No Impact Man

Why living No Impact contributes to happiness

I have a college professor friend and today he conjectured as to the reasons why choosing a life with less impact contributed to my family's happiness during the No Impact year.

He said that important contributors to happiness are:

• Meaning: I got a lot of satisfaction out of living a life that seemed connected to something larger and more important than myself.
• Autonomy: By deliberately designing my own No Impact life, I got to make a lot of choices for myself, rather than feeling that my way of life was foisted upon me by my upbringing and culture.
• Connectedness: Because we unplugged from the electronic matrix--TV, computers--we plugged into what was happening in our neighborhood and with our friends. Our relationship strengthened.

Cool, right? And what it all adds up to is what I always say: a happier planet makes for a happier people.

PS You can also friend me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (as though you don't get enough of me here on the blog, right? ;) )

The amazing No Impact community

I'm not going to write much because I just got off a conference call with an amazing group of volunteers organized by the No Impact Project's amazing new associate director, Stephanie Bleyer. The volunteers are designing and will participate in the NIP's first No Impact Week.

It's a week-long experience that the NIP will offer people who are interested in discovering a way to live that is both more fulfilling and better for the habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security. The goal is to convince people of the benefits of environmentalism, not by scaring them to death but by letting them experience the benefits.

Anyway, the point here is that these amazing volunteers are designing the week. People are crawling out of the woodwork--well, the Internet--to help. Not only that, but many of you blog readers have made huge financial contributions to the No Impact Project (whose goals I described here).

We've raised close to $1,000 already and the goal is only $15,000 in the next six weeks. Some people kindly gave $10. Others gave $50 or $100. If you also would like to support the NIP, please click here.

I am so grateful to the No Impact blog readership for providing so much support for this work.

Choosing the joy in life

If you can't see the video, click here.

Read about the video here.

Help No Impact Man raise $15,000

There is a growing movement of people, it turns out, who want to retool their lifestyles to live in ways that both make themselves and the planet happier. This was one of the big surprises to me of the No Impact year. People wanted to know what I was doing and they wanted to know what they could do too (you can support our attempt to help them by clicking here).

But how do you structure participation in a vast amorphous movement that is led by neither government nor corporations? How do you structure participation in something that is coming straight from people's hearts but which they are not quite sure how to pursue?

This is why I decided to start a non-profit project. It's mission is to engage citizens in choosing lives that they believe will both make themselves, their communities and the planet happier. The project will provide a focal point. A rallying place. Because what more and more of us are discovering is that, by choosing to emphasize the most fulfilling parts of our lives, we are automatically using fewer planetary resources.

So... The No Impact Project, which you can support by clicking here, will operate under the auspices and supervision of a wonderful and much larger environmental non-profit called the Open Space Institute. The No Impact Project will leverage the huge amount of publicity surrounding the book and film launches to help people choose the lives that they determine are better for themselves and for the planet.

There will be:

• A website designed by Free Range Studios (of Story of Stuff fame) to help people engage people in choosing the best that a harmonious life has to offer
• A curriculum for schools and college students
• A structured, truncated version of the No Impact Man experience available to religious communities, college students, business leaders and members of the community at large
• And the list goes on and on.

In short, while there are many, many environmental groups lobbying in Congress or pushing big business to change, there are very few that are promoting the benefits to people of a life lived in harmony with the habitat we depend upon for our health happiness and security. Our job is to help change our culture one person or family at a time.

And I thought so many of you might like to help. Some of you have been readers of the blog for a long time. Some have come recently. But most of us share the simple hope that Americans and citizens of the rest of the world will begin to choose ways of life that not only ensure the future our race, but that also may well make for a happier existence right now.

The No Impact Project needs a total of about $300,000 to fulfill all of its first year's goals. So far, we have raised just over a third of that. My objective, here on the blog, is to raise five percent of the No Impact Project's budget, or $15,000, in the next six weeks. It will be an ongoing campaign, and one I hope you can both contribute to (click here) and ask your friends and family to contribute to also.

All you have to do is click on the button above or below or click here.

I thank you with all my heart in advance.

With Love,

Colin Beavan
aka No Impact Man

Zen and the Art of the Climate Ride

At the end of September, I'll be riding bikes along with a bunch of other folks from New York to Washington to give voice to the fact that we want our elected representatives to take care of the planet we depend upon for our health, happiness and security.

We want to let them know that we believe in a switch to renewable energy which will both develop an industry of new jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, make our air and water cleaner, and make our planet safer.

Anyway, I'm hoping you might join me. You can read more about Climate Ride here and sign up to join in here. In case you're wondering what it will be like, here is a post by Evan O'Neil, who completed the climate ride last year.

Ok, I'll admit it. I was going to buy a motorcycle for my 30th birthday last year. I had been in recovery from my suburban auto upbringing for nearly a decade, living without a car in New York City, true to my concept of the ‘climate good life.’ I had made my dull peace with the never-empty trash cans, the motors, engines, and  combustion. I had pushed the city limits on a bicycle and now I wanted more freedom.

I hit the birthday bars with some increasingly radical ‘green’ friends who started to shift me from the motorcycle idea. That night, my racing mind went online. There was a note, an invitation to Climate Ride.

5 days, 300 miles, 100 riders. Fund raising. Take the climate message straight to Congress. It sounded big. I didn't even have a bike with gears. But I was inspired, and click! I signed up. I later found out I was the first rider to register.

I had no way of knowing that Geraldine Carter and Caeli Quinn, the founders, were gambling when they launched Climate Ride. They had built it, but would anybody come? It was the first attempt ever to take a peloton of enviros to Washington to lobby for a clean energy future.

Soon enough though, the ride filled and I set about finding a bicycle, training in Central Park, tackling Nyack, the New York City Century, whatever miles I could get. My donations started to flow, even from people I'd never met in person. I was overwhelmed by the generosity. Those were the waning days of a lame duck oil president, but who cared? We were speaking for the eons. We were on a mission.

Ride Day finally arrived for our two-wheeled climate conference. It was a diverse group. There was the pastor from Alaska with tattoos and a goatee, the nuclear industry exec with a guitar on his handlebars. As the ride began, I fell into a pace line with new fast friends.

City turned to suburbs, and the suburbs quickly eased to countryside. Soon there were baby goats scampering and a Mennonite farmer parking his buggy next to my carbon-free steed. Vultures perched on the power lines, spreading their wings to warm in the morning sun.

All was hot, hilly, and awesome until Day Five, when an entanglement of wheels mangled my rear derailleur. So close to the finish, within a day's walk of where I grew up, it looked like my ride was going to fizzle. But the crew soon had me on a spare bike and racing to catch up with everyone for the final ascent up Capitol Hill.

In the end, we came, we saw, we lobbied. But I'll never forget when the route happened past Margaret Mead's house in Doylestown, PA. It was she who said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Journeys like Climate Ride make you remember this truth, and forget all about motorcycles.

The sign of a civilized country

Tonight I was at a fundraiser for my heartthrob organization, Transportation Alternatives, where I heard the former mayor of Bogota, Columbia, Enrique Penalosa speak. According to the Project for Public Spaces:

While mayor, Peñalosa was responsible for numerous radical improvements to the city and its citizens. He promoted a city model giving priority to children and public spaces and restricting private car use, building hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways, and parks.

Tonight, Penalosa said that he had seen countries where the poor people had no clean water to drink, and yet there were highways upon which rich people could drive because the people with money and power get what they want while the poor stay thirsty.

Similarly, he said he had seen transportation systems where poor people had to walk or bike unprotected on highways and risk being killed because figuring out how to move poor people who had to walk was less important than figuring out how to move rich people who had fancy cars.

That is not civilized.

A country's transportation systems, Penalosa said, should be designed to maximize the happiness of the people who live in it. A country that attempts to maximize the happiness and quality of life of its citizens? Now that is civilized.

And by that criterion, he said, what marks a country as civilized is not a good system of highways. Instead, what marks a country as civilized is a good system of sidewalks.

What I'd say if I was wrong about climate change

I get emails from people, every so often, asking what I would say and feel if I was wrong about climate change. What would I say if, after dedicating years of my life to bringing attention to the problem, I found out there was no problem.

Well, first, of course, I would praise God in thanks that we have no catastrophe to contend with. Then, since many of the measures needed to deal with climate change have a lot of positive benefits, I will think:

1. I am glad we created 5 million or more new jobs here in the United States in the fields of energy efficiency and renewable generation.
2. I am glad we created a culture that relies less on foreign oil, so that our children can live secure lives, knowing that the energy rug can't be pulled out from under them.
3. I am glad we have found a way to save people and industry billions upon billions of dollars by making the use of energy more efficient.
4. I am glad the millions of children who suffer from asthma can now breathe easier thanks to the fact that we aren't pumping the air full of toxins from our exhaust pipes and smokestacks.
5. I am glad that, by no longer burning oil and coal into our air, we've put an end to acid rain and the devastation of our aquatic life.
6. I am glad that we created good, reliable, fun-to-use public transportation system so that families no longer have to raid their budgets to pay for cars and gas.
7. I am glad we've stopped building suburbs, which make people unhappy and [thanks to the happy suburbanites who wrote in] are designed for cars not people, and instead build villages where people can have strong community bonds that help make life fulfilling.
8. I am glad we now have fuel-efficient automobiles.
9. I am glad that we've learned as a culture to get off the work-more-to-spend-more treadmill which gobbles up resources and leaves us unfulfilled and instead turned to a way of live full of meaning and purpose.
10. I am glad we developed local, fresh food systems that care not just about filling bellies but what we put in those bellies.
11. I am glad that we have rejected the philosophies of survival of the fittest and competition for resources as driving philosophies and have instead embraced a philosophy of compassion and justice.
12. I am glad that we have understood that a sustainable society cannot work without supporting all of its people and that we looked for and found ways to improve the lives of everyone.
13. I'm glad that we've come to see people rather than things as our most valuable resource and that, in embracing the respectful and loving principles of not wasting, we have learned not to waste youth in prisons but instead to get them help for their drug addictions and alcoholism.
14. I am glad that, in realizing our resources are limited, we have come to use them to do what is important and to help each other rather than compete with each other.
15. I am glad that we have come to see education as the ultimate in sustainable industries.
16. I am glad that we have developed distributed, renewable energy technologies that allow kids in all parts of the world to have electric light so they can learn how to read.
17. The list goes on and on, but in short, I am glad that we have embraced the opportunities presented by the crisis of climate change in order to improve our society in ways we should have done anyway.

And now, to turn the question back on those who say that either there is no climate change or that it is not a serious problem:

What would they feel if we did nothing about climate change and they turned out to be wrong?

What would they feel if we buried our heads in the sand, ignored the problem, and then irreversibly damaged the planetary habitat that we depend upon for our health, happiness and security?

What's the best way to change the world?

Curious what you think:

What's the best action to promote?

a. Changing to green electricity
b. Complete moratorium on plastic bags
c. Phone your political representative

Not that these actions are mutually exclusive or representative of all the actions that could be promoted. But one represents different consumer choices, one represents habit change, the other represents political engagement.

What is the effect of each and how might each cause actual change?

Thanks! You know how I enjoy picking your brains.

It's my blog...

... so if I feel like taking a day off from the environment, I guess I can, right?

Because sometimes you don't want to talk about environmentalism or lifestyle change or any of the other constantly over-earnest stuff you usually say.

Sometimes, you just want to say how much you dig your girl.

So, tonight, we're at the Hudson River Park and a woman is stretching after her run. Isabella asks me what the woman is doing. I tell Isabella, "Why don't you go ask her?"

So Isabella marches over and, straining my ears, I hear Isabella say, "What are you doing?"

"Running," says the woman.

"No, when you were bending over like this," Isabella says, and doubles over.

Next thing, after this unknown woman has explained why runners need to stretch, she is showing Isabella all her family pictures in her phone and Isabella is asking questions.

Isabella stands up, runs over to me, hugs me, kisses me, grabs a handful of blueberries from our picnic and goes back to the lady.

I love watching Isabella develop relationships with people, completely independent of me.

If you can't take the time to brag about your kid, is the planet even worth saving?

Have a great weekend!

About looking for someone to blame

Oh hell, I do it. Probably all of us do. We choose a scapegoat and decide that they're the ones to blame for the problems. Some of us try to blame the people who work for "the corporations."

Now, personally, I *do* believe that corporate structure, where shareholders are rewarded for a corporation's profits but are legally insulated from the downsides of its malfeasance, is problematic (read more here).

But lately, I've been conversing a lot with people who are far more familiar with corporate culture than me. And they have explained it like this:

When you go to business school and then spend ten years in a corporate environment, it becomes normal to look at balance sheets as a kind of a puzzle and to ask yourself what can make the liabilities go down and what can make the receipts go up.

To make the receipts go up, the formulas go, you either need more customers or you need your existing customers to buy more. Hmmm. What could make your existing customers buy more? 

Let's say you're at a processed food company. But in a way, processed food, widgets, tires--when you're in the bowels of a corporation--are all kind of the same thing. Wherever you work, you simply need to sell more units. You find ways to manipulate the balance sheet.

So you work at the food company and you need to sell more units. One of your food scientists has told you that adding a little extra salt and fat could cause customers to increase the amount they eat at a single serving by 50 percent.

Oh, great. More units sold. Add the salt and fat, please.

You're a brand manager and--guess what?--sales have gone through the roof and you get a promotion. By the way, you're a great dad or mom, a good community member, a kind boss. You have a great heart and you love people very much.

Not only that, but you're kind of proud because you've obviously made a product that your customers like more and feel happier. And, all those people whose retirement depends on your company's revenue, are now that much more secure.

The only problem is, everybody is suddenly talking about a child obesity epidemic and pointing their fingers at people like you and saying you're evil.

But the truth is, you're not evil at all. You're actually kind. And you did what you were trained to do. Not once in your career has anyone asked you to assess the impact of your product on the body mass of "consumers." It simply never occurred to you.

And why should it?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not being remotely sarcastic here. I'm being totally serious. The actions of good people in not-so-good structures end up in not-so-good results. That doesn't make the good person bad.

Looking for people to blame misses the point. The point here is that these problems are nuanced. Scapegoating people isn't going to help. What will? Understanding them. Examining their challenges. Accepting that they are in difficult situations.

And then: finding ways to help them.