No Impact Man

Have fun!

As I write, I’m getting ready to ride my bike out to the South Bronx to meet my local environmental hero Kate Zidar, who works, among other places, at the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. We’re going to paddle around the Bronx River and look at one of NYC’s ten worst combined sewer overflows (CSOs), which regularly dumps raw sewage into the river.

It’s an hour and a half bike ride there and an hour and a half back, and I’m not going to feel like writing blog entries tonight. So I’m writing this now, at 10 AM on a beautiful sunny morning of what, by the time your read this, will be yesterday.

Seth Godin, the marketing guru, wrote this on his blog the other day:

“If you didn't want anything in return, nothing at all, what's the most generous thing you could do for your best customer…Give it a try.”

I thought of two things, and this may be more what I need than what you need, more generous to me than you, but here goes: don't forget to have fun!

It probably sounds trite and stupid, but the advice feels like just about the kindest thing I could say to a bunch of people who drop by a blog out of concern for the world's problems every day. Certainly, it's what I need to hear.

In the life mission I wrote out for myself a couple of years ago, there is a sentence that talks about the importance of having fun. The thing is, I often forget about that part.

Being constantly depressed about the state of the world is a drag and it doesn’t attract people to the solution. More to the point, it’s a waste of our lives. Is the world worth saving if it’s no fun?

The second thing I have to give you is the video below. It’s soppy, it’s old, and I posted it before, but I love it. Posting it again is one way for me to have fun. Watching it is another.

And now, I’m off for my canoe ride, and even if I’ll be paddling through a soup of other people’s poo (actually, it probably won’t because it hasn’t rained for a while), I’m going to have fun.

PS Watch in the video for the bit when the first little old lady accepts the hug, she touches his face, and the video turns to color. Pure schmaltz, but it gets me every time.

PPS Happy birthday to me!

Why eating less meat helps the environment

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s November, 2006 report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options”:

• 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock (more than from transportation).
• 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon was cleared to pasture cattle.
• Two-thirds (64 percent) of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which contribute significantly to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems, come from cattle.
• The livestock sector accounts for over 8 percent of global human water use, while 64 percent of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas by 2025.
• The world’s largest source of water pollution is believed to be the livestock sector.
• In the United States, livestock are responsible for a third of the loads of nitrogen and phosphorus into freshwater resources.
• Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass, and the 30 percent of the earth’s land surface that they now pre-empt was once habitat for wildlife, in an era of unprecedented threats to biodiversity.
• These problems will only get worse as meat production is expected to double by 2050.

Where the deeply personal meets the political

This morning I woke up and did the laundry in the bathroom sink and then asked my two-year-old, Isabella, and my wife, Michelle, if they wanted toast. They both said no. Assuming Michelle could gauge the truth for herself, I made only enough for me and Isabella. Then Michelle changed her mind and started eating toast I’d earmarked for Isabella. That made me think I’d have to give Isabella my toast (when actually I could have just made more). I got mad.

Mad for me does not mean that I run around flailing my arms about. It means a grumpy look on my face and silent scorn. But it still makes life unpleasant for the people I love. I got mad because I made up this story in my head that I would end up hungry later in the day and would not be able to work through lunch as I had planned.

What I want to point out is that having no peace in myself means that there is no peace in the world around me.

Krishnamurti, the late philosopher, speaker and recipient of the United Nations Peace Medal, says that the way to bring peace to the world is to bring peace to ourselves. To bring peace to ourselves, he says, we have to let go of the false idea of the ego which constantly lords itself over the rest of our personalities. He says we have to let go of the very idea that there is an ego, that there is some part of ourselves that can lord itself over other parts. He says we have to let go of our will.

Letting go of will is problematic in Western culture. We celebrate the idea that if you want something badly enough and work hard enough you can have it. Will power is our religion. Will power gets you rich and famous. On the other side of the coin, if you talk about letting go of the will, people say you are nihilistic and don’t care about helping the hungry.

But that’s not what I understand Krishnamurti to mean by letting go of will. Letting go of will just means letting go of internal conflict. It means letting go of the conflict between the way I want things to be and the way things are. It means letting go of the idea that Michelle shouldn’t eat toast when she says she doesn’t want any. It simply means approaching life, not antagonistically, but with love.

When I have less internal conflict, I cause less external conflict. When I cause less external conflict, there is less conflict in the world. I am the world and the world is me, Krishnamurti says. If you want peace in the world, he says, find peace in yourself. You cannot fight for peace. Find peace in yourself by letting things, even your thoughts, be the way they are.

Getting traffic off our city streets

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

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

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

According to Environmental Defense:

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

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

London, for example, has experienced:

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

And according to Environmental Defense:

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

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

Guidelines for discussion--a reminder

I want the comments section of this blog to have real value for its participants. To accomplish that, up until now, I haven't felt the need to moderate the discussion at all. My recent gardening experience, however, has taught me that a little judicious pruning can make an organism more healthy!

So: I've decided to both to begin enforcing the guidelines for discussion and to revise them to make them a little more clear. The guidelines can always be found on the left hand side of the blog, but here they are, too, as a gentle reminder:

• The comments section of this blog is intended to provide a forum for discussions about positive change.
• Please post your comments on the blog entry you are referring to, and keep them relevant to the topic of the post.
• Please pursue long back and forth discussions by private email rather than in the comments.
• Please advance ideas and add positive knowledge; nitpicking has its place but it isn't here.
• Be courteous.
• Discuss ideas and refrain from personal attacks.
• Give accurate information in the spirit of being helpful.
• Disagree respectfully.
• Credit others when you quote them.
• Be brief (ish).
• Admit the possibility of fault and respect different points of views.
• Accept that your comment may be deleted if it doesn't adhere to these guidelines.

Teach a man to dumpster dive and feed him for life

My friend Mayer Vishner, whose community garden plot I help out with, joked that the Freegans’ slogan should be “give a man a meal and you feed him for a day, but teach him to dumpster dive and your feed him for life.” Freegans, you see, make a political statement by trolling the world’s trash cans for food. Last week, I went out on a garbage tour of my neighborhood with a spokesperson for New York Freegans, Madeleine Nelson.

According to the United Nations, fully one-third of man-made greenhouses gases come from agriculture. Meanwhile, according to a University of Arizona study, half of the food produced in the USA
goes to waste. Do the math and you see that a half of a third means that one-sixth—that’s sixteen percent—of our greenhouse gases come from making food that never gets eaten. Part of the reasons the Freegans do what they do is to point out that waste.

But also, according to the Freegan philosophy:

“To live in harmony with other beings and our planet, we need to go beyond ‘responsible shopping.’ We must simplify our lives, DECREASE consumption, and thus shrink our economic needs. In so doing, we limit the time that we must devote to waged labor, and regain control of our time, the most precious commodity in our lives. By recovering goods instead of buying them and questioning the need for the products marketed to us in the first place, freegans curtail our need to finance exploitation from our product purchase using funds from jobs where we either are exploited or exploit others.”

So, I went out with Madeleine at 9:30 one night, when the food stores in the neighborhood had put out the garbage for the next day’s collection. I went with complete interest in Madeleine’s Freegan ways and total determination that I absolutely would not let a morsel of trash food pass my lips. But within five minutes of the tour starting, we had found a garbage bag outside Pain Quotidien on 8^th Street containing nothing but bread and pain au chocolat.

Even my friend Justin, who was along for the ride, found himself chowing down on the French pastries. Before long we were outside the Food Emporium eating organic bananas too. Plus I brought a bag of bagels home for breakfast.

Think about it. People are hungry and half our food ends up in the waste stream. According to Madeleine, some food stores deliberately taint the food they throw out so no one can eat it. She mentioned a famous clothing store that put dozens of bags of clothes out for garbage collection, but not before slashing each item to make them unwearable. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, with a little more efficiency and consciousness of waste, there are ways we could treat the planet better without hardly even trying.

Photo courtesy of Freegan.info

Helping trees grow

I spent today in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx working alongside a bunch of really great young Rock Corps volunteers to help the excellent Sustainable South Bronx (SSB) organization clean out “tree pits.” Tree pits are the square holes cut in sidewalks for trees to grow from. Cleaning them out helps saplings planted by SSB in the last few years to survive.

I’d like to write a long post about it—telling you about all the stories and people I met—but having ridden my bike an hour there and an hour back and having spent the day pulling weeds and garbage and dog poo out of the pits, I’m too beat. I'm 43, you know.

What I will do is give you this little bit of background. Hunts Point is home to the world’s largest produce market, from which most New York City grocery stores get their veggies. The result is that huge numbers of trucks drive through the neighborhood every day, which is one of the reasons the Bronx is an asthma hot spot. I could literally taste the grime in the air.

Planting trees and then maintaining them to make sure they live to maturity helps because:

• Airborne diesel particulates stick to leaves, the trees literally help pull the pollution out of the air.
• By absorbing storm water, trees help prevent overflow from the combined sewage and storm water system, which helps clean up the Bronx River.
• Canopy cover from the trees helps reduce the “heat island” effect, thereby keeping the air cooler, reducing the need for air conditioners, and helping reduce the production of ozone that exacerbates breathing problems.

That’s it. My legs hurt. I’m tired. I have to go to bed.

The green transportation hierarchy

“The green transportation hierarchy is the basic concept behind transportation reform groups all over the world, including Transportation Alternatives. The hierarchy puts city-friendly cyclists and pedestrians first. It rewards their low cost, space efficiency, and zero environmental impact. Trucks are not last because they perform vital commercial functions in cities. An important part of the green transportation hierarchy is that trucks get priority over personal automobiles for scarce curbside parking.”

--From the Spring, 2001 newsletter of Transportation Alternatives, NYC’s advocacy group for cycling, walking and environmentally sensible transportation.

Urban transportation policies that put walking, bicycling and public transit above cars can result in:

• Cleaner air—300,000 children and 700,000 adults in New York City have asthma.
• Better and stronger communities—Studies show the less traffic on your street, the more friends you have.
• Less time spent commuting—Congestion slows average NYC traffic speeds to just 8 miles per hour in rush hour.
• A more robust local economy—In NYC, for example, congestion costs an annual $13 billion in lost jobs, productivity losses, travel costs and wasted fuel.

What our cities could be

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mistaken rhetoric of environmentalism

The No Impact experiment in environmental living means that, as part of trying not to harm the planet, we eat better (local food), exercise more (biking everywhere) and waste less time on screen addiction (using no mains electricity). A list of the benefits we've noticed, abridged to only the health-related, includes:

• Twenty pounds off my gut, and eight off Michelle's
• No dandruff on my collar or dermatitis on my face
• Better nights' sleep and less tired days
• No more raccoon-like dark circles around my eyes
• We pout less and smile more--we feel happier
• Michelle no longer counts sheep--her insomnia is gone
• No more monthly tummy cramps for Michelle

It turns out, you see, that eco-living, in our experience, is not so much about sacrifice as it is about increased health and happiness. The same would be true of big, societal eco-changes.

Think, for example, of the long lists of benefits that might come with public transportation replacing our cities’ traffic jams, power plants billowing less pollution and cars getting decent gas mileage. But lately, we hear less about the benefits of taking these actions than about the catastrophic risks of not.

My point is that a big boost to the environmental cause might come with spending a little less time making people scared of a worse life and a little more time inspiring them towards a better one.