Collectively, small lifestyle changes can make a huge impact on the environment-and your life. Looking for happiness and health? What’s good for the environment is also, it turns out, great for you. Here’s a collection of tips from the No Impact community.
Do you have a video story from your No Impact Experiment? Share your story below:
First I wanted to make a comment about your film which I just saw. You didn’t go into your water usage which I think is actually more in danger than our energy or other green issues. You only mentioned your non-use of toilet paper, but you didn’t go into how much additional water you ended up using to clean yourselves, and doing laundry in the tub, etc. I just wished you had taken the entire sustainable lifestyle seriously and addressed those issues.
The other concern I had was that you failed to address the world’s biggest problem and you had a prime opportunity. The problem of overpopulation. Overpopulation is directly leading to all the environmental concerns that we have, from global warming, to air quality, water quality, depletion of energy and resources, etc. Even with China’s 1 child only policy they still have a net increase in population every year, and that does not include immigration, but is due instead to increased health and longevity.
Anyways, other than that I loved the experiment and I am impressed you were able to do all of those things. My family is attempting a lot of those but a bit more gradually.
We no longer eat any red meat, and we are reducing our poultry consumption as well with 1 to 2 vegetarian days a week, while I learn how to cook meals that will satisfy my families intense desire for meat.
We shop as locally as we can. I wish I had a better sense of what foods are in season when. Now days we have so little connection with the earth that it’s hard to know. The grocery store is stocked with blueberries all year round for example. We go to the farmer’s market frequently. We eat organic as much as possible (as much as we can afford).
I bicycle to work a few times a month at least (a 40 mile round trip) and am increasing that as well. My wife bikes our 4 year old around the city almost everywhere.
We have put in renovations and improvements, from windows to low gallon toilets, to tankless water heaters, and new energy star appliances, to reduce our monthly energy costs by more than half. And we have contracted to install solar panels to supply all our energy, but we are waiting on the incentive funding to become available from the DC Govt.
We only buy clothes from second hand stores (or accept gifts) - unless absolutely necessary.
We are currently growing a vegetable garden including pumpkins, watermelon, cantaloupe, peas, corn, peppers, raspberries, beans, cucumbers, basil, thyme, mint, and onions. And we are planting an apple tree this weekend.
But perhaps the biggest positive impact I have had is in convincing my boss to allow me to start a green committee at my office. The office is hard core conservative, with a good proportion of them not believing in climate change, much less man made. It has been difficult to find ways to appeal to them, but I have made strides by appealing to the bottom line and making it about making or saving money. For improvements in health and lowered health care costs: things such as having a planting day to plant tomatoes and peppers, providing fruit instead of processed and packaged snacks, and a bicycle repair workshop. We have created a freecycle room to for people to exchange unwanted items like baby toys, or books, and music, and other things. And have instituted a huge recycling project where we actually get paid for the white paper and office paper that we sort out. It has been a challenge, but has been very rewarding to see the biggest opponents of environmentalism getting involved.
This post was submitted by Stephen.
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.
Our family enjoys the tropical paradise of Honolulu and yet as an island we do all we can to buy local and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We replaced our two Volvos with one Prius. We have planted our own ‘square foot’ gardens with seed plants from the university. All our exterior lighting is solar; and all interior CFLs. We eat dinners on outside by the light of our solar lights. We compost kitchen wastes and all green waste. All of our home improvements start with visits to Re-use Hawaii (a demolition-recycler). We still buy the latest and greatest Apple products, but we try to reduce, reuse and recycle.
This post was submitted by Ronald.
Our students in 11th and 12th grades are taking a two-week low-impact challenge. Right now they’re doing individual challenges, but as a school, we’re using no non-essential electric lights. So the lights have been off in the high school for over a week now, and it’s been very nice. The principal commented on how calming it was.
We’d also like to be on the blogroll! Our blog is linked above. Can you add us?
This post was submitted by Leah Plath.