Colin Beavan's Blog, page 6
May 4, 2010
April 28, 2010
What can make you an extraordinary person?
Julia Butterfly Hill did us the kindness of dropping in on one of our No Impact Week workshops on Sunday. I said to her that people imagine that people like her do unattainable things. That people like Julia are extraordinary.
She said, "Extraordinary people are people who are just wiling to be extra ordinary." They accept how incredibly ordinary they are and just do their best--warts and all. They don't wait until they are something more than just ordinary.
As an extraordinarily ordinary...
April 26, 2010
Today I Biked to work instead of taking the Subway
This is by Patrick Groneman, of the Interdependence Project, who participated in No Impact Week last week:
The familiar route is decorated with fallen flower blossoms,
Bushwick emerges into the daylight,
my hands find the shape of the handle bars
Potholes and People walking in my path,
trucks tower, stealing sunlight.
I rise over the river and scale the sloping bridge.
Manhattan brings mayhem and I shrink a little.
I Focus on pedaling and I focus on breathing.
Arriving, I lock up my bike.
...
April 21, 2010
Join me in sharing your nightly #GratitudeList on Twitter
To celebrate Earth Week, I'm co-facilitating a series of workshops in NYC as part of No Impact Week (details here and here).
Tonight, I explained that the positive psychologists--the people who study happiness--offer us a lot of tools that can increase our baseline happiness. Getting more stuff, it turns out, isn't one of them.
Every time we buy something new, we get a burst of pleasure, these shrinks say, but before long the burst is over and we return to baseline. Your only choice, if...
April 19, 2010
What are we coming to?
One thing I think and talk a lot about and mention in my book No Impact Man is that we are wrecking our planet for lives we don't even necessarily enjoy. As I say in the book:
What really filled me with despair, though, was that I didn't believe that the way of life that was steadily wrecking the planet even made us happy. It would be one thing if we woke up the morning after a big blowout party, saw that we'd trashed our home, but could at least say we had had a rip-roaring good time. But...
April 12, 2010
Retreat from consumption--No Impact Earth Week in NYC
We've designed an in-person No Impact Week, not run over the web but in real communities. In other words, people get to come together to discuss, learn, participate in workshops and form community around the examination of the values they want to live by.
For...
March 30, 2010
At the intersection of environmentalism and KY Jelly
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I know. You were not expecting to see a picture of KY Jelly on my blog.
Me either!
But the thing is, I have this eco-celeb friend named Stephanie Soechtig. She made the excellent film called Tapped, about bottled water.
Anyway, Stephanie is traveling across the country the country with her film, doing a wonderful job explaining why we should get off bottled water.
(Because it is bad for us and bad for the planet, by the way. See here.)
Turns out the poor woman checked into a motel one night on ...
March 18, 2010
Want to run an Earth Day No Impact Man screening and action event?
It's the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Let's do something about it. Turn off your TV. Stop shopping. Eat a carrot. Get on a bike. Put a moratorium on litter. And join us for an action-oriented screening of No Impact Man.
During the week of Earth Day 2010, the No Impact Project, Slow Food USA and 1Sky are bringing people together to watch, discuss and act. The theme of this event is the impact of food production on climate change and what your community can do to...
March 10, 2010
Thoughts I come back to when thinking about environmentalism 2.0
1. Happier planet = happier people.
2. You make a difference.
3. Our culture is broken.
4. The personal is political.
5. Economic growth ≠ Life satisfaction growth.
6. Jobs are paramount but we should work to make our planetary home better not worse.
7. The concept of zero sum game is for people with zero sum brains.
8. There is a better, happier system out there.
9. If thine eyes (or thine economic system) offends thee, pluck them (or it) out.
10. It's not about having less. It's about...
March 5, 2010
Progress
The Guggenheim Museum in NYC asked me to write something on progress for one of their exhibitions:
2009 had cooler cell phones than 2008. 2010 has cooler cell phones than 2009. 2011 will have even cooler cell phones than 2010.
That won't be progress. Year in, year out, we have cooler cell phones. If it's the same year in, year out, how can it be progress? Because it's not actually progress. It's more of the same.
Ho hum. Another year goes by. Ho hum. Another year where some of the human...
