No Impact Man

Triggering an environmental avalanche

Doing the right thing in a world that doesn't can feel like shouting into an empty canyon. Some people feel helpless to change because they feel like all that effort spent swimming against the current will never change the current. Eliminating my annual 20 puny tons of carbon dioxide emissions won't cause the ocean levels to rise one inch less. Or so the reasoning goes.

But did you know that an avalanche can be started by one little pebble? Did you know, that according to chaos theory, a hurricane can begin with the flapping of the wings of a butterfly?

The research proves it. Anna, a No Impact Man reader from Australia, left a comment, slightly modified here by me, about a study to do with the effect of one person's picking up street litter on the behavior of strangers:

One of its findings was that when people are presented with someone who is actively doing the right thing, by picking up litter, this provides a 'positive injunctive norm'--an example of what should be done--to counter the 'descriptive norm' that is provided by the presence of street litter in the first place (people picking up litter so I should too versus everyone else is littering so I may as well too). And this injunctive norm (having someone pick up litter) was effective in getting people to not litter (when compared to another condition where there was no one picking up litter).

This is known, in common parlance, as the ripple effect. If people see you picking up litter, they are more likely to pick up litter too. If people see you trying to help the planet and the people who live on it , they are more likely to try to help too.

Every positive action each one of us takes (whether it's individual, political or corporate) brings us that much closer to being the pebble that starts the avalanche or the butterfly that starts the hurricane.

To see a cool, inspiring video illustrating the avalanche idea, go to my post The power of one.

And in case you're interested, the study Anna discussed: Cialdini, R.B., Raymond, R.R., Calrgen, K.A. (1990), A focus theory of normative conduct; Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 58 (6).

Image courtesy of Gazette Out There

Why own a car when you can share one?

Tomorrow I leave with my daughter Isabella and the cameraman of the documentary about the No Impact project on a 200-mile trip to my hometown of Westport, MA, a trip I haven't made for nearly a year because of the project. But now that the rule-based phase of the project is formally over, even my fairly stringent environmental conscience accepts that I occasionally have to visit my family, impact or no.

The bad news is that the dog sitter canceled at the last minute, which means I have to bring Frankie with me which means I can't take the train. That means that I'm going to drive. But there is a little bit of good news and to the actual point of this post: a method we can all use to reduce our reliance on cars.

According to a paper by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:

Carsharing is an automobile rental service intended to substitute for private vehicle ownership. Carsharing emphasizes affordability and convenience. Vehicles are rented by hour, located near residences, and require minimal effort to check in and out. Carsharing services are common in some European countries and are increasing in North America. Carsharing gives consumers a practical alternative to owning a personal vehicle that is driven less than about 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometres) per year. Carsharing has lower fixed costs and higher variable costs than private vehicle ownership. This price structure makes occasional use of a vehicle affordable, even to low-income households. It also gives drivers an incentive to minimize their vehicle use and rely on other travel options as much as possible. Carsharing typically reduces average vehicle use by 40-60% among drivers who rely on it, making it an important transportation demand management strategy. [Emphasis is mine]

Car sharing is an environmentally friendlier alternative to car ownership because 10 to 20 households end up sharing the use of each vehicle, the per use costs of the vehicle is a deterrent to casual use (as opposed to actually owning the car), the comparatively lower costs of public transportation and walking and biking make them more attractive than car use. In fact, a study of a car sharing service in Portland, OR concluded that:

• 26% of members sold their personal vehicle after joining the organization.

• 53% of members avoided a vehicle purchase as a result of their membership.

• Members increased transit ridership, bicycle use and walking.

In other words, the idea of car sharing is that it allows people to get rid of their cars but still have occasional access to them, with the overall effect of lower reliance on automobiles. Plus, in my case, using Zipcar, I get to drive a Toyota Prius which gets 45 miles per gallon, making use of a car for my trip, since three people (and a dog) are traveling, about as efficient as the train.

Click here to find car sharing services near you (and don't forget to get rid of your car).

NYT ethicist Randy Cohen on the ethics of transportation

Thanks to Clarence Ekerson of StreetFilms for emailing me Open Planning Project Executive Director Mark Gorton's interview with New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen. It's about the ethics of transportation in New York City in particular and in big cities in general. During the interview, Cohen says (slightly paraphrased):

• Ethics is about the effects of our actions on others and, especially when you live so close together in a city, it's easy for one person's actions to have profound effects on others.
• One thing that undermines ordinary happiness and health and economic life of New Yorkers is the private car.
• We're becoming a nation of fatties in part because most Americans, when they want a quart of milk, can't walk but have to take the car to get it.
• If you leave decisions [about the ethics of transportation] to individual moral choice there is no solution possible to the problems caused by automobiles. People will continue buying SUVs even though they harm others more than other cars.
• But we as a culture, as a country and as a society are capable of making wise policy choices.
• What's wrong with driving around the city to do errands is simply everything. The word we ethicists use for that kind of behavior is "selfish."
• It's particularly vile and morally indefensible in New York City, where there is excellent public transit. There absolutely no need for private cars in Manhattan.
• The greatest crime of the automobile in New York City may be that it undermines ordinary happiness in ways we've ceased to notice. That's truly sad.

Watch the interview below or click here to come to the blog and watch it.

The No Impact Dear Santa letter

Dear Santa,

I was thinking about how much I love playing with my little girl Isabella and talking to my wife Michelle and joking around with my best friend Tanner. You know what I realized? There is nothing more fun than just laughing with the people I love. There isn't a gadget or a game or a toy or any sort of thing you and the reindeer could possibly bring me that I would rather have than a couple of hours of laughter.

I was thinking how when I talked to a bunch of third graders a while back and I said to them, "How many of you know the feeling of really wanting something and then when your parents finally get it for you, instead of feeling excited, you feel kind of disappointed and sad?" Three-quarters of the kids raised their hands. By age eight, these kids already knew that more stuff doesn't really make you feel better.

I was thinking, too, how that wanting feeling I get in the pit of my stomach is never cured by getting the object of my desire. Once I get what I want, instead of feeling satisfied, my want just moves on to the next thing. And I was also thinking how most of my stuff has the effect of pulling me away from my friends and family--because I use it alone--when joking around and having fun with them actually is really effective at making that wanting feeling go away.

Finally, I was thinking how all this stuff that doesn't really make me happy also has the effect of hurting the planet as clouds of carbon are produced as the stuff is manufactured, delivered, used and finally disposed of. I was thinking, on top of that, how so many people get stressed out by the debt and high costs of a Christmas full of presents. In other words, all the Christmas junk not only harms the planet but it kind of harms the people too.

So anyway, Santa, I was thinking how, since joking around with my friends and family gives me a lot more pleasure than more stuff, maybe you and the reindeer could just drop a few envelopes down our chimney. Like maybe I could have a couple of comedy tickets so I could take my friend Tanner out. Maybe we could have some symphony tickets, so Michelle and I could hold hands and listen to great music. You get the drift.

What I'm asking for is gifts that, instead of causing me and mine to separate from each other, instead cause us to bond together and enjoy each other. Experiences we can share that have the effect not only of giving us a good time but, say, supporting the arts and helping to build and strengthen community. They have the benefit, too, of not consuming a lot the planet's resources.

Thanks so much Santa. Sorry if I won't be coming to the mall this year to sit on your lap. I'll leave the cookies in the kitchen as usual.

All the best,
No Impact Man

An organization that wastes not, global warms not (and saves money, too)

If every car in the United States idled 5 minutes less a day we'd save 13 million tons of CO2. If "smart" power outlets stopped delivering current to electronics sucking up juice in standby mode, we'd save 10% of household electricity use.

Okay, maybe reducing waste won't solve the climate crisis, but it makes a start, and we don't have to wait around for new technologies or renewable power sources or even politicians to do us the favor of deciding that global warming is an important issue.

One person cutting waste can make a substantial difference in their power consumption. Saving waste, when extended to buildings, businesses and towns, can be huge. I'm not talking--at least in this post--about denying ourselves anything. I'm simply talking, for example, about turning things off when they are not being used.

Think of the carbon emissions a trucking or livery business could save by training drivers not to let their engines idle. Think of the carbon saved by a hotel chain that installed motion sensors to turn off lights and air conditioners in vacant rooms.

Now think of the money saved if you reduced the fuel, paper, food, packaging, heating, air conditioning or electricity waste in your own business, building or town. Running your organization environmentally more than likely means nothing like increased costs. In fact, on the one hand, save the planet. On the other, cha-ching!

PS If you have ideas for saving waste, you've found a way to get your organization to waste less, your organization has benefited by reducing waste, or you or your organization or town have adopted simple, easy to implement policies that make a big difference, please leave a comment behind to let us all know.

What Would Jesus Buy?

I talk a lot on this blog about how less consumerism makes for more happiness, both for the people and the planet. Well, today in the United States, the day after Thanksgiving, a winter vacation day with not much to do, millions of Americans head to the malls to begin the consumer frenzy of Christmas. It's Black Friday.

And according to the excellent new movie What Would Jesus Buy, about anti-consumption crusader Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping, not only won't the stampede to shop do the planet much good but it's not going to do us much good either:

• Last holiday season, consumers spent $455 billion they largely couldn't afford
• Consumer debt is now $2.4 trillion
• 26 million Americans are clinically addicted to shopping

Meanwhile, Reverend Billy is out there preaching the word of Stop Shopping in order to save our souls, our wallets, our communities and our planet. Support him, if you're inclined (and I certainly was), by going to his movie (go today...the malls are too crowded anyway).

Click here to read a New York Times review and here to see where it's playing. Watch an interview with him below (if you get this by email, click here to come to the blog and see the video). The flick is a hoot.

On caring without despairing

This a guest post by Beth Terry, who blogs about not using plastic at Fake Plastic Fish. If, by the way, you're an international reader, don't think the absence of new posts on November 22 and 23 means I'm dead. It's a holiday here in the USA. Happy Thanksgiving!

My dad asked me the other day how I can blog day after day about plastic and not get totally overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the problem. I think part of my coping strategy, and it might be yours too, is selective attention.

I guess I allow in as much information as I can stand in order to understand the problem and then shut it out and focus on what I can do and how I can have the biggest impact and do the most good I can without caving under the pressure. The things we do as individuals do matter, but the things we do that others see matter even more.

There's no more hiding our lights under bushels.

I was thinking about this today as I was picking up plastic trash from the sidewalk as I walked to work. I was hoping others would notice... not so they'd think I was a good person but to plant the idea in their heads that picking up trash (and maybe not making so much trash in the first place) is something to consider doing.

Keep doing what you're doing and don't be overwhelmed by what others are not doing. In the end, we might all fail. There's a good possibility that all our efforts will come to naught. But that's no reason not to do what we can in the present, if only because it makes our lives so much better now!

Time to live in the gray

So, it's been a year. Twelve months ago, 52 weeks ago, 365 days ago, my little family--one wife, one toddler, one dog, one husband--embarked on a project to live with as low as possible an environmental impact for one year, smack bang in the middle of what some people think of as the most polluting city in the world--New York.

The rationale for the project was this:

(lower negative impact) + (higher positive impact) = no net impact

This, of course, has no real basis in science but it was meant to make rational-sounding a more philosophical question. Could I and my family, for at least this one year, do more good than harm?

Over the year, we reduced to zero or as darn close to zero as we could:

• Our trash (we produced almost none)
• Carbon emissions associated with growing our food (we ate local, seasonal, unprocessed, vegetarian)
• Use of transportation dependent on fossil fuels (we rode bikes, push-scootered and walked)
• Consumption of resources (we bought only what we needed and then only second hand)
• Our use of mains electricity (we survived with the one lamp provided by a single solar panel, a lot of beeswax candles, no fridge and no laundry machine)
• Our use and pollution of water (lots of water conservation measures and use of homemade vegetable- and mineral-based, biodegradable, non-toxic cleaning and personal products)
• We also increased our positive impact through volunteering to help tend trees, raise money for charity, tend to oyster growing in the Hudson, etc.

It's been an utterly amazing year. With no TV, I've become a better father. With no light, I've learned to rest. With no laundry machine, I've learned that there are certain sacrifices people are not going to be willing to make! No Impact has impacted everything from my life philosophy to my family dynamics to my finances.

I've met, spoken to, crossed swords with and fallen in love with the most amazing environmental heroes. Both ones with international attention and those who get no attention at all for what they're doing. Both people trying to change the world and people who have just quietly lived their lives for decades trying to cause no harm.

Over this year, too, there was a huge press explosion surrounding the No Impact project. My little family was featured on the front page of the New York Times House and Home section, I got roasted on the Colbert Report, and I rode my rickshaw around on the set of Good Morning America. I've spoken to reporters from Chile to Tokyo.

Believe me when I say that the press coverage took me by surprise. It has been hugely difficult--like when someone wrote that Michelle and I should be killed and our little girl taken away. But it has also been hugely rewarding. As a writer, there is nothing, to me, more satisfying than being able to take part in a wide-ranging discussion of this, the most fundamental of questions: how shall we live?

And now, the rules are over, if not the choices that need to be made for our future life and the discussion on this blog and elsewhere. Now it's time to learn to live a little less in black and white and a little more in gray. Of course, we are keeping many of our adaptations. But also, in the coming months, we will be figuring out how we will live, not by the rules of No Impact, but according to the dictates of our conscience.

Where will we buy shoes? What will I do when my creaky computer breaks down? Where will we get Isabella's clothes? Will Michelle, a confessed lover of shopping, retain the life-changing learnings she feels she has gleaned, or will the culture get the better of her? How, in short, shall we live?

How, in other words, will we balance being part of the culture and our desire to live sustainably? In some ways, many have said to me, this will be the most interesting part of our experience, because it is the part that many more mainstream people will be able to apply to themselves.

So yes, to those of you who who have asked, the lifestyle experiment continues, even without the year-long rules, and so does the blog. So keep coming. Keep commenting.

Lastly, how do I feel?

Excited and sad. Excited because some of the rules, when obeyed as rules, don't make sense in our lives. I can't wait for some CFL-bulb supplied light, for example. Excited because we have discovered so much about how to live well. Excited, too, because the conversation only continues and deepens.

But sad because, although I've met so many people who are trying so hard, I am worried that we as a country are moving way too slowly. Sad, because, a year after I stared this project, partly out of frustration with how slowly things were changing, still, very little has changed. Sad, because as a country, we still seem to be talking not about what we should do for the planet, but if we should do anything at all. Sad, because without the rules of No Impact, all I'm left with is my flawed human nature.

And human nature, with the fate of the planet in its hands, is something I sometimes feel a little scared of.

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.

Use less or use better?

One of the debates within environmentalism is this question of whether to solve the planetary crisis we will have to use fewer resources or whether we will just have to use them more efficiently and cleanly.

There are those, in other words, who seem to believe that we will get to keep driving around in SUVs and to keep our AC turned on all day, but that the vehicles and air conditioners will just be part of a much more efficient and cleaner energy system. Technology, they believe, will solve all our problems.

Personally, I believe that technology will solve some of our problems. But to achieve the 80% to 95% reduction in carbon emissions we need to achieve, we will ultimately have to make lifestyle changes, too (unless, of course, you believe that our economy can operate as a perpetual motion machine).

I'm not talking about returning to caves, but I am talking about things like higher reliance on public transportation, eating less beef, and maybe even hanging clothes out on a line instead of throwing them in a dryer. And personally, I don't see the debate between the efficiency and the reduction models.

There is so much to reduce that wouldn't feel in the least like deprivation. Who, for example, would miss all the packaging that we have to hump to the garbage the minute we get a new purchase home? Which of us would really miss much if we turned the lights and the air conditioning off in empty houses and buildings?

Even Amory Lovins, one of the gurus of the energy efficiency, accepts that consumption reduction will ultimately have to be part of the equation. The extract below comes from "Mr. Green: Environmentalism's Most Optimistic Guru," an article in the January, 2007 New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert (emphasis is mine):

I asked Lovins how his plan to save the world through energy efficiency could accommodate the open-ended nature of human desire. If, as he claims, conservation is profitable, what was to stop the profits from going straight toward more consumption?

"It doesn't automatically prevent that," he said. But, he added, "you might plow the money back into more efficiency rather than more powerboats and helicopter skiing. After all, you don't rewash your clean clothes in the cheaper-to-run washing machine, because your clothes are already clean. At some point, I think you get jaded by continuous trips to Bali.

"Your neighbors might point out that what you're doing is increasingly antisocial," he continued. "On a moral or spiritual level, at some point you may discover you're not all that happy having more stuff or more travel. Trying to meet non-material needs by material means is stupid and futile. Every faith tradition that I know decries materialism.

"Markets are meant to be greedy, not fair. Efficient, not sufficient. They're very good at short-term allocation of scarce resources, but that's all they're good at. They were never meant to tell you how much is enough or how to fulfill the higher purpose of a human being."