No Impact Man

Lest you all think, that with my recent calls for collective action, that I have abandoned individual action, please read my post at WorldChanging about how the two are in separable. Leave your comments there but leave them here too!

A continuing debate erupts within the environmental movement about the relative merits of individual versus collective action. Back in 2007, on the subject of individual action, The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote,

You can change lights. You can change cars. But if you don't change leaders, your actions are nothing more than an expression of, as Dick Cheney would say, "personal virtue."

I heard criticisms like Friedman's constantly throughout a one-year project in environmental living that I took on under the moniker No Impact Man. What difference can one person make? Having had a lot of critics who forced me to look at the issue, I've come to some conclusions.

Firstly, there is one circumstance under which one person absolutely cannot make a difference: if that one person doesn't try. And if we don't try, who among us knows whether we have foregone the chance to influence the people around us? Which one of us knows for sure that, by applying our talents and efforts to what we believe in, whether we might become a Martin Luther King Jr. or a Bobby Kennedy or an Al Gore or a Betty Friedan or a Nelson Mandela?

Not that these great names are necessarily the most important aspects of movements...

Read the rest of the post here.

PS Did you guys know that the man character in this week's Law & Order was apparently modeled after me? Too weird.

I posted the last couple of days about the occupation of the Capital Power Plant, spearheaded by Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry.

Why were there so few comments? How come, when we talk about how to compost, we get a huge discussion, but when we mention civil disobedience, there is quiet?

Do we all agree that we are facing an emergency? Do we agree that we need rapid societal change in order to deal with the emergency? Do we have a better way to deal with this emergency than protests?

Sharon wrote:

"The problem I foresee is that no matter how effective this gesture is, it will probably only be a gesture. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing, but the reality of the convergence of peak oil and climate change means that if we are to make real shifts in the situation, among other things, we'd have to a have a populace willing to do with a lot less... I am still a little mystified about why you don't actually ask your readers to do the thing that might actually matter - demonstrate, not just for one evening a la Earth Hour, but in their lives, that they are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to shut down the coal plants."

Jen wrote:

"I'm waaaay over the protest model of civil disobedience. Don't get me wrong - I'm planning to go to this - but I want other options for political activism... It seems to me we need more - more ways to be activist. We need a new model for civic engagement that supplements sixties-style civil disobedience and inspires all those people who roll their eyes at this kind of protest. We need those voices too - how can we inspire them to speak?"

I have to admit to being flummoxed at times. The obstacles are great. There is still not a critical mass of people who believe we are in a crisis and who can overcome the influence of special interests in the political realm. Nor do there seem to be enough people willing to change their lifestyles to have sufficient effect to reduce our resource use substantially.

So, what?

Two things, I think: One is that we have to continue to look for and examine new methods of activism.

I like a model I call "distributed power," where we become self-sufficient enough in our energy generation and food growth, as examples, to take the power out of the hands of centralized corporations and "distribute" the power to the people. But again, we're back to the question of how to get enough people to participate.

The other way forward is to start from where we are. That is to say, if the only tools we have are dispersed individual action and gesture-like political action, then we accept that, for now, those are the tools we have. We can't afford to wait around until we have the best plan.

In other words, just because we don't know if there might be more efficient ways to start doesn't mean we shouldn't start. Just because we don't know what step four or five in the process should be, doesn't mean we shouldn't take step one.

Just because we aren't sure if we'll make a difference doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

When I say we, I don't just mean the radicals in the crowd. I mean all of us. If you believe, as I do, that there is an emergency, then it's time to stop outsourcing your concerns simply because you've never imagined yourself to be an activist.

It's time to try. It's time for all of us to try.

A couple of days ago, I posted an invitation from environmental activists Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry to participate in the occupation of the Capital Power Plant in March. Some commenters on this blog responded favorably. Some were concerned.

Susan Och wrote:

Civil disobedience is supposed to be a last resort, after you have exhausted all other avenues. How many of us have actually written to all of our elected officials, talked to all of our friends and neighbors, written our letters to the editors, or done absolutely all we can to curb our use of energy?

Let me tell you my position: I will be there.

I'm afraid we are at the place of last resort. If you don't yet understand why we need to take radical action to reverse the greenhouse gas emission trend, read here and here. This is an EMERGENCY.

It's a scientific emergency, yes, but it's also a political emergency, because governments around the world are not taking the scientific emergency seriously enough. It's up to us--citizens who aren't used to getting involved in politics and activism--to give those governments a wake up call.

Read a memo from Betsy Taylor of 1Sky reporting on how the  international response to the climate crisis at the recent climate change negotiations at Poznan is way too weak. Here's the highlight:

• "It’s going to take a lot more than the bureaucratic and chaotic process I watched in Poznan over the past two weeks for us to cut global warming emissions as deeply and quickly as scientists say is necessary.

  "I am not the only one who feels this way. Bill McKibben of 350.org, Al Gore, Dr. James Hansen, and most recently the Alliance of Small Island Nations (AOSIS) are all calling for deeper cuts in emissions and for public actions to turn things around. The path to a global deal in Copenhagen, just one year from now, will not be successful unless we have a louder, and more visible, bottom-up push for change. It’s time to get serious about mass mobilization."

• "According to several sources, including leaders from the wind industry with whom I spoke directly, lobbying by the coal, cement, steel and fossil fuel companies was furious, relentless and ultimately overwhelming in the context of the European fiscal meltdown. According to a senior EU Commission official quoted in the Financial Times, “about 90% of European manufacturers would qualify for free carbon permits under the package.”

• This deal won’t result in adequate CO2 reductions in the time we have. The last minute demands of the power plant and industrial sectors are a likely predictor of what we can expect in the States as groups battle for a strong climate bill in Congress. Lets face it, the U.S. fossil fuel lobby makes the European coal companies look like wimps.

• A growing number of experts and governments insist we must adopt a target of 350 ppm or 1.5 degrees C as the threshold for safe emissions. Right now atmospheric concentrations of CO2 stand at 387 parts per million, increasing by about 2 parts per million each year. We need a more fundamental and fast turn away from fossil fuel.

Here's what you can do right now to push for transformational change:

• Become a Climate Precinct Captain and take things into your own hands by organizing locally: local.1sky.org. 1Sky has developed an online tool to facilitate a constant offline drumbeat of action in every Congressional district across the country. Once you sign up for the tool, get at least ten neighbors and friends to get involved with the 1Sky campaign. E-mail Ada@1sky.org with questions.
• Join us at the largest climate convergence in history - Power Shift '09 -  or consider sponsoring someone else to attend. We need 10,000 people in Washington, D.C. screaming for change.
• Organize a 350 action for October 24, 2009 by signing on to 350.org and making sure that the world hears us loud and clear before next year’s Copenhagen summit.

As Betsy says, "This is not a time to just take advice from those of us in DC. It is time for every rabble rousing, child-loving, planet protecting person to get clear that we will not be okay unless we disrupt business as usual."

Sometimes when I give a talk, I'll say that if there is some Grand Designer or some Great Intelligence that creates the Universe, chances are that He, She or It did not create a system in which what was good for the planet would be bad for the people (unless that He, She or It had a very low IQ).

More than likely, I say, since the planet and people are interconnected, the Designer figured it so that what's good for the planet is also good for the people.

I rediscover this truth  over and over with environmental lifestyle adaptations. Biking, for example, is better for the planet than cars and turns out to keep people healthier, too (the bad news is that our culture is not built in a way that everyone can get where they need to go--like to work--by bike).

Anyway, some new support for the idea that what's good for the planet is also good for the people comes in this week from Indiana University. Greening the urban landscape, it turns out, improves children's health:

In the first study to look at the effect of neighborhood greenness on inner city children's weight over time, researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the University of Washington report that higher neighborhood greenness is associated with slower increases in children's body mass over a two-year period, regardless of residential density.

            

"Previous work, including our own, has provided snapshots in time and shown that for children in densely populated cities, the greener the neighborhood, the lower the risk of obesity," said Gilbert C. Liu, M.D., senior author of the new study, which appears in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. "Our new study of over 3,800 inner city children revealed that living in areas with green space has a long-term positive impact on children's weight, and thus, their health."

This follows, it turns out, because:

Trees and other urban vegetation improve aesthetics, reduce pollution and keep things cooler, making the outside a more attractive place to play, walk or run.

Meanwhile, more vegetation means more carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere, less storm water run off and its associated toxins into our water ways, the removal of diesel particulates from the air, and a reduced heat island effect, meaning less power used for air conditioning.

We help the planet, we help the kids. The point here is that spending money on environmental adaptations need not be the luxury of the elite. It can actually improve the lives of the underpriviledged.

Photo courtesy of NRDC's Switchboard.

Bill McKibben sent me this note over the weekend and asked me to share it with you. Thoughts? Plans to attend?

Dear Friends,

There are moments in a nation's—and a planet's—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

We will be there to make several points:

• Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level—below 350 parts per million co2—lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.
• Even if climate change were not the urgent crisis that it is, we would still be burning our fossil fuels too fast, wasting too much energy and releasing too much poison into the air and water. We would still need to slow down, and to restore thrift to its old place as an economic virtue.
• Coal is filthy at its source. Much of the coal used in this country comes from West Virginia and Kentucky, where companies engage in "mountaintop removal" to get at the stuff; they leave behind a leveled wasteland, and impoverished human communities. No technology better exemplifies the out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.
• Coal smoke makes children sick. Asthma rates in urban areas near coal-fired power plants are high. Air pollution from burning coal is harmful to the health of grown-ups too, and to the health of everything that breathes, including forests.

The industry claim that there is something called "clean coal" is, put simply, a lie. But it's a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don't come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It's time to make clear that we can't safely run this planet on coal at all.

So we feel the time has come to do more--we hear President Barack Obama's call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore's call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet's atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it's their cheapest fuel. Part of our witness in March will be to say that we're willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it's only a trip to the jail.

With any luck, this will be the largest such protest yet, large enough that it may provide a real spark. If you want to participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you. There will be young people, people from faith communities, people from the coal fields of Appalachia, and from the neighborhoods in Washington that get to breathe the smoke from the plant.

We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. After that we have no certainty what will happen, but lawyers and such will be on hand. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day—it is but  one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it.

Needless to say, we're not handling the logistics of this day. All the credit goes to a variety of groups, especially the Energy Action Coalition (which is bringing thousands of young people to Washington that weekend), Greenpeace, the Ruckus Society, and the Rainforest Action Network. A website at that latter organization is serving as a temporary organizing hub: http://ran.org/get_involved/powershift_and_mass_civil_disobedience_updates/. If you go there, you will find a place to leave your name so that we'll know you want to join us.

Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben

Photo of Capital Power Plant courtesy of Daily Life.

First off, Annie Leonard of Story of Stuff and I will be doing a live radio interview on KPFA's environmental radio show Terra Verde today (Friday). You can listen at 4:00 PM EST by clicking here (I'll post the link to the recording later). Onwards...

As long as we've been talking a little about a non-consumptive Christmas here on the blog, I thought I'd introduce the idea of sponsoring baby chimpanzees orphaned by the bush meat trade as a really neat charitable gift for a loved one. You can make someone a chimpanzee guardian as a Christmas present by clicking here.

Watch the video below and you'll be immediately sold on the idea.

According to The Jane Goodall Institute:

The Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of Congo—Africa’s largest chimpanzee sanctuary—provides orphaned chimpanzees with a loving, safe home. 

Poaching for the illegal, commercial bushmeat trade not only kills adult chimpanzees, it also harms baby chimps who are captured and sold into the illegal pet trade.

The lucky ones are confiscated from poachers and sellers by authorities.

That’s where the Jane Goodall Institute comes in.

At Tchimpounga Sanctuary, the Jane Goodall Institute gives traumatized orphan chimpanzees, who are often sick, malnourished and close to death, a second chance at life.

The chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute’s Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center sleep in dormitories and have large areas of secured forest and grassland enclosures to roam by day. By exploring the natural habitat together, they develop the social skills necessary for their well-being.

Make someone a chimpanzee guardian as a Christmas present by clicking here.

Either way, watch this adorable video:

A Day in the Life: Chimpanzees at Tchimpounga Sanctuary from The Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.

Somebody emailed me an article by Joanna Benn on the BBC's website: "Baby Decisions--Adding the World's Woes?"

Click through to read the whole article if you want, but basically, Benn poses the two sides of the argument like this:

When I see babies, not only do I see the beauty, joy and miracle of life, I also see nappies, landfill waste, vast amounts of food and money needed, and a very shaky, unpredictable future.

On the other hand:

Ask any environmental organisation what it thinks about birth control; it'll sidestep the issue, and say it's not their place to comment.

If a commentator says there are too many people on the planet, their words smack of authoritarian dictatorships and human rights violations, and echo traces of unpalatable eugenics.

She also says:

I have couched the question a few times: "Why did you want children?"

The answers have usually been - "It seemed the next thing to do, we wanted to, it felt right, I couldn't imagine not..."

Push again - "Have you thought about what kind of world you are bringing them into to? Some climate change scenarios give us a 10 to 15 year window before things get very ugly and scary indeed."

Resounding silence.

Meanwhile, the environmentalist Bill McKibben has written a whole book on the subject--Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (you can read the first chapter here).

The fact is, the more people who live on this little globe, the more resources we use, the more we strain the entire system.

The question is, to what extent are we responsible for making our family choices based on the planet? Also, to what extent should we discuss this issue? Does it risk alienating the people we want to convince? Or is it a reality we have to face up to no matter what?

First off, after my recent post about Christmas with no presents, somebody sent me a link to a great site that helps facilitate giving gifts to charity as Christmas presents. You might find it helpful: Redefine Christmas. Onwards...

Here is a little bit from the epilogue of my book. Just thought you might enjoy a taste:

As Annie Leonard says in her online video Story of Stuff, the live impactful lives we lead may not be so great:

"We are in this ridiculous situation where we go to work, maybe two jobs even, and we come home and we’re exhausted so we plop down on our new couch and watch TV and the commercials tell us “YOU SUCK” so gotta go to the mall to buy something to feel better, then we gotta go to work more to pay for the stuff we just bought so we come home and we’re more tired so you sit down and watch more T.V. and it tells you to go to the mall again and we’re on this crazy work-watch-spend treadmill. And we could just stop."

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We could just stop.

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Somewhere I read a talk of Pema Chodron’s where she says something like, “Most of us in this room are not so rich that we have nothing material to worry about and we’re not so poor that we can’t think about anything but getting ourselves fed. So let’s start by giving thanks for our middle birth.”

What Pema means about a middle birth is that we can be so overwhelmed by suffering that we don’t have the luxury to examine our lives. Or we can be so distant from suffering and so coddled by material comforts that we become too complacent to examine our lives. In a middle birth, we have just enough suffering to get our attention but not enough to overwhelm us.

Perhaps part of the problem in our response to the planetary crisis—why we don’t stop, as Annie Leanord says—is that so many of us in the developed world have such a cushy lifestyle that we are stuck in our complacency.

This is like the story of the Buddha himself. As it goes, his father was a king and wanted more than anything to protect his son from the knowledge of suffering. As a result, his son was never allowed to see anything that might upset him. Buddha came to believe that life was only about the pursuit of his own pleasure. He never questioned his life, because he never had a reason to. He just lived it as it had been delivered to him—until one day when he left the palace.

For the first time, he saw sick people and old people and dead bodies. He saw that these things ultimately happen to all of us. That sooner or later, we all suffer. Buddha asked, if old age and death are what happens to us, then what is the meaning of our lives? If the pleasures we seek are not permanent, then how important are they? What is the worth of all the riches and pleasures I’ve experienced in the palace which one day will be taken away?

Buddha was shocked out of his complacency and began searching for a better life. The good news is that, at least as the parable goes, he found it.

Maybe this global warming thing, along with all the other environmental crises, along with the economic meltdown, could be for us in the developed world like leaving the palace and seeing dead bodies and the old people and sick people. Maybe it will wake us up enough to ask: What is this life? What is it for? What is its meaning? How should we live?

Maybe it will wake us up enough to make us search for a better, more meaningful, more purposeful life—for us and for our planet.

Yesterday I posted about the trash I'd generated through eating takeout when I got too busy to cook for myself. Someone commented that eating takeout--in itself--is no problem. Cooking at scale may save energy. The problem is the plastic or cardboard containers that get generated.

Commenters left two suggestions behind for ways to get take-out without making trash. One is to take your own reusable containers to the take-out place yourself. I've done this before and the server liked it so much, he gave me extra food.

Another option is to ask the manager of your favorite food place if they would mind keeping a reusuable container belonging to you on hand. That way, they can deliver to you and you don't have to pick it up. When the delivery man drops off your food, you give him back a second, clean container to take back and store until next time.

Here's what's neat about this kind of idea. When you do it, it generates buzz, because other people are forced to get involved. It's like the glass jar I carry for coffee. Everyone wants to talk about it. Same with the reusable takeout tubs. Everyone will want to talk and it's chance to change a few more minds.

Image of "to go ware" from reusablebags.com.

Finished the book at last, but in the final few weeks, I discovered that I just couldn't keep it together to do my family's food shopping.

We temporarily turned back into take out mavens, causing more plastic tub trash in a couple of weeks than in the last couple of years.

This begs the question, if so many other people are too busy to avoid the mounds of trash, what can we do to help avoid that waste of resources?

Doesn't this mean we have to change the culture to make sustainability like falling off a log?