I just watched your movie and it really was encouraging to see. I believe we are a no impact family as well, so it was nice to see all the stuff we went through. It all started when we got pregnant for my daughter and realized we wanted to eat healthier. After 7 years I am now finishing an associates in Alternative Energy Engineering, Shane my husband is finishing certificates in Organic farming, watershed, and horse management. With this and lifestyle we have the ever changing goal in our life that we want to live self sustainable. I do notice that after looking at all the problems and solutions, not only in our life in a micro level, but from what we learned in our education on a macro level, the most impact is: the change within us and rejoining ourselves in community. The beautiful thing about human survival is that our bodies down to our souls know what’s best for us, basically we are our own best healers, and once the awareness seed is planted it just keeps on blooming. I think what your doing is great because the impact that you are making is planting those seeds. For some it may not grow now, but will, they may just find a different way to nurture it. But the ones that are ready, the work is done, now they will feed that need inside of them, because it is so rewarding. Keep up the great work, and just to let you know you are not alone, we and many others are doing our part to be as informative as possible, that a no impact life style can work. We cant fix an energy problem without changing our energy. In sequence these are some of the things we did.
Did wilderness survival classes
Started to eat Organic and local food and stopped eating out
Had a home birth
Only shopped at thrift stores
Stopped going to the doctor and only used herbal remedies, this has been our biggest change and most work because it made diet changes
We did a short lived news paper on networking organic and CSA farmers, midwives, co-ops, and heath based businesses.
Took up blacksmithing
composting
Joined co-ops
Drove a grease car
Went without deodorant (many complained)
Sewed our own clothes
Made our own shoes out of recycled tires
Did our own laundry, now we have resorted to just the drying part
Doing homeschooling
Got rid of our TV
We Lived off the grid for a few months on just a wind turbine, and solar panel on a CSA farm.
Bathed out of buckets, and took solar showers
Walked
Make our own soap
refused gifts
where natural fibers
cloth diapers
Do limited water dishes
recycle everything
bartered
Got involved with local government
Traveling working on farms for food and life style, at that time we moved alot
Took up playing instruments
Grey water system with our toilet
Made a composting toilet
Took up gardening, and raising livestock
Immersed ourselves in community
Got involved with education that involves sustainability
Do research on corporate buy outs of products
Surrounded ourselves with support
We haven’t gotten to the place where we want to be yet and sustainability and no impact has fluctuated to work with our life changes, But our goal is to have a low net energy community farm. We love this lifestyle and want to see how far we can take ourselves while still being a part of society. We are now just starting business called “Potential Energy” where we do a life cycle analysis on peoples lifestyles and give them resources, ideas, to improve change with their lifestyle, themselves and with their community, as much as they can and our willing to do.
We just really want to see the change in people, with out them feeling uncomfortable, and representing that in what we do.
Lots of love, Beth, Shane and Leda Celeste
This post was submitted by Beth Celeste.
For quite sometime now everytime me and my boyfriend would hang out and usually just lay in bed or on the couch watching the television. After reading the book no impact man it inspired me and reminded me that there was so much more we could be doing. So I asked him to join me in challenge. For one week we would watch no T.V. He agreed, and we did it. It was only hard the first day but after that we found so much more to do, and most of them were highly enjoyable! Not only did we save some electricity but it also brought us closer than we’ve ever been! So thank you Colin Beavan! You’ve opened up my perspective and have helped me improve my lifestyle while helping the environment!
This post was submitted by Rachel.
Have you taken a look in kids lunches lately? Individual servings, wrapped in plastic, in portions too large for most kids, and filled with too much sugar. I have taken back the brown paper sack lunch and replaced it with a basket (from the thrift store). Inside I pack sandwiches filled with home made almond butter and apple cider jelly (from apples gleaned by my daughter), homemade granola and yogurt, mason jars filled with milk or juice, and none of it wrapped in anything. All of this is topped with a handmade napkin and reuse-able water bottle to keep it all in. Everyday she comes home with her basket ready to fill the next day rather than full of garbage.
This post was submitted by Rhiannon Fisher.
Jim & I learned to live small while sailing our boat to the Bahamas from Lake Ontario. We found that the most expensive and high energy using thing on board was our fridge. So over the side it went! (Actually, we just never installed it, some-one gave us a few bucks for it, poor slobs!) We found that my chef-type skills were up to the challenge, although you’re only as good as your food source, (read: US small towns don’t really have a great fruit & veg department).
We now live in a 500 sq. foot house quite similar to our boat: no fridge. No running water. PV electric panels work great especially when you just plain old don’t NEED.
This post was submitted by Michelle.
I heat and cook with wood which I fetch from nearby woods, usually dead or down.
I grow almost all my food, using no commercial fertilizers or poisons. I get a nearby farmer to deliver a dumptruck load of manure yearly. Sometimes he can’t, so now my 10 hens are in a house I built them and I use the henhouse cleanings as excellent fertilizer.
I mow the lawns with a simple push mower. I rake up the mowings for mulch.
I drive an old VW Jetta that nobody wanted because some of the gears don’t work. It doubles as a pickup with the back seat down. (I’m always picking up something like dirty hay from the barn, buckets of decaying woodchips, firewood, restaurant waste for the hens…)
I go to town (8 miles over hills, otherwise perhaps I’d bike) once a week. I could go less often but I have a son with financial problems which require me to go to his workplace and collect his paycheck every week.
When I’m going to town I ask a neighbor if he needs anything.
I go to bed early and get up early.
I read books from the nearby library.
I rarely buy new clothes (you don’t need to look too good when you never go anywhere).
I work hard all day, so at night I’m too tired to need much entertainment.
I help a nearby dairy farmer whenever he needs me (no pay, but I get all the milk I can drink, as well as occasional packages of hamburger, tongue, liver).
I write letters. (I only have internet when I have children living at home, as now).
I make jams or dried fruit for Christmas presents. People love it.
Of course I hang-dry my laundry. In the winter I hang it in the house, it puts moisture in the air.
I build what I can, I fix what I can. This is very rewarding.
When I do buy new things I try to get excellent quality so they will last. For example, right now I am about to buy three new gardening tools (mine are finally busted), they all have lifetime guarantees.
On the rare occasions when I get sick I drink nettle tea (from nettles I pick and dry) or eat cayenne (from peppers I grow and dry).
I appreciate the beauty around me.
Don’t think you can’t do this. I’m a 60-year old mother of five.
This post was submitted by Wendy.
we are an artist and a musician working together to maximize the amount of time we’ve got to do our work (which happens to be very much inspired by sustainability and reconnecting with nature) by having very few expenses. we’re living in a 14′ travel trailer while we build a 15′ square cabin on some land in the high desert - the climate here is mild, so we need little in the way of heating and cooling, and we’re able to grow lots of our own food. my art studio runs on $500 worth of solar equipment (including panels and batteries). we made a refrigerator that burns a minuscule amount of energy simply by changing the thermostat on an old chest freezer we found next to a dumpster. much more info on our blog at http://www.theobviousobserver.com.
This post was submitted by alyce santoro.
We all know how much a human being polutes, so this is the BEST you can do to lower impact on a long term.
Let me tell you, life without kids is great: I have a lot of time and I retired at 38 (some money, easy/cheap lifestyle and no kids) which would not be possible with kids. The environment is actually one of the reasons we don’t want kids. We didn’t like to put a child in this already messed up world and implicitely contributing to it.
Just give it a thought before you start having kids; kids might be fun, but also a lot of work, and life without them is not actually “better” or “worse”, just different. In our case, we are very happy not having them!
This post was submitted by Frank.
We meet as neighbors to talk about what matters to us and we use the internet to write to leaders instantly as a group. We once wrote the City of Seattle asking for help to make our traffic circle beautiful and they sent us plants. When we were out planting them, so many cars stopped and people thanked us for what we were doing.
Meeting takes us about the same amount of time as it would to watch a movie, but we get so much more. We feel connected with each other, and feel free to find one another for help if we need it.
This post was submitted by Jen Peters.
Eat only organic
Increasing plant based meals
Eating local from farmer’s markets
No take out- bring food with us.
Composting
Wash laundry in cold water
Chemical free household (cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, chemical free/ organic body care products)
Setting the thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer
Recycling
Reuse all cardboard - art trading cards, kids projects
Wearing preowned clothes
Enjoying nature on weekends instead of shopping
Adopting an animal from a shelter- then donating toys make from old clothes back to the shelter.
Hosting green bday parties with near zero waste
Bring cloth produce bags and bags for shopping
This post was submitted by Marga.
We a kitchen we have here at work so I wash the disposable plastic bowls and spoons and reuse them every day. Consequently, I’ve used one bowl and one spoon within the last week as opposed to seven bowls and seven spoons. It feels better because now I have a special bond with my own cereal bowl and spoon, heh! Colin is right in that if you treat everything in your life as trash then it all becomes trash and you life is full of trash. By the way, thanks to Colin for coming and speaking at the Google NYC office! You’ve made a difference!
This post was submitted by Mohamed Fakhreddine.