Hi Folks!
Okay, I've had couple of you contact me, track me down and otherwise. It's great to hear from all of you, and I think one of the most exciting things is hearing you all continue to think about the issues from class. That is the only reason I could ever teach, because I know you all are bright cookies and with a little information and inspiration, you all have the ability to change things. I ran in to Jonathan the other day. It was great to see him, and even more exciting to hear about how he's thinking about things that combine his internship with ING into something green! Go Jonathan GO!!
Also, I've been doing a few other things on my own, so please feel free to check out http://greened-house.blogspot.com/
And I found this, which I thought was quite a good read and a much needed boost:
It is from: http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/ and well worth the read.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Pushing On Icebergs
Some weeks ago No Impact Man had a post succinctly titled Why Bother?.He was looking for input and comment on the very basic question of whether all our little green activities actually make any difference. The responses got kinda rowdy, and some feelings were hurt before it settled down. Actually, I was glad to see the passion, though most of the hurt feelings were pretty unnecessary.I commented, near the end, and this was part of my comment: "But yes, Greenpeople- we have an elephant in the room, and we DON'T like to think about it. What it boils down to is; what difference does it make if I sacrifice, and cut, and have one child- so that some jerk on the next block can continue to drive his SUV, using the gas I saved- and have 10 kids and 4 plasma televisions and a jetski?...Mostly what I can offer is- I've been doing it for 30 years- am still doing it- and the bottom line is; I'm an optimist. I think there are ways. But it takes what I call 'pushing on icebergs'."I have come to understand why great teachers lean towards the extensive use of parables. Somehow, the human brain is just more receptive to a story with a good lesson to it than to plain logic. Stories, and metaphors, reach us better.My metaphor here is that huge societal problems are very much like icebergs. They are huge; massive, with tremendous momentum and inertia. Walk up to an iceberg (standing on anything you can) and push on it, as hard as you can. You will not see ANY response from the iceberg; it's just too massive for you to affect, you and all your force are infinitesimally small in comparison to the berg.Pretty discouraging.And yet. Physics; good old physics, should bring you some realizations here- the outcome of which can be positive.Icebergs - float. They are not attached to the land; and they DO move. Mostly, they move in response to other huge forces; winds and ocean currents. And they tend to go in what looks like random directions.But like the rest of us, they ARE subject to the laws of physics; if you apply a force to the berg, it DOES have an effect. It has to.So this big honking iceberg is edging towards you- and if it keeps going the way it is, it's going to crush your boat, which happens to have your family in it. Your boat is anchored fast; you can't just sail out of the way. Do you stand there and watch the berg come? Or do you push?Granted, there are plenty of folks who would/will just stand there, and watch it come to squash them.I can't. I'm gonna push on the damn berg for all I'm worth.Obviously, one little shove IS useless. You have to buckle down; dig in with your feet, get used to the idea that you have to push, and push and push- and no, you won't see anything happening for a very long time. But- Physics is ON YOUR SIDE. If you keep applying force- the berg pretty much has to respond. At least a little.Something that's on your side- humanity. If YOU are busting a gut, trying to turn this oncoming iceberg- SOME of the bystanders WILL join in. It's just human nature. Now- what are the chances you can deflect the berg- if there are 100 people pushing? Better. But most of them won't help- until they see someone already committed. Really committed- and not quitting. More human nature. And sure, there will always be the jackasses who stand by and jeer, and tell you you're crazy.History- also - is on your side. Immense social icebergs HAVE been shifted out of their course, multiple times. The nicest example is Women's Suffrage. That iceberg had been floating in the male direction only, for THOUSANDS of years. Logic was not responsible for shifting it. It was the emotional commitment of many many people; over many many years. And it started with a few utterly committed women; who refused to quit.Many of the other examples are not so nice. "Abolition" was bloody and horrific- and in case you haven't noticed, is not really over yet. "Temperance" was astonishing, and ultimately a proof that logic, in isolation from reality, is a disaster. The outcome was not just funny movies, and speakeasies; it was thriving gangsterism, supporting more bloodshed and misery. Gandhi's peaceful persistence also generated bloodshed in the end. Icebergs are dangerous- don't forget that.I've actually DONE this. Pushing on icebergs. They do move. The main example I'll give you is widely familiar at the moment- good ol' Global Warming. I was a speaker at the 2nd North American Conference - in 1988. Essentially EVERY scary fact and possibility you've heard about recently - was discussed, in detail, at that meeting. Very few people listened to us, and the hot winds generated by the oil companies and capitalists continued to push the iceberg right down its disastrous path.But; look where we are, after only 20 years of constant, steady pushing, by a very small community. All of a sudden, a whole bunch of folks - thousands of times more than the original pushers- are starting to push too. Frankly, I still haven't seen the berg move- but things are looking up, quite a bit. Boy, though, we wish folks had started to push sooner. Ah, well.There will never be a sudden huge shift in the iceberg. It's not possible, and we shouldn't expect it. But the direction, and the trends, can be shifted.Does your one compact fluorescent lightbulb make a difference? Physics says it does. Physics is a good ally.So. Find a good place to set your feet. Dig in. And push. Don't quit. And don't waste your time yelling at the jackasses to come help- they won't, and the yelling just encourages them.Just keep pushing. And watch and see- somebody from the crowd will come and start pushing too- right beside you.I've seen it happen; and I'm still pushing.
Stay in touch kids!
very best,
Mary
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Thursday, April 5, 2007
UPDATE: Impacts of Global Warming....
Warming 'already changing world'
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Brussels
Climate change is already having major impacts on the natural world, a UN report is set to announce.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes there is also a discernible, though less marked, impact on human societies.
The IPCC is due to release the summary of its report on Friday, and talks look set to go on until the last minute.
Draft versions seen by BBC News warn it will be hard for societies to adapt to all the likely climate impacts.
The report is set to say that a temperature rise above 1.5C from 1990 levels would put about one-third of species at risk of extinction.
Adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change IPCC draft
More than one billion people would be at greater risk of water shortages, primarily because of the melting of mountain glaciers and ice fields which act as natural reservoirs.
The last-minute wrangling is likely to affect the degree of certainty in the final version, but not the overall direction.
The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world.
Eighty-five percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world.
Growing certainty
Since the IPCC's last global assessment in 2001, the amount of scientific work on observing and collating changes to the natural world has vastly increased.
In parallel, computer models which project the Earth's climatic future have grown ever more sophisticated, though there are still uncertainties in their forecasts and they remain unable to model some physical processes accurately.
The combination of more observational evidence and better models allows scientists to paint a much more detailed picture of what is happening in different regions of the world, and what they believe is likely to happen in the future.
"What we find is that evidence of the impacts of climate change is much sharper, much more reliable," said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.
"Many of the uncertainties have been resolved; and they confirm that the poorest of the poor are most likely to be hit by the impacts of climate change."
Fresh water is perhaps the most serious issue for human societies.
The world's great mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and Alps, act as natural reservoirs, trapping winter rain and snowfall as ice, and releasing it gradually in the summer.
Evidence suggests that glaciers are shrinking in all of these ranges. One recent study predicted that 75% of Alpine glaciers would have vanished by the end of this century.
As the ice disappears, spring and autumn floods become more likely, with an increased risk of drought in summer. The IPCC is expected to say there is "very high confidence" that these trends are already occurring.
It will also project a higher risk of flooding for many major cities on or near the coast.
Another significant human impact projected in the drafts is a reduction in agricultural output for most regions of the world.
Africa, most of South America, and Asia are likely to see crop yields and livestock productivity falling.
Temperature rises of about 1C would benefit agriculture in some regions, such as New Zealand and the northern portions of Russia and North America; but greater rises would damage output in all parts of the world.
Carbon cuts
Some observers of climate issues have long maintained that action on climate change should focus on protecting societies and natural systems against impacts such as floods and drought, rather than on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
The IPCC, however, is set to conclude that "adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude".
Poorer societies are likely to be hardest hit, as they lack the resources to set up protective measures and change their economic base.
Adapting to climate impacts, in the IPCC's view, should go hand in hand with reducing emissions.
The report has already led to an exchange of words between the European Union and the US, with Europe's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas on Monday condemning the US's "negative attitude" towards international climate treaties, and saying that a change of stance was "absolutely necessary".
The US ambassador to the EU, Boyden Gray, responded that trans-Atlantic differences were "not that great", even though President Bush, commenting on a Supreme Court ruling that his administration had a duty to regulate vehicle emissions, maintained the US was "doing enough" and saw no need to change policy.
This is the second in a series of IPCC reports coming out this year, together making up its fourth global climate assessment.
The first element, on the science of climate change, was released in February, concluding it is at least 90% likely that human activities are principally responsible for the warming observed since 1950.
The third part, which comes out in May, will focus on ways of curbing the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6524251.stmPublished: 2007/04/05 14:13:18 GMT© BBC MMVII
By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Brussels
Climate change is already having major impacts on the natural world, a UN report is set to announce.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes there is also a discernible, though less marked, impact on human societies.
The IPCC is due to release the summary of its report on Friday, and talks look set to go on until the last minute.
Draft versions seen by BBC News warn it will be hard for societies to adapt to all the likely climate impacts.
The report is set to say that a temperature rise above 1.5C from 1990 levels would put about one-third of species at risk of extinction.
Adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change IPCC draft
More than one billion people would be at greater risk of water shortages, primarily because of the melting of mountain glaciers and ice fields which act as natural reservoirs.
The last-minute wrangling is likely to affect the degree of certainty in the final version, but not the overall direction.
The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world.
Eighty-five percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world.
Growing certainty
Since the IPCC's last global assessment in 2001, the amount of scientific work on observing and collating changes to the natural world has vastly increased.
In parallel, computer models which project the Earth's climatic future have grown ever more sophisticated, though there are still uncertainties in their forecasts and they remain unable to model some physical processes accurately.
The combination of more observational evidence and better models allows scientists to paint a much more detailed picture of what is happening in different regions of the world, and what they believe is likely to happen in the future.
"What we find is that evidence of the impacts of climate change is much sharper, much more reliable," said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri.
"Many of the uncertainties have been resolved; and they confirm that the poorest of the poor are most likely to be hit by the impacts of climate change."
Fresh water is perhaps the most serious issue for human societies.
The world's great mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes and Alps, act as natural reservoirs, trapping winter rain and snowfall as ice, and releasing it gradually in the summer.
Evidence suggests that glaciers are shrinking in all of these ranges. One recent study predicted that 75% of Alpine glaciers would have vanished by the end of this century.
As the ice disappears, spring and autumn floods become more likely, with an increased risk of drought in summer. The IPCC is expected to say there is "very high confidence" that these trends are already occurring.
It will also project a higher risk of flooding for many major cities on or near the coast.
Another significant human impact projected in the drafts is a reduction in agricultural output for most regions of the world.
Africa, most of South America, and Asia are likely to see crop yields and livestock productivity falling.
Temperature rises of about 1C would benefit agriculture in some regions, such as New Zealand and the northern portions of Russia and North America; but greater rises would damage output in all parts of the world.
Carbon cuts
Some observers of climate issues have long maintained that action on climate change should focus on protecting societies and natural systems against impacts such as floods and drought, rather than on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
The IPCC, however, is set to conclude that "adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude".
Poorer societies are likely to be hardest hit, as they lack the resources to set up protective measures and change their economic base.
Adapting to climate impacts, in the IPCC's view, should go hand in hand with reducing emissions.
The report has already led to an exchange of words between the European Union and the US, with Europe's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas on Monday condemning the US's "negative attitude" towards international climate treaties, and saying that a change of stance was "absolutely necessary".
The US ambassador to the EU, Boyden Gray, responded that trans-Atlantic differences were "not that great", even though President Bush, commenting on a Supreme Court ruling that his administration had a duty to regulate vehicle emissions, maintained the US was "doing enough" and saw no need to change policy.
This is the second in a series of IPCC reports coming out this year, together making up its fourth global climate assessment.
The first element, on the science of climate change, was released in February, concluding it is at least 90% likely that human activities are principally responsible for the warming observed since 1950.
The third part, which comes out in May, will focus on ways of curbing the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6524251.stmPublished: 2007/04/05 14:13:18 GMT© BBC MMVII
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Possible internships
Hi Folks!
I'm back in the US and all is well. Athens is lovely and full of pollen. Enjoy the air in Italy!!
And, yes, I am looking into the possibility of taking on an intern or two (or possibly more). The position would be unpaid, at the moment, and would involve helping with background research for projects.
At the moment, I am exploring the options and the possibilities. If any of you are interested, please send me an e-mail and let me know.
Ciao!
Mary
I'm back in the US and all is well. Athens is lovely and full of pollen. Enjoy the air in Italy!!
And, yes, I am looking into the possibility of taking on an intern or two (or possibly more). The position would be unpaid, at the moment, and would involve helping with background research for projects.
At the moment, I am exploring the options and the possibilities. If any of you are interested, please send me an e-mail and let me know.
Ciao!
Mary
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Some recommendations
A number of you have asked me about environmental development related jobs, etc.
Here are some websites that may be worth looking at:
http://www.ecojobs.com/index.php (some good prospective positions)
http://aquanet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=5&id=67&Itemid=43
(Water and marine related jobs at a lot of different levels)
http://devnetjobs.tripod.com/ (A WIDE array of jobs. A great site and very regularly updated)
http://www.ecoemploy.com/jobs/ (mostly jobs in the US in environmental field - a lot of neat opportunities here)
http://www.ardinc.com/ (another organization that does some neat work)
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/jobs/index.cfm (also some good jobs)
http://enn.com/index.html (worth looking at)
http://www.developmentex.com/oppsummary.jsp (a lot of jobs at a lot of different levels)
http://hostedjobs.openhire.com/epostings/jobs/submit.cfm?company_id=15631&version=1 (they have some paid internships and do some very good work)
That should be enough to get you started.
Also for those of you looking at graduate schools, you should read:
Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. (Paperback) by Robert Peters
Trust me on this... you will be glad you read it!
Good luck folks and keep me posted!
Very best,
Mary
Here are some websites that may be worth looking at:
http://www.ecojobs.com/index.php (some good prospective positions)
http://aquanet.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=5&id=67&Itemid=43
(Water and marine related jobs at a lot of different levels)
http://devnetjobs.tripod.com/ (A WIDE array of jobs. A great site and very regularly updated)
http://www.ecoemploy.com/jobs/ (mostly jobs in the US in environmental field - a lot of neat opportunities here)
http://www.ardinc.com/ (another organization that does some neat work)
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/jobs/index.cfm (also some good jobs)
http://enn.com/index.html (worth looking at)
http://www.developmentex.com/oppsummary.jsp (a lot of jobs at a lot of different levels)
http://hostedjobs.openhire.com/epostings/jobs/submit.cfm?company_id=15631&version=1 (they have some paid internships and do some very good work)
That should be enough to get you started.
Also for those of you looking at graduate schools, you should read:
Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning an M.A. or a Ph.D. (Paperback) by Robert Peters
Trust me on this... you will be glad you read it!
Good luck folks and keep me posted!
Very best,
Mary
Going Green?
Hi Folks!
A few additional things you might be interested in:
For an idea of how much of an impact you are having on the planet go visit: http://www.myfootprint.org/
It's a bit simple, but also quite interesting.
Also, here is the article I mentioned in class about the family in Manhattan living "Green" Very Green. Chartruese even.... Not that all this has to happen, but still,.... sort of interesting....
The Year Without Toilet Paper
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Dim Lights, Big City The Conlin-Beavan family experiment requires that lights be low in their Fifth Avenue apartment.
'To reduce their impact on the environment, two New Yorkers give up what most take for granted.
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007
DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Michelle Conlin’s lunch is packed in a Mason jar each day.
A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.
Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.
Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.
Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.
Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, “Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism,” will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism’s last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, “focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture.”
“That’s the thing about this current wave of environmentalism,” he continued. “It’s not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It’s what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It’s also very urban. It’s a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?”
With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.
Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)
In this household, food was something you dialed for.
“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”
Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu — right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer — hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread “is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action.” Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough “mother” fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.
Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan’s homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.
The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.
The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).
Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her “high-fructose corn syrup ways,” meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. “Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction,” she said. “I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours.”
Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl’s. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)
Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband’s bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: “All progress is carbon fueled,” jeered one office mate.
Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw “An Inconvenient Truth” in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. “It was like, ‘J’accuse!’ ” she said. “I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic.” Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, “If I was a student, I would march against myself.”
While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport — giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment — she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. “It was my last hurrah,” she explained.
It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother’s bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks’ salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.
The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan’s father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella’s birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane’s Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.
“They cost a dollar,” Ms. Conlin said.
It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. “We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant.”
He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, “Only in strictness comes the conversion.”
Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. “They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back,” Mr. Beavan said. “We always say, ‘We’re trying not to make any trash.’ And some people get really into that and others clearly think we’re big losers.”
Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan’s Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.
“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”
Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. “Rain is worse,” she said.
Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.
“Like all writers, I’m a megalomaniac,” Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. “I’m just trying to put that energy to good use.”
A few additional things you might be interested in:
For an idea of how much of an impact you are having on the planet go visit: http://www.myfootprint.org/
It's a bit simple, but also quite interesting.
Also, here is the article I mentioned in class about the family in Manhattan living "Green" Very Green. Chartruese even.... Not that all this has to happen, but still,.... sort of interesting....
The Year Without Toilet Paper
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Dim Lights, Big City The Conlin-Beavan family experiment requires that lights be low in their Fifth Avenue apartment.
'To reduce their impact on the environment, two New Yorkers give up what most take for granted.
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007
DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Michelle Conlin’s lunch is packed in a Mason jar each day.
A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.
Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.
Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.
Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.
Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, “Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism,” will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism’s last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, “focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture.”
“That’s the thing about this current wave of environmentalism,” he continued. “It’s not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It’s what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It’s also very urban. It’s a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?”
With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.
Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)
In this household, food was something you dialed for.
“We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”
Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu — right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer — hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread “is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action.” Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough “mother” fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.
Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan’s homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.
The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.
The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).
Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her “high-fructose corn syrup ways,” meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. “Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction,” she said. “I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours.”
Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl’s. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)
Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband’s bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: “All progress is carbon fueled,” jeered one office mate.
Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw “An Inconvenient Truth” in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. “It was like, ‘J’accuse!’ ” she said. “I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic.” Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, “If I was a student, I would march against myself.”
While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport — giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment — she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. “It was my last hurrah,” she explained.
It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother’s bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks’ salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.
The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan’s father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella’s birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane’s Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.
“They cost a dollar,” Ms. Conlin said.
It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. “We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant.”
He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, “Only in strictness comes the conversion.”
Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. “They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back,” Mr. Beavan said. “We always say, ‘We’re trying not to make any trash.’ And some people get really into that and others clearly think we’re big losers.”
Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan’s Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.
“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”
Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. “Rain is worse,” she said.
Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.
“Like all writers, I’m a megalomaniac,” Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. “I’m just trying to put that energy to good use.”
Thursday, March 22, 2007
ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING ASSIGNMENTS
For Class on Tuesday 27 March, Please watch and read the following. You will need about a hour and a half, and need to be able to hear these. Our discussion will center on the issues here, as well as issues in the movie.
Please read and listen to:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642
(Be sure to get both stories...scroll down)
Gore's testimony to Congress 21 March 2007:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yo7rmajxxnc
Rep. Joe Barton (R) response to Gore's testimony:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CqUHM2gf5g4&mode
Lampson's Testimony questions Gore's testimony:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtWslM6Fb5M
Boxer vs. Inhofe in regards to Gore's long winded answers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=x4iHan7BjqY
Hillary Clinton and Al Gore
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3jxTw4ADfIA
ENJOY!!!
Please read and listen to:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9047642
(Be sure to get both stories...scroll down)
Gore's testimony to Congress 21 March 2007:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yo7rmajxxnc
Rep. Joe Barton (R) response to Gore's testimony:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CqUHM2gf5g4&mode
Lampson's Testimony questions Gore's testimony:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtWslM6Fb5M
Boxer vs. Inhofe in regards to Gore's long winded answers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=x4iHan7BjqY
Hillary Clinton and Al Gore
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3jxTw4ADfIA
ENJOY!!!
From my in box re: Thursday discussion
James Egan
to
Mary.matthews@tethysconsultants.com,marymmatthews@hotmail.com,fareedk@uga.edu
date
Mar 22, 2007 1:23 PM
subject
United States Budget Allocation
Hey guys,
just sending you an email from some of the research I did on the US budget.
Depending on what figures you want to use (all information gathered from http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/summarytables.html) the Department of Defense is allocated anywhere from around 49%-56% of the federal discretionary budget.
However, if you look at the entire budget, which includes transfer payments (like social security, medicare, medicaid, etc.) and net interest payments, money spent on security/defense is only allocated 21.3%. I would argue that looking at the entire budge is a waste of time. No one (not event he president) can really reallocate money from transfer payment programs and net interest payments are mostly payments to treasury issued securities and off/on budget trust funds.
Basically, 50% of the money given to the president to distribute throughout the government is allocated to defense spending. Education on the other hand is only given 6.6%. My argument was, if some of the money from the department of defense was moved towards the department of education, our educational system could be reformed and equal or surpass education programs of competing industrial nations.
How that money should be spent? I would argue to give it straight to the educational programs of the individual states, because each area is so different, a national prescription is unrealistic. Will this ever happen? What will it take to happen? My skills for seeing the future only go so far.
another interesting thing I found out when I was researching, CIA, FBI, ATF, Coast Guard, Secret Service and a variety of other agencies I thought that were included in the Department of Defense are either their own department, or they are part of the Justice Department or the Homeland Security Department.
have a good weekend,
James
James Egan
to
Mary.matthews@tethysconsultants.com,marymmatthews@hotmail.com,fareedk@uga.edu
date
Mar 22, 2007 1:23 PM
subject
United States Budget Allocation
Hey guys,
just sending you an email from some of the research I did on the US budget.
Depending on what figures you want to use (all information gathered from http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/summarytables.html) the Department of Defense is allocated anywhere from around 49%-56% of the federal discretionary budget.
However, if you look at the entire budget, which includes transfer payments (like social security, medicare, medicaid, etc.) and net interest payments, money spent on security/defense is only allocated 21.3%. I would argue that looking at the entire budge is a waste of time. No one (not event he president) can really reallocate money from transfer payment programs and net interest payments are mostly payments to treasury issued securities and off/on budget trust funds.
Basically, 50% of the money given to the president to distribute throughout the government is allocated to defense spending. Education on the other hand is only given 6.6%. My argument was, if some of the money from the department of defense was moved towards the department of education, our educational system could be reformed and equal or surpass education programs of competing industrial nations.
How that money should be spent? I would argue to give it straight to the educational programs of the individual states, because each area is so different, a national prescription is unrealistic. Will this ever happen? What will it take to happen? My skills for seeing the future only go so far.
another interesting thing I found out when I was researching, CIA, FBI, ATF, Coast Guard, Secret Service and a variety of other agencies I thought that were included in the Department of Defense are either their own department, or they are part of the Justice Department or the Homeland Security Department.
have a good weekend,
James
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