDA.

The only problem? Karma. Around the time my PDA got smashed, Michelle’s work gave her one of her own. Lying in bed at night, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get my pile of index cards to send her an email to tell her to pay attention to me.

By the way, if you like this post and would like to support my work, you can do so financially by clicking here or in non-financial ways by clicking here. And thank you!  [I have changed my mind about taking donations but thanks all the same. NIM 6/17/07]

Kant's views on No Impact living

Now I am no expert on philosophy, but my friend Eden tells me that Kant considered the best test of morality to be the Formula of Universal Law. He wrote, “act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should be a universal law." Or to translate, each of us should live our lives in such a way that would allow for the possibility of everyone one else living the same way.

Assuming I was like the average American before the No Impact experiment began, my ecological footprint was 24 acres. But worldwide, there exist only 4.5 biologically productive acres per person. In other words, if everyone were to live like the former me, we would need more than five planet earths. So, there was no possibility of everyone else in the world living the same way as me. Kant would have thought I was immoral. He would have smiled upon the No Impact project, however, Eden says.

Does anyone else know anything about Kant’s Principle of Universality--or indeed any other philosopher's ideas--and how they apply to the things we discuss here at the No Impact Man blog? I’d love to hear.

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By the way, after a great deal of thought, I have decided not to accept ads on this site, but that I will accept reader support. Of course, the greatest help you can give is to visit often, click on the comments link, and contribute your wisdom and practical knowledge. Participation is this blog’s lifeblood. But if you feel inspired to support my work financially, please click here. And if you are looking for non-financial ways to support the work, click here. Thank you so much.

[I have changed my mind about accepting donations, but thanks all the same. NIM 6/17/07]

This post also appears in my green parenting column for Time Out Kids New York, appearing every Wednesday. For resources on eco-friendly stores and restaurants, or simply to plan a weekend outing, visit them at tonykids.com.

Getting concrete

One of the hard parts about the No Impact experiment is that it is not part of any tradition or culture. That is to say that because we are not part of any community, we have to make things up as we go along. That’s why I like this new project launched by Miranda at Simple Living and Sharon at Causabon’s Book, which strives to give a set of fixed and stringent rules for reduction of individual greenhouse gas emissions, in each of seven areas, by 90 percent.

 Sharon and Miranda call their initiative the Riot for Austerity 90% Emissions Reduction Project. They choose the 90 percent mark because climatologists now generally agree that we need to reduce manmade greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050 in order to prevent the melting of the icecaps and Greenland ice sheet that would cause irreversible change to the climate. Because American’s emit way more greenhouse gas than most of the rest of the world’s peoples, we must reduce our emissions by 94 percent in order to meet the planetary target of 80 percent. Sharon and Miranda rounded from 94 percent to 90 to make it easy (joke!).

 They have a Yahoo discussion group, where people who want to attempt the 90 percent reduction—or even less stringent targets—can discuss. The rules for the Riot for Austerity are based on the average US consumption in each of seven areas. The project targets are calculated as a 90 percent reduction on those averages. I’ve summarized the targets for each of the seven areas below.

[Added since I first posted: I want to emphasize that what I like about this project in particular is the community of people working together towards the goals. I really do believe that each of can only do what we can. These stringent goals are definitely not for everyone. I just thought it would be interesting to show you what some people are working together to accomplish. A community of people who supported each other in the single step of not using plastic bags or to go cups would be equally inspiring. Takers?]

Gasoline:

• 50 gallons per PERSON, per YEAR

Electricity:

• 1,100 kWh per HOUSEHOLD, per YEAR

Heating and cooking energy:

• If your home uses propane or natural gas, 100 therms per HOUSEHOLD, per YEAR
• If your home uses heating oil, 75 gallons per HOUSEHOLD, per YEAR.
• If your home uses locally and sustainably harvested wood: Unlimited
• If your home uses unsustainably harvested wood, 5 cords per HOUSEHOLD, per YEAR

Garbage:

• 0.45 pounds of garbage per PERSON, per DAY

Water:

• 10 gallons per PERSON, per DAY

Consumer goods:

• $1,000 worth per HOUSEHOLD, per YEAR.
• Used goods count only ten percent of their purchase price (so you could buy $10,000 of used stuff).
• Used goods that were donated to Goodwill or the church rummage sale, etc, can be bought in unlimited amounts (since might otherwise just end up in landfill).

Food:

• No less than 70% of food purchases should be organic and be grown within 100 miles.
• No more than 25% of food purchases should be bulk, dry goods (flour, pasta, etc) from more than 100 miles away.
• No more than 5% of food purchases should be wet goods (meat, fruit, shampoo) from more than 100 miles away.

Balancing a toddler bed on a rickshaw

We put off buying Isabella'€™s first toddler bed as long as we could. One reason is that there isn't a whole hell of a lot of room in our one-bedroom apartment for an actual bed (if only reports of our being multi-millionaires were true!). Another reason is, to be honest, that I like the containment aspect of the crib. Put the Squirt down at bedtime, and you'€™re guaranteed that'€™s where she stays. A little grownup time at last.

Well, goodbye to that.

Isabella's toes are virtually sticking out between the slats of the cage--€”I mean, crib--€”so Michelle went to a second-hand kids store called Jane's Exchange, over on East 3^rd Street, and bought a toddler bed for fifty bucks. Yesterday, I went to pick it up and tied it to the rickshaw with a bungee cord, biked it home and dragged it up the stairs.

Guess what? Isabella wouldn'€™t stay in it! Maybe I just found a second use for that double-sided tape I wrote about in yesterday'€™s post.

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By the way, since Jane'€™s Exchange is over in the East Village, on my way, I stopped in at AuH₂O, "an environmental and socially conscious clothing store located in the East Village. We specialize in one-of-a-kind pieces that are recycled, redesigned, and reconstructed, sewn right on site."

Kate Goldwater uses her design skills and store to subvert her customers. "They come,"€ she told me, "€œbecause they know the clothes are one of a kind. Then I get to convert them in the dogma of reuse."€ In addition to making all her new clothes from old clothes, Kate replaces plastic shopping bags for her customers with bags she makes herself from scrap cloth. If a customer brings the bag back she gets a ten percent discount on the next purchase.

Kate even applied to the TV reality show Project Runway. Here is what she said at her interview: "I want to change the world! I'm a socially conscious, environmental and feminist designer that wants to revolutionize fashion! I'm opposed to the mass production, mass consumption, wasteful, sweatshop labor-filled industry but making clothes is my passion! I have the talent and motivation to make it in the industry and make a difference! And I need Project Runway for the exposure."

Here is what they said to her: "Uh, no thanks." You think they somehow weren't in love with the no mass consumption idea?

But Kate did get to write a hilarious piece about her Runway experience and about AuH₂O for the Huffington Post, and I'd take that over Project Runway any day! Besides, aren't the ties she makes too cool for Project Runway? The one pictured here is made from plastic cards that come in credit card junk mail and say "Your business name here"€ on them.

 

Living in the gray

We have this great picture of Isabella that Michelle had blown up on poster board some time back. Strictly speaking, of course, the poster is not in the No Impact project’s non-consumption rules. I bit my tongue.

Then, we had to mount the poster. Michelle came home with some of that sticky putty, which was, again, new and not in the rules. I can’t tell you how many times the picture fell on our heads and we stared at gooey putty drooping off the wall for a day or two before finally putting the poster back up. The putty didn’t work.

Finally, this morning, Michelle had some double-sided mounting tape, and the next thing I am quietly obsessing over whether Michelle bought it new or whether we already had it. You know, like: OMYGOD! THE END OF THE WORLD HAS COME. THERE IS SOMETHING NEW IN OUR HOUSE! MICHELLE HAS WRECKED THE PROJECT!

What is wrong with me?

Michelle has been incredible about No Impact and she hasn’t bought a single new thing except the poster, the putty and the double-sided tape. She’s being amazing. We’ve reduced our resource consumption hugely. And we’ve done it without it really hurting ourselves. But still, I find myself all worried.

You know what it is? It’s living in the gray. I can’t stand it. I want everything to be all or nothing, black or white, because if it’s one thing or another, I don’t have to pay attention. I can just go back to sleep. It’s all tidy and taken care of, and I can be dead to the world. But, um, isn’t this project about waking up?

I’m attaching to the rules of the project the way I used to be attached to my desire for consumer items. That’s no good. It’s like attaching to the rites of a religion instead of its spirit. Because the rules are really just supposed to be guideposts. They are the finger pointing to the moon, but they are not the moon. The job of the rules is to help us treat the planet with self-restraint and kindness, but they are not the actual self-restraint and kindness.

If I stay awake, though, maybe I can finally realize—and Michelle is much smarter than me when it comes to this—that sometimes the kindest thing to do for the planet is to break the rules in order to spread some joy. My lovely wife did that today by getting the most adorable picture of my little girl, who I am so amazingly in love with, and blowing it up super big, buying brand new double sided tape and putting the picture up on our living room wall for all to see.

Update on No Impact land

Union Square Cabbage season has ended! We spent the winter eating it boiled, steamed, fried and baked. No more. Spring has finally brought kale, chard, sweet peas, broccoli rabe and all sorts of other yummies to the farmers’ market. Yippee! We’re still waiting for in-season tomatoes and a lot of other goodies, but who’d have thought six months ago that our palettes would do a dance for arugula?

The heat with no air conditioner has not troubled us yet. With our windows open, the noise of other people’s air conditioners has. So have the mosquitoes. I pull down the top windows, which lets the hot air out and the nasty bugs in (even way up on the 9th floor). But my best friend Tanner showed up the other day with a pair of those collapsible screens as a gift. Hurray for community.

No fridge is hard so far. The milk goes bad in a day. The aforementioned arugula turns yellow in two. The pot in the pot is a bust. My dad has found a vintage Coleman cooler on eBay, where he plans to use some top-secret bidding tool. He feels sure to win. I’m going to get some of those ice packs and throw them in a neighbor’s freezer to keep the cooler cold. It’s the best I can do, especially since vegetables are going to be coming in bulk next week, when deliveries from the CSA (community supported agriculture) start.

As for other aspects non-electric, Michelle loves doing everything by candle light; I hate it. We’re waiting for a couple of solar-powered lamps to come in the mail, which ought to make things a bit easier. Meanwhile, the hard thing about stomping the laundry in the bathtub is getting our acts together often enough so it doesn’t mount up into a mammoth job.

But the great news is that we met a lady at the farmers’ market on Saturday who rode her kid and her groceries around on a specially-built tricycle. It turned out she had a second one—who’d have thunk?—and guess where that second one now is? Parked right outside my building. She loaned it to us and we love, love, love it! Life is so much easier when you can plop your two-year-old in a rickshaw along with the groceries.

Why I make environmental action personal…

…partly because news items like these make me worry that making it governmental will be too long in coming.

From Dana Milbank’s “As the World Warms, The White House Aspires,” commenting on the President’s new global warming (so-called) initiative in the Washington Post on June 1:

“…the plan the White House outlined yesterday listed no concrete targets or dates, no enforcement mechanism and no penalties for noncompliance. It also wouldn't take effect until four years after Bush leaves office. It was, rather, a call to spend the final 18 months of the Bush presidency forming an aspirational goal."

Meanwhile, if you were wondering how the rest of the world is thinking of the new “plan”:

Bush kills off hopes for G8 climate change plan - The Guardian

Bush sidesteps G8’s climate change agenda - The Independent

(Thanks go to Climate Progress for all this)

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From Grist, by Ken Ward:

“Public opinion polls show a significant increase in the number of Americans who support strong climate action. Deeper digging shows this support is superficial, too thin to drive the rapid sociopolitical change now required…”

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According to The Independent’s Geoffrey Lean:

“Global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared, a series of startling, authoritative studies has revealed.

“They have found that emissions of carbon dioxide have been rising at thrice the rate in the 1990s. The Arctic ice cap is melting three times as fast - and the seas are rising twice as rapidly - as had been predicted.” 

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Photo above (courtesy scienceblogs.com) included because another reason for my making environmental action personal is that I like polar bears.

This post also appears in my green parenting column for Time Out Kids New York, appearing every Wednesday. For resources on eco-friendly stores and restaurants, or simply to plan a weekend outing, visit them at tonykids.com.

 

 

Why bother?

Someone who nicknames herself Nightingale emailed me a question that, in part, went like this:

“We seem to be a pretty tenacious lot, we humans, and wouldn't it be best to realize that we can't save everybody, that some of us will survive the lack of ozone, and just let the chips fall where they may?”

Some other people emailed me that one person (i.e. me) cannot change the planet, so what is the point?

Others have said that the planet is much more powerful than any of us and will survive long after us, so it doesn’t need us to “help it.”

The same kind points are made about world hunger, disease, poverty, violence, and war. One might say that these plagues will always exist, so what’s the point of trying to do anything? (One might just as easily ask, by the way, what’s the point of NOT doing anything?)

I gave one answer to these questions in a post about a little girl and a beach covered with stranded starfish, which can be pretty much summarized as "every little bit helps."

But at the heart of my reasons for engaging in the No Impact experiment is my desire to engage a very personal question about how I want to be as a person. (And I really mean to direct this question only at myself. I don’t mean to imply that anybody else should be asking this question of themselves).

The question is: when things seem futile, do I want to be the kind of person who lets the “chips fall where they may,” or do I want to be the type who tries to do something anyway?