We know, in terms of impact on our environment, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves (ever calculated your footprint?). Industry, companies, organizations are doing a lot more to lower their environmental impact than we individuals and families do. We are living on too large a footprint each and every day and changing our habits is hard.

Colin Beavan is taking things seriously however and started a year long experiment to live as NoImpactMan, or in Colin’s own terms:

“A Guilty Liberal Finally Snaps, Swears Off Plastic, Goes Organic, Becomes A Bicycle Nazi, Turns Off His Power, Composts His Poop and, While Living In New York City, Generally Turns Into a Tree-Hugging Lunatic Who Tries to Save the Polar Bears and The Rest of the Planet from Environmental Catastrophe While Dragging His Baby Daughter and Prada-Wearing, Four Seasons-Loving Wife Along for the Ride”

This basically means: only local food, transport by foot or tricycle, no electricity, no heating, …

Colin notes correctly on his blog that living a true zero impact life is utopian. One aims to combine doing less harm and doing good to arrive at a net zero footprint.

Key to understanding footprint is thinking in terms of the whole chain of events from resource(s) to waste and beyond. This is something we still have to get used to and the complexity of our world makes for some surprising results. According to some researchers for example, walking to work or to your shop actually damages the planet more than driving there (cf. Times article). After all walking requires energy, energy we get from food, food that is increasingly produced in highly energy-intensive ways.

Via ABC News

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 18:15 and is filed under future, society, sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.