No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, by Colin Beavan.I just completed reading this book and I have to share some quotes with you. These quotes are just some points that struck me - there's a TON of info in this book. Hopefully they will encourage you to read the book ... and think about what YOU can do to help preserve the world around us!
I'm not a tree-hugger. I don't think that we can actually "save" the planet because God says that it will eventually be burned up. But that doesn't relieve me of any responsibility. As a Christian, I believe that it is my responsibility to be a good steward of the world around me - and the resources that I choose (or don't choose) for myself and my family.
I do what I can because of my responsibility to God. Simple as that.
This is not a Christian book - and it contains some swearing as well as some meditation-zen stuff. It also contains a lot of questions and biblical questions. It made me see my world in a different light.
I recommend this book. The following quotes are from the many pages that I dog-eared...lots and lots to ponder and glean from this experiment. It has made me look even closer at what purchases I'm making and how I can improve my "footprint" in this world. (Note: the quote titles are mine.)
PS Read the book first. I haven't watched the DVD yet, but I do have it and hope to watch it soon. I'll keep you posted.
Life:
"The happiest people, the shrinks discovered, did not live their lives on this perpetual loop. Rather, these folks had raised their baseline mood in ways that did not require repeated doses of new stuff. The people most satisfied with life, it turned out, had strong social connections, found meaning in their work, got to exercise what they considered to be their highest talents, and had a sense of some higher purpose." (pg. 26)
Garbage:
"According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food packaging makes up 20 percent of our solid waste nationwide [US]. The archaeologist studying our nation's trash, it seems, would see that it's not just the city folks who don't have time to cook. A lot of suburbanites aren't exactly finding the time to peel a carrot, either. It's just that instead of getting their throwaway packaging from takeout, they're getting it from the frozen-food section." (pg. 39)
"Think of the grocery store. If you're lucky, in the aisles around the edges you'll find some fresh produce -- some food you can actually cook. But every other aisle -- the aisles in the store's heart -- has shelves crammed with cereal in boxes and vegetables in cans and frozen food in plastic trays. That's the stuff that's destined to become, after a couple of minutes in a microwave and a couple more on a table, or a lap, a full 20 percent of our nation's trash.
However much my grandparents' ghosts might cluck their tongues at my way of life, it is not that my family alone had turned into some sort of monstrous, garbage-making machine. It's not that I'm a marred human being who took a wrong turn, or that I've turned bad in the twenty-five years since my grandparents wielded their influence over me. It's not that I'm the lazy ingrate I thought I was. But it may be that, as a member of the crew of the huge steamship that is our culture, I had acquiesced to some decisions that caused the whole boat to take a wrong turn, and possibly sink." (pgs. 39-40)
"Sure, it was just one piece of tissue, but the problem is, as Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, some 80 percent of our products are made to be used only once. As trivial as that paper towel might seem, it points up a multitude of individual and cultural choices we make every day, choices that mean we are sucking resources out of the planet and sending them to the landfill or incinerator, having barely used them.
As long as we're talking about waste, it's worth noting that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 4.8 million tons - nearly 10 billion pounds - of disposable paper napkins, towels, cups, and plates is what the United States sends to landfills every year. I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but what we're talking about when we talk about 10 billion pounds of trashed paper products is 10 billion pounds of dead trees." (pgs. 47, 48)
Plastic Bags:
"Every year, we junk some 4 to 5 trillion plastic bags worldwide, according to the Worldwatch Institute. Around the globe, plastic bags, used for a matter of minutes and then thrown away, leave stores and markets in quantities hundreds of times greater than any other piece of merchandise. They are the world's most ubiquitous consumer items and, not coincidentally, its most pervasive throwaway product.
We recycle plastic bags at a rate of less than 1 percent, and thrown-away bags formed some 4 million tons of municipal waste in the United States in 2006. They poison the air when burned in incinerators, or leach nasty chemicals in our landfills for hundreds of years. And thanks to their lightweight aerodynamics, the wind carries an estimated 1 percent of plastic bags out of trash depositories. These renegade bags end up billowing from trees, hanging from fences, or, worst of all, floating in the ocean.
In 1988, across a span of just two weeks, fifteen leatherback turtles, an endangered species, washed up dead on the beaches of Long Island. Alarmed by the deaths, marine biologists performed autopsies. They discovered that eleven of the fifteen dead turtles had ingested plastic bags that blocked their stomach openings. Leatherback turtles, you see, have the unfortunate twin qualities of a taste for jellyfish and bad eyesight. To these nearly blind turtles, it seems a submerged plastic bag looks simply delicious." (pgs. 53, 54)
Stuff:
"Everybody says I want this and I want that. If our assumptions about happiness and the fulfillment of desire are true, well, then, so be it: the economy is rightfully predicted on the fulfillment of desires and it will burn along until there's nothing left to burn. But if that is so, why did Jesus say that a camel can fit through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man can get into the Kingdom of heaven?" (pg. 115)
Chemicals:
"Corn belt fertilizer washing off the land into the Mississippi River, meanwhile, ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. It turns out what when you fertilize the ocean you get a massive bloom of oxygen-hogging algae. The results if a 7,900-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf that is so depleted of oxygen that it suffocates fish, shrimp, crabs, and all manner of marine life. The EPA estimates that 210 million pounds of fertilizer end up in the Gulf every year." (pg. 122-123)
Light:
"...I read that people without artificial lighting often experience a phenomenon known as "second sleep." They go to sleep when it gets dark, wake up halfway through the night, light a candle, get up for an hour, and then go back to bed. They supposedly end up more rested than people who go to bed later and sleep through the night." (pg. 166)
Water:
"In the United States, for example, the average single-family household uses some seventy gallons of water every day. A full quarter of that we use to flush our toilets. In other words, while 1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, Americans are flushing 2.5 trillion gallons a year down the toilet." (pg. 193, 194)
Children:
"More children have died from diarrhea than people have been killed in war and conflict since World War II. A child dies every eight seconds from drinking dirty water." (pg. 194)
Simple Steps:
"To keep toxins out of the wastewater, around the house we use nothing toxic. Pretty simple. We learn to make our household and personal cleaning products from a combination of borax, white vinegar, baking soda, and Dr. Bronner's vegetable-oil-based liquid soap. Baking soda, it turns out, makes the world's best underarm deodorant. A vegetable-oil-and beeswax moisturizer made by a local person is better for our skin than anything we've ever used before." (pg. 197)
Thoughts:
"When I take my last breath, will there be a wish that I had more stuff? ... This life is so short and it will soon be over. What will we use it for?" (pg. 210)
"I'm just suggesting that we should at least wake up long enough to make it an active decision. And yes, it's our decision. It's a decision that belongs to us. Not to the government. Not to big business. It belongs to us." (pg. 215)
"I'd hear criticisms like this constantly throughout the No Impact project. What difference can one person make? Well, absolutely none if that one person doesn't try to influence a difference. But who among us knows how much we will influence the people around us? Which one of us knows which of us, by applying their talents and efforts to what they believe in, may not become a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Bobby Kennedy or a Betty Friedan or a Nelson Mandela?" (pg. 219)
"I'm not going to make myself a martyr. But I am going to keep trying to live my life deliberately. For most of my forty-five years I didn't try hard enough. I got too paralyzed by this question of whether I was the type of person who could make a difference. Finally, during the year of the project, I realized that's the wrong question. The real question is whether I'm the type of person who wants to try." (pg. 224)
~~~
Colin's blog link: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
