No Impact Man

My grandfather's cuff links

My grandfather was a big wig, first, in the OSS and then, through the 50s and 60s, in the CIA. In fact, my last book, Operation Jedburgh, told the story of secret World War II operation that my grandfather helped oversee.

Now, I am not uncritical of the actions of the CIA through those years and certainly not lacking in introspection about my grandfather's career. But I am, nevertheless, incredibly proud to have been his grandson (he passed in the early 80s).

Grandfa, as I called him, grew up on a farm in Ohio, raised by his mother and some uncles. His father had left. But he got himself into and through Yale University and went on to become a senior U.S. government official. Toward the end of his life, I asked him to show me his medals. Tears rolled off his chin as he showed me his Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Part of what I have left of him are his cuff links: one pair in gold, one in mother of pearl, one that are shaped like crowns with a red jewel on top. I also have another pair of cuff links that Michelle, my wife, gave me, but I only ever wear them if I'm scared of losing my grandfather's.

It's not that I don't appreciate the cuff links that Michelle gave me, but they just don't carry the same meaning. Plus, I got married wearing my grandfather's cuff links, gave my first book reading wearing them, went to every important friend or relative's wedding or funeral wearing them.

Now, the cuff links connect my grandfather's life with my life. They aren't a replacement for our relationship. They are not, like so much of what we consume, a surrogate for the human bond. Instead, they serve the purpose of maintaining my relationship with my grandfather across the barrier of life and death.

This is not fanciful. I feel it when I put them on.

So in moving towards a sustainable, nondisposable economy, where products are made to last instead of being thrown away and bought again, we have a yet another opportunity. The opportunity to live a life where, by manufacturing durable products and repairing them, we get to surround ourselves with long-lived material elements of our lives that become imbued with meaning and memory.

Think of eating at a kitchen table with your grandchildren at the same table you ate with your grandmother. Think of proposing to your fiancee with the same ring your grandfather proposed to your grandmother. Think of shaving as an old man with the same razor that your dad gave you when you first learned to shave.

Think of getting, as I do, to remember your love for your grandfather and the times he made you blueberry pudding every time you get dressed up.

Economic progress?

Day three in bed with the flu, so I'm just offering you this one-minute video from Adbusters. If you can't watch in your email or newsreader, watch it here.

Visit your senator and representative and tell them what counts!

Talk about fun! 1Sky.org is giving us the chance to work together to show that each of us make a difference, and that we make even more of a difference if we work together.

You see, in just a few weeks, from March 14 to March 31, our senators and representatives will be heading home for recess, and they're job during recess--at least in part--is to hang out in their local offices and listen to us.

1Sky, an organization working to put sustainability and renewable energy on the top of the political agenda, has launched a "visit your representative and senator" campaign.

1Sky needs our help letting our elected officials know about the huge economic opportunities that would come with being the world leader in renewable energy. Their agenda is:

• 5 million new jobs in a sustainable economy
• Secure our future by cutting climate emissions by 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050
• Smarten our energy priorities by not building any more coal plants and investing in renewable energy technologies

You can help personally introduce this agenda to your member of congress or senator. If you have never been to your elected officials' offices, don't worry. 1Sky will send you a packet to ensure your visit is successful.

Sign up here.

Creation

Isabella (who turned three today by the way) has done me the favor of bringing another flu bug home from school. So don't expect much.

As I've said before, I don't adhere to any one religion, but I do enjoy the ancient wisdom contained within them all. And someone who calls herself Dura Matter in the comments left behind a snippet that I liked. She attributes to the pastor Rob Bell.

"How we treat the creation reveals how we feel about the creator."

Our problem, you see, is insufficient materialism

On Saturday, I had coffee with Boston College Professor Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream.

We were talking about throwaway products and the disposable culture which fuel our economy and trash our resources (and which I recently wrote about here). I asked her if she thought part of the problem is that we have become too material and not sufficiently spiritual? Was that why she thought we consumed so rampantly that it strained the planet's ability to sustain our health, happiness and security?

"It's a false dichotomy," she said. "It's not that we're too material but that we see materialism as separate from spirituality." Our mistake is in not embracing the fact that the material is the manifestation of the divine, and that we therefore treat the material as something to be wasted and thrown away.

When you look at it that way, we need to be more rather than less material. We need to see the intrinsic value inherent in material resources. "If we treated the material as sacred," she said, "we might become more spiritual about the way we consume and that might help us solve some of our problems."

Too cute to drown

I know, I know. It's not about the polar bears. It's about human health, happiness and security as it depends on the well-being of our planetary habitat. At least that's the rather cumbersome phrase I coined in order to get away from the "environment," which to so many connotes something alien, outside of ourselves and low in priority.

But even if we get away from nature and wildlife for the purposes of trying to advance the more politically popular agendas of climate change, decreased foreign oil dependence and a sustainable economy stabilized by renewable energy, can I just say this? I love nature and wildlife.

I even love frogs.

Most certainly, I love Flocke, the adorable polar bear cub born in the Nuremberg Zoo in January. She's way too cute to drown in an Arctic Sea without ice. That's reason enough, as far as I'm concerned, to change the way I live.

PS Not sure I'd change my life for frogs, though (okay, lighten up, that's a joke!).

Thanks to my eco-hero Kate Zidar--planner at YMPJ, ecologist at Habana Outpost, visiting professor at Pratt, and God knows what other cool things designed to make me sick with envy--for forwarding the pics of Flocke below.

Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins!

I've been working on my book and today I was just feeling irrelevant and down and thinking that I just didn't have anything much to contribute to the whole discourse on human health, security and happiness as it depends on the well-being of our habitat. I just couldn't get any writing done.

So, for a break, I wandered over to the used book store where we get our books, the Strand, to hear Ed Begley, Jr, star of the environmental reality show, Living with Ed, talk about his new book, Living Like Ed.

He was smart and great and funny and had lots of good things to say. When his talk was over I went to get my book signed. Like I say, I was feeling a bit down so I almost didn't tell him about the No Impact project, but I forced myself.

"Wait," he said. "You're that guy? You're No Impact Man? And you came to hear me talk? What an honor!"

I mean, I hope it isn't crass to say that he said those things, but I was just feeling like such a loser today, and it made me feel so good that he had even heard of the No Impact project. It kind of boosted my morale. It made me feel like I'll be able to write again tomorrow. Plus, he wrote in my copy of his book, "To No Impact Man, My hero."

Anyway, during his talk he discussed electric cars and someone raised their hand and said wouldn't we be better off without cars altogether? Ed said that electric cars were better but they weren't the final answer. Electric cars aren't going to make us happy, he said. Not even solar panels are going to make us happy.

Then he said that he'd once seen a bumper sticker that said "Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins." The problem is, if we live as though we believe that, we actually lose. The planetary habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security can't sustain it.

"And you know," Ed said, "I've never seen a hearse with a luggage rack on top."

The bottom-line problem with sustainability?

According to Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, 80 percent of products sold in the United States are designed to be used once and then thrown away.

Now, this is a leap of logic, but for the sake of a thought experiment, let's assume that 80 percent of the energy and raw materials used by manufacturing industry are used to make products designed to be used only once.

There is so much talk about shifting away from the cradle to grave and towards a cradle to cradle paradigm so that materials, once thrown away, can be truly reused to make new products. That's a great and important idea.

But returning to my admittedly-naive thought experiment, if 80 percent of the manufacturing sector's energy and materials are used to produce single-use products, doesn't that mean that designing those products to be used, say, twice would automatically save 40 percent of the sector's energy and materials?

Suppose, in addition to cradle to cradle design, we made product durability and ease of repair an issue? Suppose we simply designed all our products to last twice as long? In many cases, that's not, by the way, so technically difficult.

The real difficulty is that durability undermines business models that depend on consumers buying the same products over and over again--repetitive consumption. So maybe the holy grail is to figure out how to manufacture durable, repairable products and still turn a profit.

Read a lot more about this in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Sustainable consumption's "double dividend"

[First off, let me say sorry about yesterday's post of a revamped version of the national anthem. Like so many people commented, I couldn't hear the lyrics. I thought that only the melody had been adapted. I would never have posted it if I had realized that the lyrics had been changed. But onwards...]

One method of making consumption sustainable is to modify material and product production, distribution, use and disposal methods so that the consumption is less damaging. Another method, and the one that I often write about, has to do with just reducing consumption.

I like this approach because no new technology is required. It is simply a matter of habit change. And I like it because I don't believe the two-job, credit card debt up to our necks, don't have time for our friends and families approach to life makes us happy.

I believe, as Professor Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey discussed in his 2005 paper "Live Better by Consuming Less?," that there is a "double-dividend" to reduced consumption. One dividend is that it helps maintain our health, happiness and security as it depends on our planetary habitat and the other is the increase of happiness that can come with a lesser emphasis on accumulating stuff.

What I like about Tim Jackson's paper is that he clearly articulates the arguments both for an against this position, and then comes to a conclusion about how the double-dividend argument might actually be achieved, given the complexity of human nature:

• A starting point for conventional economics is that, "in some simple sense, the consumption of goods and services is an attempt to provide for our individual and (at the aggregate level) collective well-being."
• "What emerges from this assumption is the idea that the more we consume (in economic terms) the better off we are...The equation of economic consumption with well-being goes a long way toward explaining the primacy of measures such as GDP in public policy terms."
• In contrast, "the environmental lobby has been particularly vociferous in denouncing the economic model both for its failure to to protect the environment and for the oversimplicity of its underlying conception of human nature."
• "The assumption of insatiability at the heart of economics is directly counter to certain classical conceptions of human well-being. Pleonexia, the insatiable desire for more, was regarded in Aristotle's day as a human failing, an obstacle to achieving the 'good life.' In the modern consumer society, it is encoded in both the ideological foundation and the institutional structure of the market economy."
• Jackson goes on to ask if consumption does not offer us the good life, why would we consume so much? This is a strong contradiction to the idea of pleonexia as a pathology. Jackson demonstrates that consumption is actually rooted not so much in the need of the products we consume, per se, but in deep psychological needs.
• "Among the behaviors suggested by the evolutionary psychology of consumerism are those concerned with display and status... That certain kinds of consumption are used to advertise status, power, and social position has been explored extensively in the sociological discourse on consumption."
• This is not pathological but an "expression of behavioral traits that have been successful in ensuring the survival of the species for generations."
• Furthermore, status-based decisions, such as to buy a big house, then lock us into other consumption decisions, like to buy the oil to heat the house.
• Beyond that, "in addition to their purely functional characteristics, material commodities possess vitally important symbolic properties... One of the most obvious applications of this broad thesis lies in the role of material commodities in constructing and maintaining personal identity." In other words, as our culture is constructed, consumption lies at the heart of expressing our style and individuality.
• "We consume in order to communicate. Through consumption we communicate not only with each other but also with our pasts, with our ideals, with our fears, and with our aspirations. We consume in pursuit of meaning."
• "But where do these arguments leave the double dividend argument? How should we now construe the idea that it is possible to live better by consuming less?"
• Jackson goes on to say that the needs for status, identity and meaning do not preclude their being decoupled from what we own. That, in fact, what we learn is that if we want to reduce consumption than we need to find ways to replace the communication that consumption achieves. We need to find better ways to achieve that same communication.
• Furthermore, "the insight that a certain amount of consumer behavior is dedicated to an (ultimately flawed) pursuit of meaning opens up the tantalizing possibility of devising some other, more successful and less ecologically damaging strategy for pursuing personal and cultural meaning."
• "It remains a very real possibility that we could collectively devise a society in which it is possible to live better (or at least as well as we have done) by consuming less and becoming more human in the process."

To read the whole 19-page paper, in PDF, go here.

Young people: how about an extra five grand?

Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute asked me to alert younger readers in the crowd to the fact that Breakthrough is offering $5,000 fellowships to up to ten of the United States' "top young organizers and thinkers to develop a vision and strategy for a new youth progressive movement."

From the webpage:

"Breakthrough Generation -- like its parent think tank, the Breakthrough Institute -- sees the creation of a new clean energy economy as the defining challenge and opportunity of our time and the center of the new progressive movement. The pursuit of transformative action to create the new energy economy can overcome a comprehensive set of societal challenges while achieving greater global prosperity and security, and it exemplifies the type of expansive and aspirational politics the next generation needs in order to break through issue barriers and advance large, inspiring visions."

From the application:

"Breakthrough Generation Fellows will receive a $5,000 grant to pursue a
proposed project during the summer or fall of 2008; attend a one-week summer
conference at the Breakthrough Institute; attend a spring and fall summit;
partake in a series of guided readings and discussions with Fellows, the
Breakthrough Institute Founders, and other advisors and experts; and have
access to resources of the Breakthrough Institute throughout the year."

Read more here and download the application form here.