Courtesy AdbustersFor twenty years, the people behind Buy Nothing Day have been pleading with consumers to avoid the frenzy inherent in "Black Friday," the no-holds-barred shop-o-rama that comes the day after Thanksgiving. This year, they're ramping things up and calling for an all-out Wildcat Strike against the "capitalist consumption machine." Socialists, you say? No, just worried people who want to take a stand in the face of "crises of ecology, psychology, and faith."

Dearest readers, I'll let them say it themselves -- give this a look, and visit the Buy Nothing Day site to learn more:

This year we’re calling for a wildcat general strike. On November 27/28 we’re asking tens of millions of people around the world to bring the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding – if only momentary – halt. We want you to shut off your lights, your televisions and other nonessential appliances. We want you to park your car, turn off your phones and log off your computer for the day. We’re calling for a Ramadan-like fast. From sunrise to sunset, we abstain en masse. Not only from shopping but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.

Instead we’ll feed our spirits and minds with a feast of subversive activities: pranks, shenanigans, credit card cut-ups, bicycle swarms, mall invasions and all manner of culture jams and creative détournements … and some of us will take things even further with sit-ins, demonstrations, passive resistance and acts of nonviolent defiance, anarchy and civil disobedience. If we can create a big enough ruckus on November 27/28, then we may be able to catalyze what the Situationists tried to set in motion half a century ago: a chain reaction of refusal against consumer capitalism … a sudden, unexpected moment of truth … the first ever global revolution.

So think about it -- and at the very least, I encourage you to rein in your shopping this holiday season. Here's an interesting look at the role of products and packaging in our current climate crisis; when all is said and done, they can be tied to 44 percent of our greenhouse-gas emissions. In the words of Santa's seamstress, "Yikes."

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Dearest readers,

Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man.You've perhaps No-ticed the No Impact swirl of late: there's been lots of buzz about No Impact Man, the New Yorker who committed his young family to a year of zero-waste living, and his eponymous film. In late October, five thousand people participated in the first-ever No Impact Week. If you missed it then, here's your  second chance: the Natural Resources Defense Council is sponsoring another No Impact Week beginning this Sunday -- you can sign up here, then learn how to plan and carry out your own consumption revolution. (If the timing is no good for you, conduct your own No Impact Week with this handy how-to guide.)

No matter what you think of the No Impact phe-No-menon, the idea of a week of "pre-holiday mindfulness," as NRDC terms it, sounds pretty darn refreshing to me. The event is part of NRDC's new Simple Steps campaign. Wander over to the site, and you'll find the beginnings of a solid set of resources, including household calculators, tips for greening your community and your family, and pointers for understanding product labels. Near and dear to my heart is a section called This or That -- much like my own set of FAQs, it aims to answer those pesky "paper or plastic" questions that make so many of us a little twitchy.

Kudos to NRDC for its site, which is full of bright candy colors and making me dream of lollipops. While I go in search of sweets, take a look at Simple Steps yourself and let me know what you think. Useful? Inspiring? Vapid? Making you crave corn syrup?

And let me know if you give No Impact Week a shot, or if you're experimenting with consumption in some other way. The more stories, the better!

Sweetly,
Umbra

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This interview is part of a series on people who are making their communities smarter, greener places to live. Got a nomination? Leave it in the comments section or send it along to us.

Winner of Project Laundry List’s 2009 “Art on the Line” competition. Daisey BinghamAlexander Lee founded Project Laundry List as a Middlebury College undergrad in 1995, after hearing Dr. Helen Caldicott say we could shut down the nuclear industry if we all did things like hang out our clothes. He’s been true to the cause ever since, pushing for clotheslines across the land—even at the White House. Grist caught up with him to find out how hanging out can make for better neighborhoods, what clotheslines have to do with climate change, and why laundry stigmas are as persistent as wine stains.

Q. You created and run Project Laundry List—why, and what are its goals?

A. Growing up, my mother had always referred to herself as Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (the prickly laundress in Beatrix Potter’s series) and the clothesline was much less a pennant of the eco-chic, as it is becoming today through our work, than a flag of New England Yankee frugality. Helen’s idea resonated with me and we started a subgroup of the environmental club. We asked people to put themselves on the line and come hang out with us, and the puns haven’t stopped.

Our mission has evolved to focus on “making air-drying and cold-water washing laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy.” This really only became my day job in 2007, after years as a teacher, law student, public utilities commission staffer, and political campaigner. I get paid roughly minimum wage, mostly raised through selling clotheslines and drying racks. I work a bazillion hours. We have never really written grants. There is no time for that nonsense when the house is burning down. This is a work of love and passion, motivated by an abiding sense that we are in planetary crisis. Not much sense in working for Lehman Brothers and laying up treasure, like many of my classmates did, when ain’t none of it gunna matter if we don’t get ahold of the climate monster. I am just not the type to drink martinis and listen to Mozart as the Titanic is sinking.

Raise your hand if you believe in the right to dry!Couresty Project Laundry ListI am inspired by people like Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, to live and work as I do, but I fall way short. Furthermore, I am too irreverent and incorrigible to be as good a Catholic as she. An editor for my forthcoming book (More Time to Hang) likened me, somewhat admiringly, to a monk. I grunted and then chuckled, remembering Dorothy’s rebuke to somebody calling her a saint: “I won’t be dismissed so easily.” In July 2008, ABC World News, in their story on the right to dry, referred to me as “a 33 year-old bachelor lawyer from Concord, NH.” That conjures up another image, entirely. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Q. The clothesline issue seems to have gotten a lot of press in the last year or two—to what do you attribute that? Does it surprise you?

A. No surprise. People love to talk about laundry and everybody, everybody is an expert. Laundry is a universal human experience that is tactile, olfactory, and sentimental. Nearly everybody of a certain age has their own story of twirling among the bedsheets pinned on a clothesline with a grandmother or parent. Consumers like the smell so much that Yankee Candle has four scents meant to remind us of clothes drying on the line. (Forget that they mostly smell like dryer sheets.)

We have received mention in the WSJ twice, ABC World News and the CBS Sunday Morning Show, and NPR and The New York Times (seven times!). We have a meme that works, but the clothesline is just a “gateway drug” to better environmental living. It is a jumping off point to talk about the failure of the fourth layer of government (“community” associations); to talk about clothing care issues more generally, like we are doing with the Permacouture Institute through our New Again Coalition; to talk about why taxpayers foot the bill to wash prison uniforms in hot water; and to think about so much else.

Q. I’m always taken aback when I hear about places that don’t allow clotheslines, and then I assume they’re gated communities in sprawling places. Is that generally true? And are the bans are a reflection of some sort of stigma?

Lee (left) with Canadian folk singer and children’s TV personality Fred Penner, sporting a clothesline tie. Courtesy Project Laundry ListA. Truth is, clotheslines are banned or severely restricted by landlords and mobile home parks, too. It is not just the super-wealthy who are afraid of some mythic property value decrease if a neighbor shows some thong on the line.

The Italians—only 3 to 4 percent of them own a dryer—think we are crazy. They are a fashion-conscious, industrialized nation. We could take a page from their book. By contrast, about 80 percent of American households own a dryer, but good news: for the first time last year, we did see a drastic decrease in the number of Americans who see the dryer as essential.

There are five major objections to the clothesline that I confront all of the time: Prudery, snobbery, liability/safety, convenience, and feminism. I could write a book (I am writing a book) full of anecdotes that paint a picture of an America looking for any reason not to use a clothesline. The excuses range from the absurd to the comical. In both Connecticut and New Hampshire, shills for the local chapters of the Community Association Institute testified against Right to Dry legislation, claiming that the clothesline is a liability. Somebody might walk into one in the common area of a condominium and sue the association, they claimed. Never mind that, according to the National Fire Prevention Association, dryers cause 15,000 fires every year, resulting in 10-15 deaths and $200 million in property damage.

Michelle Obama put in that garden at the White House and I said, on Facebook, “Maybe a clothesline will be next.” Within minutes someone asked me if I was being racist or snarky. He was surprised to learn we had been pushing for a White House clothesline since 2007 on www.right2dry.org. That is what we are up against here. Stigma.

In response to the Times debate I wrote a piece for, a woman proclaimed, “You’ll pry my clothes dryer out of my cold dead hands.” Project Laundry List is not telling her she cannot have a dryer. Feminism is about choices. We are telling her that if she has a dryer, the oceans may rise and her front porch will get wet. Tough choices for some.

We are not anti-dryer; we are pro-clothesline. If you cannot get up out of your wheelchair or you have debilitating allergies for part of the year, the dryer makes sense and is a marvelous invention, but the real problem is not the millions of Americans disallowed from hanging clothes, it is the hundreds of millions of Americans who refuse to get up, go outside for some fresh air and sunshine, talk over the fence with their neighbors, and mindfully take time to do an essential human task. By my estimate five billion plus people in the world manage fine without a dryer. It may not be “easy living,” but it beats having the ocean lapping at your door.

Q. What promise do better laundry habits hold for individuals? What about for climate?

A. Life is about choices. We should sweat the small stuff, because small is beautiful; however, we can ill afford not to sweat the big stuff. A report that just came out concluded that if Americans would hang their laundry out to dry, along with 16 other small steps, they could slash U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 7.4 per cent by 2019. This is a studiously conservative study. We can do more, faster. I know we can, in my unscientific gut.

As far as laundry itself, we do a terrible job of measuring its true national energy impact. It is okay to look at the average household energy used by a fridge, but when you have over 2 million households doing fifteen loads or more per week and others skewing the average by doing laundry down the hall or at a Laundromat, the 5.9 percent figure, which is the average American residential electric use for the tumble dryer, tells you almost nothing. There are 2 million people in jail in this country and millions spent last night in a hotel, hospital, or nursing home. We do not submeter commercial or industrial laundry facilities to see how much they are using. All that laundry done for restaurants, universities, fish piers, etc., goes unaccounted for.

Q. You spent the summer on a “Clotheslines Across America” tour—what are the most memorable things you saw and heard?

World’s largest—and solar-powered to boot!Courtesy Alex LeeA. The tour started on my 35th birthday in New York City. The purpose was to have fun and meet some of our supporters. I wanted to see this country, see the holy ground that people like my uncle, a Marine lieutenant in Korea, died to protect. I met somebody at the giant clothespin sculpture in Philadelphia who had supported us for over a decade!

Another primary purpose was to provide material for a movie that is being made called Drying for Freedom—watch the trailer. The interviews that we did in Kentucky, visiting the World’s Largest Laundromat (solar hot water!) just outside Chicago, standing beneath the Arch in St. Louis on the Saturday morning of Parkapalooza, and watching a baseball game with Gov Pat Quinn of Illinois (we want a major league team to do a “Line Dry” event next year) were a couple of the highlights. I had the most fun doing a photo shoot with a pin-up girl in Philly so that we can make a poster that asks, “Why Don’t More Men Hang Out the Laundry?!” She was watching as I did the dirty work… and don’t worry, it was tasteful! Maybe every Hollywood couple can do a similar photo shoot with Celeste Giuliano (the awesome photographer) and we can produce a whole calendar on this theme.

Q. What will it take to get every U.S. municipality to give its citizens the “right to dry”?

A. What will it take to get every utility company in the country to give away clotheslines to its customers, like Toronto Hydro and BC Hydro have done in Canada? Couldn’t they give away racks, too? What will it take to get these places you are asking about to allow xeriscaping, compost piles, window AC units and screen windows (so people don’t get central air), and gardens? Maybe some really good designer drugs from Aldous Huxley. Maybe the Community Association Institute making this an organizational priority.

Q. What eco-worry keeps you up at night?

A. Environmentalists have this fascination with carbon dioxide. It is time for them to start paying attention to methane, before the proverbial cow pie hits the electric fan.  To understand why methane is 72 times worse than carbon dioxide over a twenty year period, read Wikipedia. Particularly, I am worried that New England governors are about to encourage Hydro-Quebec to build more dams when nobody can show me any peer-reviewed evidence that rotting vegetation in temperate hydroelectric reservoirs are not a major producer of greenhouse gases. I have been working with the Cree since the early 1990s on this and have paddled the Rupert River—just dammed this year—five times.

Q. Anything else you want people to know about your work?

A. Without throwing about academic terms like Jevons Paradox and the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, I just want to say that heroes of mine, like Amory Lovins, who have asked us to invest with religious fervor in the concept of energy efficiency, have forgotten that we need to focus on what happens with all that leftover cash saved through efficiency. If the individual takes that cash and flies to a conference in Copenhagen or buys one of these new drying cabinets that Maytag thinks we need to have next to our dryer, then we have not gained a thing. In fact, it is a setback.

Read More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Elizabeth Shove’s book Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience (Berg 2003). Stop putting your faith in sweeping political reforms, like the “clean” nuclear and America is the Saudi Arabia of clean coal mumbo jumbo coming out of our Congress, and start taking some personal responsibility. Congressman Brian Baird is on the right track with his behavior change research bill. New technology is important, but not the silver bullet.

The biggest crisis facing humanity is not campaign finance reform, climate change, nuclear waste and proliferation, or endocrine disruption and our poisoned food, air, or water, but rather how we do our laundry. What if every one of the five billion people without access to a dryer now suddenly had not only a dryer, but a refrigerator, washing machine, and hot water heater in their mud hut? And what’s up with all the wooden clothespins we buy now being “Made in China”? I was made in America and think conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, that you should put on your sweater and turn down the thermostat. It is almost winter, for Pete’s sake.

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I don't dislike No Impact Man. He is more intentionally political than his detractors portray him to be, and I think his yearlong stunt of living without toilet paper in NYC has been eye-opening for a lot of people, and amusing for many others. I admit that the "happy green" genre of books that are appearing a lot now, exemplified by Sleeping Naked is Green (by Vanessa Farquharson), make me nauseous: a hot twentysomething journalist makes sacrifices such as "buying only green cosmetics" while traveling to eco-resorts by plane and making amends with carbon offsets. But I was, until recently, a less ostentatious personification of the same middle-class green guilt, and I understand the way we anxiously try to bargain with our angry planet by promising to be better consumers. No one wants to admit that we may not be consumers at all in a few years.

What I want to point out here is that simple living, simple people, are everywhere, and always have been. We recognize the extreme varieties: back-to-the-land types, monastics, Mother Teresa and Ralph Nader, not to mention the homeless, addicts, that crazy lady who takes in all the stray cats. Really they live among us, quite unobtrusive in most cases, and most of them are sane.

My friend Catherine has worked all her adult life in administrative jobs, minimizing her material needs and ignoring most external definitions of success, in order to write poetry. She’s needed to get off the computer for health reasons lately, and is diligently working to set up a small business as a personal organizer (if you’re in Boston and having trouble finding your passport in that firetrap you call your office, check out Catherine’s services at ARoomofOnesOwnOrganizing.com). Another friend, Rick Zemlin, lives on $10,000 a year in San Diego. He feels that working more than 20 hours/week is unhealthy and leaves no room for his spiritual development, which is the focus of his very intentional life. Rick doesn’t write a snappy blog, or have a book contract that I know of, but his Facebook posts are honest and detailed. He did write a disarming article for his church newsletter, detailing his personal expenses, and he’s allowing me to cite it here.

Current Annual Personal Consumption Expenses

5,200 Rent & utilities (bedroom in a 2 bedroom apt. in high-priced California. House phone. No cell.)
1,500 Food (lacto-ovo vegetarian, with an emphasis on good nutrition)
100 Misc household and personal items
100 Clothes (thrift stores provide all of my clothing)
1,000 Health care & supplements (no health insurance)
750 Transportation (public transit fares & tennis shoes. No car)
500 Recreation (movies, eating out, retreats, coffee shops, etc.)
650 Travel: to see family & friends
550 Gifts consumed (items received gratis & low income medical discounts)
—– 10,350

I say disarming because Rick's expenses are remarkably low. He has obviously given up much of what defines the rest of us, including owning a home and having children. But he has a special clarity and warmth, and he seems to be enjoying his life as much as anyone I know. Here’s Rick’s philosophy: "I believe we are each on a journey with our Creator, moving deeper and deeper into the gift of our lives -- into the fullness of living. This core life purpose of living fully is joined by a second one, equally important: to help create a world where all are able to do so -- a world in which all 6.8 billion of us can thrive. I see this thriving world as the Grand Dream that God holds for us. I believe that we are given all that we need to live into this vision for the world, and that because God is infinitely patient with us we will eventually arrive. It is our destiny, our home. It's going to cost us, though. (And I think we will gladly pay ... one day.)" Read Rick’s full article here.

I learned a lot about the relative definitions of prosperity by living in Europe in my twenties. (Czechoslovakia, 1990-92, the Czech Republic 1992-95. Same town, same apartment.) When I arrived, shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a four-member family was typically living in a high-rise apartment with one or two bedrooms. No kudos to the repressive and corrupt regimes of communist Eastern Europe, but material prosperity was adequate, and no one seems much happier 20 years later now that they all have new cars and TVs and debt.

These friends, these memories of other places, and my own experiences of living out of a car or a backpack, are comforting to me now in moments when I’m anxiously scrutinizing the household budget, or wondering where that last 30k we need for the house is going to come from. I remember to breathe deeply and recite my mantra, "In the end, it's six by six and nothing more."

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am worried that your hotness may be contributing to global warming. I'm not sure what can be done to fix this.

O Zone

A. Dearest O,

You are making me blush. But I am using your letter as a springboard to report some exciting news: In an effort to make my operations more energy-efficient, I am combining my previous twice-weekly column into one weekly, multi-question column. Experts say the shift will result in 26 fewer milligrams of carbon emitted each week. I'll also be popping up in other places on Grist during the week now, and asking you dearest readers for more input. So keep the questions, suggestions, and blush-inducing compliments coming -- we'll lick this climate thing yet.

Efficiently,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

What is the most effective thing each of us can do over the next six weeks to help stop global warming?

Ned T.
Columbia, Md.

A. Dearest Ned,

I assume your six-week timeframe is pinned on the Copenhagen climate conference, to which we are all looking with bright eyes and big hopes. My advice for the interim is two-pronged: first, pledge to make one change in your own life that will reduce your energy use. Because I'm getting in the holiday spirit, I'll even say changing one light bulb counts, though I'd like to see you take some bigger steps as well. Second, but only because I couldn't blurt both ideas at once: Contact your representatives and senators. Tell them you support the passage of strong climate legislation, and tell them Obama would be insane not to go to Copenhagen. Tell them if they don't do something about climate change immediately, you are going to distribute photographs of them in compromising positions. We all know you don't possess any such photographs, but that sort of threat will always send a shiver down a politician's spine. When it comes to the climate crisis, we are no longer above such maneuvers.

Shiveringly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Do you have any recommendations on how to make the annual corporate 'gift basket' sustainable, yet memorable?

Erin K.
Portland, Ore.

A. Dearest Erin,

Want not, waste not.Good for you for thinking about how to make this consumption-y tradition more sustainable. The obvious choice, of course, would be to forgo the gift basket entirely. Can you get away with that at your company? Why not send your supporters and customers a gift certificate for a nice meal, instead, or donate to a worthy non-profit organization in their name. It seems to me that, in an age when 83 percent of people report receiving gifts they don't want, the corporate gift basket has run its course. However, if you absolutely must dole out tangible items, see if you can draw any inspiration from our list of creative green gift basket ideas. If all else fails and a more traditional basket is required, make sure you are thoughtful about choosing local, sustainable products. You live in a land of good cheese, beer, and wine, so it shouldn't be hard.

Scroogily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Can I recycle my receipts? I'm worried that the type of paper they're printed on will contaminate the regular paper I'm recycling.

BadRabbit
Richmond, Va.

A. Dearest Bad,

What a good question as we approach Holiday Shopping Madness. I can say with nearly 100 percent confidence that you cannot recycle your receipts -- at least, those printed on thermal paper, which is the sort of shiny, sheeny paper that faxes used to arrive on. (Remember faxes?) However, as with all such "can I recycle this or that" questions, I'll advise you to doublecheck with your municipality. Two more things on the receipt front, one creepy, one promising. The creepy one is that some receipts are coated with BPA, the estrogen-mimicking chemical found in baby bottles and can linings. At present, the best advice for avoiding this form of BPA exposure seems to be to decline receipts when you can, and wash your hands after handling them when you can't. Now for the more promising news: I've been hearing about a business model in which you, the customer, can associate your debit card with an e-mail account and request digital receipts, so instead of ending up with a pocket full of non-recyclable thermal paper, you end up with an inbox full instead. Many people seem to be trying this notion, but I have not located one good, central resource that's figured out how to get it up and running -- readers, any insights?

Totally,
Umbra

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

For those times when fresh vegetables are not available, are canned or frozen veggies the way to go from a sustainable and nutritional standpoint? Assume that we recycle in our household. Cheers!

Mark L.
Sanford, Fla.

A. Dearest Mark,

I thought you Floridians would just live on fresh oranges and lemons all winter. Scurvy must have its opposite, I suppose, and one never hears of orange casserole or orange stew.

On the sustainability front, there is no clear and dominant difference between canned and frozen veggies -- or, to say that another way, studies differ. The major ding on frozen food is the energy you use to keep it frozen; for canned, it's the energy used to make the cans.

Based on what I read, I would recommend that if you cannot purchase fresh vegetables for some reason, you purchase high-quality processed vegetables with no additives, that you eat frozen vegetables within two weeks, and that you religiously recycle your steel cans. Of course, you should first be buying whatever fresh produce is available in wintry Florida.

Grade A frozen foods are harvested when ripe and quickly taken to the freezing plant, where they are (even more quickly) flash frozen at extremely low temperatures. The modern industrial freezing process retains almost all the original nutritional value of the food (according to nutrition guru Marion Nestle's helpful book What to Eat). Good to go on the nutrition angle. But it's important to have an efficient freezer. One study using 1970s data found that the longer frozen foods sit in the freezer, i.e., are using energy in storage, the more they fall behind canned goods in the efficiency smackdown.

The canned goods are a bit less nutritious, but a study that looked closely at this issue found the differences between frozen and canned carrots to be insignificant. Carrots in syrup, or whatever they might put carrots in, would of course fall in to the category of dessert or a processed food, and cannot be favorably compared to fresh. As you know, the ecological issue with canned carrots is the steel can itself, which has high embodied energy costs. If a study assumes the recycling of the steel can, then canned vegetables can compete favorably with frozen vegetables on the sustainability index. (One health consideration is that BPA is often used in the linings of such cans.)

All this to say, the two forms of commercial preservation are ecologically comparable, so we can all put this issue out of our minds and focus on eating our recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables. As we discussed last week vis bike helmets, it is ecologically important to remain in good health and away from hospitals. Fruits and vegetables help us achieve this goal. They also help us eat low on the food chain, an even more vital objective in the sustainable kitchen.

Five a Day-ly,
Umbra

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

As a frequent cyclist, I've inevitably been in my share of collisions and accidents. Most bike experts recommend replacing your helmet after any crash, even if the damage isn't visible. Obviously the two most important qualities of a bike helmet are lightweight-ness and strength. That is best achieved by petroleum-based, non-biodegradable substances. Can you recommend how to avoid hurting the environment with these disposable Styrofoam helmets (other than being a more careful cyclist)?

Julia A.
Washington, D.C.

A. Dearest Julia,

Small eco-price to pay for an intact head.Please continue to wear your helmet and replace it after each crash. Cut the straps of your old helmet and write "crashed" on it with a permanent marker, then throw it in the garbage. Biking safely is an ecologically correct practice, even if it occasionally results in a small amount of waste. Two, three, four helmets a year is a small ecological price to pay when we consider the benefits of cycling (though for your body's sake I hope you don't go through this many).

Let us remember that biking is emissions-free transportation. Whether you are commuting by bike or simply taking a brief trip to the store every week, you are ecologically ahead of almost every form of transport save walking. If your bike is simply an exercise device, you are keeping yourself fit and providing inspiration for other would-be cyclists.

Secondly, a lightweight helmet made out of plastic is a fairly innocuous object on the environmental scale. As we have learned over the years, plastic is evil due to the raw materials (petroleum) from which it is made and the eons that will pass ere it degrades. On the bright side, helmets are light, and hence do not require overly much fuel on their trip to the bike store or the landfill -- which would be a concern were they made of gold. Some companies are tinkering with eco-friendly helmets, but I think you should not lose your head over this issue. You could always save your used helmets for some kind of trash sculpture.

Julia, a hospital visit has the potential for much more ecological impact than does your discarded helmet. Your fitness level keeps you (hopefully) from general ill health, and hence reduces the need for greenhouse-gas emitting trips to the doctor. More important, of course, the helmet protects you from serious head injury and/or death, both of which are far more environmentally costly than a piddling nine-ounce helmet. Let's say you were not wearing a helmet and bonked your head in a crash. First the ambulance or a friend's car has to transport you to (and from) the hospital, emitting Earth-damaging gases en route. Then perhaps you have to get a CAT scan or MRI, neither of which would be solar powered. What if you have a bleeding abrasion that requires multiple washings and several sets of bloody sheets and piles of gauze? Maybe they bring you a hospital meal which certainly includes terrible not-shade-grown coffee and some kind of mystery meat from a confined animal feeding operation. In a worst-case scenario, you could scrape off your nose and require years of plastic surgery -- certainly not ecologically OK, and sadly a real-life example.

Wear a bike helmet without worrying too much about the environmental consequences. Umbra, also known as Safety Pup, has spoken.

Cautionarily,
Umbra

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Here at Grist, we like to think of ourselves as trendspotters. And this is one trend we didn’t mind spotting: hot actresses are starting green websites left and right. With the launch of the most recent addition from Alicia Silverstone, we thought we’d take a peek at what lies beneath the glitz and glamour. Oh, and we figured we’d check out the websites, too.

Alicia Silverstone, thekindlife.com
Motto: “Sign up and spread the kind”
Mood: A chat with your spacy childhood friend
Worth a damn?: Too soon to tell

thekindlife.comSilverstone’s site, a cross-promotion for her book The Kind Diet, kicked off this week with a welcome video in which she describes her vision for a “blog-community thing” where she’ll give advice on the health and environmental considerations behind consumer choices. “I’m just trying to fill a need ... and I’m hoping that you’ll help me do that,” she says in this stoner-in-the-desert style confessional. Silverstone has made her eco-leanings public before, most notably through a naked PETA ad. And contrived as it may be, her presence here somehow feels authentic, as if you could write her a note (which people are starting to do) and she’d get right back to you (um, so far she’s not).

Gwyneth Paltrow, goop.com
Motto: “Nourish the inner aspect”
Mood: Spare and elegant, bordering on insufferable
Worth a damn?: Sure as Margo Tenenbaum smokes

Dominique Charriau/WireImage.comMuch has been made of this vanity website, in which Paltrow introduces marvelous, wonderful things into the lives of mere mortals. How you feel about it depends largely on how you feel about her, but we give props for the fact that it weaves in sustainability—almost naturally. Vegan recipes and recyclable socks nestle alongside accounts of taking weekend jaunts to London and getting fashion advice from Vanity Fair—you know, the stuff we all do when no one’s looking.

Tricia Helfer, triciagreen.com
Motto: “Chronicling the adventure of building a green, off-the-grid house”
Mood: Clouds and prairies and legs that go on forever
Worth a damn?: Good for a Cylon or solar fix

triciagreen.comUnlike the others on this list, Helfer—who’s either pervaded your every dream after her star turn in Battlestar Galactica or never blipped across your radar—hasn’t created a glitzy consumer site. Hers is actually an account of investigating the green options for a vacation home in her native Alberta, Canada. The quest may not garner many real-person points, but Helfer and her husband, a showbiz lawyer, manage to sound legitimately inquisitive and down to earth.

Rachel McAdams, greenissexy.org
Motto: “Tiny changes, big impact”
Mood: Bright and fun ... until you start reading
Worth a damn?: Eh, it’s a fine place to poke around for a while

Attit PatelThe Notebook beauty downplays her celebrity on this site, which she started with two friends when they realized that they were exchanging green “quips and tips” on a daily basis (and which now boasts a small slate of contributors). Her modesty is appealing, as is the green-lipstick kiss that graces every entry—but the writing is downright dull: “Hair dryers can really suck. Energy, that is.” A guide to taking action exhibits signs of life, and offers templates for writing to companies about their good (and bad) behavior, but to be true to its name, this site needs a little spark.

Julia Stiles, juliastilesstyles.com
Motto: “Helping the environment. You’re welcome.”
Mood: In your face, eco-poseurs
Worth a damn?: If you’re in a meta-mood

juliastilesstyles.comWe love a celebrity with a sense of humor, especially when it’s least expected. Which is why the eco-knockoff site created by Julia Stiles makes us just a little bit happy. The lippy actress deadpans her way through a video featuring her fashions, including a tie made from Swiffers and a shirt that doubles as pants, and then offers a “purchase” link that actually encourages visitors to donate to a food-rescue organization. Snark for a good cause? For some reason, that really resonates.

Related Links:

BPA Babies and Cash Registers

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Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

We are a family of five, with three little boys growing bigger every day. Which is the better environmental investment for our family: to replace our existing hot water heater with a solar model, or to switch to an on-demand, "instantaneous" hot water system?

Thanks!
Gillian and Grant
Toronto, Ont.

A. Dearest Gillian and Grant,

Whaddaya mean, my bath is heated with coal?Solar hot water is the better choice and would still be so if your children grew not one inch taller. Solar hot water takes advantage of the sun hitting your roof, which hopefully happens regularly without costing you money, nor the Earth anguish. A tankless heater will still use a polluting energy source to heat the water. It is a rare ratepayer who gets electricity from all-renewable sources, and Torontoians (?) seem to have the usual mix of coal, gas, nukes, hydro, and so forth.

All a tankless model does differently from your (I assume conventional) hot water heater is heat water as you need it, rather than storing hot water for hours. Like your tank heater, it uses either an electric coil or a gas fire to do this. A tankless on-demand model is, in the best scenario, a bit more efficient than your existing hot water heater. But it still has all the problems of using a non-renewable resource: pollution, greenhouse gas production, a sufficient power generation and delivery system, and of course reliance on the supply of whatever resource is used. You might be interested in reading my earlier column on tankless heaters.

A solar hot water system, on the other hand, can provide the bulk of your hot water needs without using any non-renewable resources (other than those used to make the equipment). Solar hot water is neither a new nor a highly complex technology, so you need not be a brave early adopter to have a system installed. There are a wide variety of systems (again, see a previous Umbra solar water love-fest) to choose from, and there are often financial incentives from one's city or state. Toronto seems to have a solar hot water initiative heating up right now, in fact, and here is a list of system suppliers to peruse.

The two potential drawbacks that I see are the initial financial outlay and whether your roof and home are well situated. But you won't know whether these are actual or theoretical drawbacks for your specific situation until you investigate the systems available where you live, their costs, and the fabulous financial incentives that might be coming your way. Here are some resources from the U.S. government on solar water heaters and how to calculate their costs.

Always choose the sun over the coal mine.

Sootily,
Umbra

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Vegans don't eat eggs because it's an animal product like honey and milk and also because of how animals are treated. However, does eating an egg kill a baby chick that could have had a life? I am a vegetarian and people often argue that the eggs in the grocery store are not fertilized and would never have a life. Is that really true? I know being vegan is the best way of living but does eating eggs really kill something that could have had a life? It would be great to get your opinion.

Harshita S.
Cambridge, Mass.

A. Dearest Harshita,

One foot on the floor.It is not my opinion but rather a fact that if a hen's egg has not been fertilized by a rooster, no embryo or chick will form. In general, an egg sold in a grocery store will not have been fertilized. There is a chance that you are shopping at a small store that carries eggs from small-scale producers, and in this case a rooster might be at the henhouse and the eggs might be fertilized. However, even a fertilized egg is unlikely to result in a life. Let us back up for a moment.

Hens, like women, produce eggs whether or not there is a chance of fertilization. Hens have one ovary, which regularly forms yolks inside its follicular sac. When the yolk is ready, the sac breaks open and releases it into the oviduct. If a hen happens to have a fresh set of sperm from a rooster stored in her infundibulum (the opening of the oviduct), the sperm gets a chance to fertilize the yolk. Whether this occurs or not, the albumen and shell are added in layers to form the complete egg as the yolk continues on a journey through the oviduct. When the egg is completely formed and the hen is ready to push it out, taa daa! Some hens will lay an egg per day.

A fertilized chicken embryo will grow and hatch in about 21 days if the right conditions are met, that is, if it is kept at 80 degrees. Either a hen must brood upon the egg until it hatches, or it must be incubated in a heated machine designed for the purpose. Few breeds of chicken will still brood, as this habit is inconvenient to the egg farmer and has been removed from the genes.

To recap, two things must be present for an egg to have a life: roosters and incubators. It is unusual for either of these conditions to be in place on a modern egg farm. Either the farm is such that tens of thousands of hens are in small cages pumping out eggs, with neither rooster nor free space in site. Or the chickens are roaming around, with perhaps a rooster or several roosters ruling the roost, but the farmer is in the egg-selling business and collects every egg to bring to your store. The only way an egg is a potential life is if that farmer sometimes collects and incubates her own eggs, and your egg happens to be fertilized but was not chosen to hatch out. So you see I am really stretching the possibilities here.

Here's the thing: if you do choose to eat eggs, despite the captivity of the birds, you should be buying eggs from small egg operations. These operations should have freely ranging chickens, and may have roosters. Hence, if you are going to eat eggs, it is better to buy and eat the ones that extremely hypothetically might have resulted in a live chick. Large-scale chicken egg farming is economically, ethically, and environmentally repugnant.

Mildly,
Umbra

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OliBac via flickrAh, back-to-school season. The rustling of leaves, the squeak of new sneakers, the reassuring sound of chalk on a blackboard. Wait, does anyone still use chalk? And if they do, is it emitting some sort of toxic dust that’s dooming our children to a life of bad health and environmental despair?

School, once that bastion of knowledge and wholesomeness, has become a sort of devil’s playground, presenting dilemmas ranging from toxic threats (probably not chalk, but what about radon or asbestos?) to junk-food lunches to diesel buses. We hereby present a few useful links and resources for navigating the hallways of your educational institution, whether it’s the local Kindergarten or a top-tier college.

Study up on the issues and think about whether your school makes the grade—then give yourself recess. You deserve it.

For the younger (swing)set

Most of you organized parental types have no doubt finished buying school supplies, but in case you’re scrambling—or all the colored pencils mysteriously break at once—here’s our guide to greener back-to-school shopping and a rundown of materials to avoid and embrace. Think about whether you can buy less overall, and remember: shopping online is better than driving to the mall.

Now that your kiddo is stocked up and off to school, will the bus ride be a source of bad fumes? Visit EPA’s Clean School Bus USA site to find out more about the issue of diesel buses and what school districts are doing to address it.

The toxic fun doesn’t stop when the bus puts on its brakes: unhealthy schools across the country are dealing with a legacy of bad building decisions. Once again, our friends at the EPA have a thorough (if not very pretty) site dedicated to making schools healthier places. You can also visit the Healthy Schools Campaign for a look at the issues and solutions (and enter their photo contest!).

One more major component of your child’s day: school lunch. Today’s lunches are a pale, plastic-wrapped imitation of the hot lunches of yesteryear (which were nothing to write home about, but at least they involved vegetables). A growing contingent is pushing for healthier lunches, and Congress is taking up the Child Nutrition Act this fall. Don’t let them keep feeding your kids crap. Get involved today.

And if you’re off to college ...

Take a look at our list of the 20 greenest colleges in the U.S. If you’re going to one of them or another green-leaning school, good for you! If you missed the boat, you could always transfer ... or better yet, check out our green campus special for inspiring profiles of student activists, tips for helping your school see the light, and handy links and resources for making this school year the greenest yet.

And keep an eye out for the newest Umbra Fisk video, coming soon: Umbra visits College of the Atlantic, the country’s first carbon-neutral school.

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Not my window. But this is how they feel sometimes.TottoBG via flickrOnce upon a time, I was full of unswayable romantic notions about old houses. Then I bought one.

I’ll refrain from going into too much detail about the quirks of our house, and of course I’m grateful to have a roof over our heads. But we’ve come up against a particular challenge that I can’t seem to figure my way around. It’s a little thing called window shopping.

No, not window shopping like pressing your nose up against the glass (thanks, wordplay-loving co-workers!). Window shopping like, “We have got to replace these old, rattling, single-paned, glazing-falling-out beasts before another winter sets in.” Even weatherstripping doesn’t help at this point.

The good news is that friends and family and This Old House keep telling us how easy it is to replace windows yourself. The bad news is, we’re pussies. I mean, of all the projects to screw up, is that really the one you want to test your skills on? So we started scouting around for installation estimates.

But that’s where the bad news got worse. Not surprisingly, it costs a lot to have someone else put windows in your house. And furthermore-not-surprisingly, it costs a lot more if you choose a material whose production doesn’t devastate planetary and human health.

The most affordable option? Vinyl.

If there’s one thing that echoes in my head after editing Ask Umbra for years, it’s this: “No vinyl, that’s final.” Vinyl’s drawbacks are many, varied, and well documented. We had two companies visit so far; one spent the entire time talking up vinyl (and assuring us that “it doesn’t bleed”) while the other spent the entire time talking it down. I look around my neighborhood, and everyone seems to have it. I research online, and everyone seems to sell it—but I’m also noticing another interesting trend, which is a sort of vinyl-window backlash. They don’t actually perform that well. They warp and wear out. There are other more modern options (fiberglass, for one, which is a relative newcomer to WindowLand and brings its own set of pros and cons).

I’m thrilled to see vinyl getting its due. But here’s the thing: of the estimates we’ve gotten so far, only vinyl came even within spitting distance of our budget. This is one of those moments where I get a fresh reminder of why everyone doesn’t just “Go Green It’s So Easy and Fun!” Reality intervenes.

I know new windows—whether vinyl or not—should eventually pay for themselves in energy savings. So I figure I have a few options: Keep getting estimates in the hope that someone will magically be willing to install non-toxic windows for a reasonable price. Suck it up and buy the vinyl windows, installation and all. Buy more expensive windows and try to install them ourselves, thus coming out at about the same place. Or really suck it up and buy non-toxic windows and installation. (This last one is, frankly, nearly impossible given our current budget.)

What should I do? Now you get to vote. And/or rant in the comments about what a fool I am. Meanwhile, I’ll be window shopping.

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BPA Babies and Cash Registers

Making buildings more efficient: It helps to understand human behavior

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

I just got married and received a lot of presents in the mail. I recycled/reused all the boxes, but I'm still stuck with a LOT of bubble wrap and sealed air. Is there a place where I can take these rolls of plastic to be recycled?

Johnny
Washington, D.C.

A. Dearest Johnny,

Congratulations and best wishes for a long and happy marriage. You may wish to retain a portion of the bubble wrap for use during periods of marital fragility.

I have several ideas on the recycling of said wrap, which boil down to this: Find a place to recycle it. Find a place that will reuse it. Or reuse it yourself.

mollypop via flickrNormally, as you may know, I defer to your local recycling service for such questions. The D.C. recycle website is silent on the matter of bubbles and sealed air, though they adamantly refuse packing peanuts. They do accept a variety of plastics, including plastic bags, so you should call them and see if they accept deflated sealed air -- which, after all, is a clean plastic film not unlike a plastic bag and is even made from the same material, polyethylene.

Most of us have made the egregious error of using "bubble wrap" to refer to all air cellular cushioning material. Only the trademarked (and presumably vastly superior) Bubble Wrap manufactured by the Sealed Air Corporation deserves the name. Or so the Sealed Air Corporation says. You see, air cellular cushioning material is made by heating and extruding polyethylene beads out of a tube until they form two layers of film. One layer of film is then wrapped around a holey drum. Air sucks the film into the drum, forming the future bubbles, and the second layer of film is laminated on top to seal the deal. The SA Corp uses a secret other layer of lamination to stop air leakage in the bubbles, rendering competitors' products inferior. True Bubble Wrap might also make the most satisfying popping sound -- I cannot say.

If you cannot find a local bubble wrap recycling business (use the internet and Earth 911), you can often ship bubbles and puffy sacks back to the manufacturer. You might also try your luck with shipping facilities like The UPS Store and its ilk, museums that might need bubble wrap to protect works of art, or sites such as Craigslist and Freecycle. One man's dilemma is another's treasure find.

One other thing you might consider is finding uses for the bubble wrap around your home. Put "recycle bubble wrap" into Google and you will find all manner of interesting suggestions, from the sensible (use it between walls and furniture for protection) to the downright silly (wrap your feet in it for winter warmth).

Poppingly,
Umbra

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Yummy, with a chance of drizzles.Homer (the Greek scribe, not the cartoon dork) is supposed to have declared extra-virgin olive oil "liquid gold." If by that he meant something to treat as if precious, things have changed considerably three millennia later and half a world away from the Mediterranean.

TV cooking gurus evoke Homer's gold with a breezy acronym (EVOO) and splash it around like it's tap water. Even local- and seasonal-minded cooks like me treat it like a pantry staple. I live thousands of miles from the nearest olive grove, yet I rarely pass a day without heating some oil in a pan with a little chopped onion and chile pepper to build flavor for a sauté; drizzling it over salad greens with a dash of vinegar and a pinch of salt for a quick dressing; or assaulting a finished pasta dish with it (to the horror of some dining companions).

Unfortunately, olive oil's ecological footprint has exploded along with its popularity. In Homer's time, household olive production ringed the Mediterranean, part of a highly productive polyculture that included grapevines, nut trees, and more. Remnants of that tradition still exist (as do some of the olive trees, which can live past 1,000 years), but most olive oil now comes from vast plantations that rely heavily on irrigation and agrichemicals.

An olive grove in Italy.Jon Shave via flickrAccording to a scathing 2008 report in the U.K.'s Ecologist magazine, industrial-scale olive production is turning large swaths of southern Europe into desert, drawing down the water table, squeezing out biodiversity, and drenching the earth in chemicals. The resulting gusher of cheap oil undercuts the small-scale artisans who made the product so popular in the first place.

If that weren't enough, a shocking portion of the product that appears on our supermarket shelves as extra-virgin olive oil is actually cut with cheap sunflower and hazelnut oil, as this 2007 New Yorker exposé shows. These counterfeit oils, too, are no doubt grown under ecologically devastating circumstances.

Against this backdrop of industrialization and adulteration, I wanted our tasting to include real olive oils (I know, picky) from producers that aren't destroying the ecology of the Mediterranean. I would love to have included some of the fantastic California-based oils now available -- such as Frog Hollow Farm -- but could not get my hands on any certified-organic ones for this tasting. I rarely see much California oil in supermarkets outside of the state. And in freight terms, it's probably more efficient for East Coasters to buy oils shipped by boat from Europe rather than by truck from California. (As for shipping impacts in general, olive oil is on that list of things -- coffee, tea, cocoa, wine -- that come only from specific areas, don't require refrigeration, and can be packed quite efficiently. Thus I don't fret much about food miles.)

Given the harsh economic realities of our times, I had to rule out the magnificent $40-plus bottles that come direct from small, diversified farms. Neither Grist's budget, nor those of most families, can afford such luxuries these days.

So to proceed, I scoured the shelves of two natural-food stores for relatively inexpensive organic olive oils. (I figured the organic-certification process would largely weed out adulterated products.) I found five. Then I assembled a panel of five food lovers to join me in tasting them: first unadorned as a dip for bread, then tossed with spaghetti along with a pinch of sea salt and chopped fresh garlic. Here's what we found.

[A note on origins: "Product of Italy" is a notoriously misleading phrase, one that actually tells us little about an oil's country of origin. Olive-oil bottlers in Italy can legally bring oil in from elsewhere -- common sources include Spain and Turkey -- bottle it in Italy, and declare it a "Product of Italy."]

Whole Foods 365 Everyday Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil
$6.49/16.9 oz, or $0.38/ounce
Origin: 100 percent Italian olives (according to the company's website)

This one made everyone's top three in preference, and thus took the prize. I found it delicate, subtle -- almost to the point of blandness -- and satisfying, both on its own and in the pasta. One taster found it "nice [but] basic" on its own, and "very nice ... strong" on the noodles. Others comments were "bland but yummy," "delicious," and "peppery."

La Piana 100% Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil
$12.49/16.9 oz, or $0.74/ounce
Origin: "Product of Italy"

This one fared solidly, landing in the middle of the pack. Its most enthusiastic supporter called it "clean crisp, nice, smooth" in its unadorned state, but "nothing amazing" in the pasta. Other comments ranged from "olive-y" to "nice flavor" to "spicy and balanced." I found it to be perfectly nice, but a little boring.

Spectrum Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil
$16.99/25.4 oz, or $0.66/ounce
Origin: Spain

This one divided the panel. I found it the most interesting of the bunch, with assertive herbal and spice notes lacking in the other entries. In the pasta, the oil stood up to and balanced the garlic. I rated it number one. One other taster concurred. She found it "yummy, full-flavored" on its own, "earthy and rich" in the pasta. Other tasters disagreed - -vigorously. "Very bitter, tastes like gasoline," roared one. Two others agreed about the bitterness. Another found it "too acidic" with bread, but "nutty" with pasta.

Zoe Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil
$17.99/23.5 oz, or $0.76/ounce
Origin: Spain

I liked this one; the other tasters, not so much. I thought it delivered a smooth and buttery flavor, with a hint of bitter tannin. One taster found it acceptable with bread ("spicy on the back of the mouth, good first taste"), but deplorable on pasta ("so bitter and oily"). Another taster's impression went from "grassy" to "fishy" in the progression from bread to pasta. "Too light, with bitter overtones," concluded another.

Bionaturae Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil
$12.50/17 oz, $0.73/ounce
Origin: "Made in Italy" and "100% Italian"

This one did well, placing second. It fared particularly well on pasta. I found it muted but delicious on bread and balanced and correct on the pasta. Its biggest champion declared "dainty ... lightly spicy" (bread) and "very olive-y ... rich and earthy" (pasta). Others generally found it disagreeable with the bread but much improved on pasta.

The bottom line: In my kitchen, I divide olive oils into two categories: "everyday," which I use for low-heat sautés and strong-flavored dressings; and "finishing," which I use only to drizzle over dishes just before eating. I would happily use any of these as everyday oils; I will probably give the Spectrum and Bionaturae oils a turn as finishers. The overall favorite, though, was Whole Foods' rock-solid and aptly named 365 Everyday. And at about half the per-ounce price of the other oils, it's quite a bargain.

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In November 2006, Michelle Conlin began a year-long experiment in extreme sustainability, resolving to burn no fossil fuels, produce no trash, and eat only food grown within 250 miles of her Greenwich Village home. She gave up nearly all shopping and learned to use cloth diapers for her 2-year-old daughter. She took up bicycling and rode a scooter to work. Describing her earlier self as “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” and a “take-out junkie,” she gave up coffee (with some lapses) and to-go food. Eventually she gave up electricity at home, relying on candles in her 9th-floor apartment and lots of stair climbing.

Michelle, Isabella, and Colin, still smiling.Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

Conlin, a 42-year-old reporter at Business Week, had no blog, book deal, or film project to send her on this journey of sacrifice and self-denial. What she had was a husband.

By fortune or misfortune, Conlin is married to Colin Beavan, the self-described No Impact Man. He cooked up the No Impact Man stunt as fodder for a book of the same name, out Sept. 1. He keeps a No Impact Man blog. And a film crew recorded his year for No Impact Man the movie, also released next month.

Beavan, 45, says he undertook the project to learn if his own lifestyle could become part of a solution to the world’s environmental crises. In writing about his motivation, he says he was afraid of becoming “that brand of liberal who whines about the world but doesn’t actually do anything about it.”

“If I were still a student, I’d probably march against my adult self,” he quips.

Hence, the bathtub full of laundry and the winter dinners of local cabbage. Also, because of the deforestation crisis, no toilet paper.

While Beavan gets all the attention and the superhero nickname, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, Isabella, are dragged along for the un-motorized ride. That’s a good thing for the film, because Conlin emerges as the most vivid character for the simple reason that she struggles to make such drastic changes in her life.

Beavan, despite his claims that he was a do-nothing liberal, seems like he was just waiting for a reason to build a kitchen compost bin, mix up natural cleaning supplies, start buying groceries at the Union Square farmers market, etc, etc. The movie shows him reflecting on and defending the project, it shows him visibly losing weight over the year, but you don’t really see him struggle.

Conlin is more sympathetic because she misses coffee and tires of eating local root vegetables. She thinks, understandably, that a year is a long time to go without buying new clothes. While No Impact Husband devotes much of his day to cooking, cleaning, and making the experiment work, she keeps her day job. The filmmakers play up Conlin’s “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” characterization, but it’s still clear this is difficult for her.

The movie opens with Beavan backstage at The Colbert Report, practicing different ways of explaining his shtick. This is telling, as a lot of the movie is about the couple explaining the project. A New York Times profile about them serves as a plot development, because they’re shocked at how strongly and negatively readers react to their project.

“I didn’t quite get why people hated us,” says Conlin. She visits Eating Liberally blogger Kerry Trueman, who wrote a scathing post about No Impact Man before softening her view of the enterprise.

“This really touches a nerve for people,” Trueman says. “Aside from making people feel guilty and defensive about their consumer habits, people are very traumatized if you suggest that they should make do without something.”

Others weren’t angry but dismissive, leading Beavan to complain about the Times profile headline, “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”

Beavan holds Isabella at the Union Square Greenmarket. Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

“What if we called it the year I lost 20 pounds without going to the gym once?” he says. “Or the year we didn’t watch TV and became much better parents as a result? Or if we called it the year we ate locally and seasonally and it ended up reversing my wife’s pre-diabetic condition?”

But if the project is meant to get people talking—and Beavan says it is—it succeeded. Colbert, Good Morning America, and a slew of other media called to get his story. Sony/Columbia bought the right to rework the story as a drama that could, reportedly, include Will Smith. (Weird, I know.)

At some point toward the end of his project Beavan makes the discovery that he isn’t alone in working toward sustainability. He visits a project to reintroduce oysters in the Hudson River and an industrial cleanup project in the Bronx and says, “There is this network of people who have been working on this stuff forever.”

It shouldn’t have taken a year-long experiment to figure that out, but Beavan understands that the publicity gods reward stunts like No Impact Year. To my knowledge, the Bronx cleanup people haven’t been invited on Good Morning America.

Beavan undertook the project expecting that it would launch a more politically engaged stage in his career. (He has a Ph.D. in electronic engineering and wrote previous books about the history of forensics and D-Day.) After learning that 12,000 diesel trucks a day pass through the Bronx neighborhood he visited, he reports, “The diesel particulates in the air are causing asthma in kids, causing brain damage in kids … I’m not talking about the polar bears, I’m not talking about people in faraway island communities who are going to be hurt when the ocean levels rise. I’m talking about people who are already feeling the effects of our over-consumptive society.”

I hope his work keeps moving in this direction. In explaining why he flipped off his apartment’s circuit breakers earlier in the film, he says, “I can’t change the way that electricity is delivered to my house.” I wanted to tell him that a lot of engineers, activists, and citizens are working hard because of their conviction that—together--they can change where electricity comes from.

He seems to sense this when he installs a rooftop solar panel and says, “For the first time I’ve realized that it’s not about using as little as I can possibly use, but finding a way to get what I need in a sustainable way.”

It might be an artificial revelation at the end of a patently artificial “experiment.” Then again, even Thoreau’s shack at Walden Pond was a stunt, with a book deal always in mind. Walden proved both deeply irritating and useful to those who were unsettled by it. No Impact Man (the movie) inhabits that tradition well.

One more note: It’s a thoroughly fun movie to watch, with great music. Watching Beavan reading Gawker comments about himself gives a sense of how hard it can be to dramatize a story about not doing things. But filmmakers Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein make the most of the Manhattan setting, using traffic jams, overflowing trash cans, and belching exhaust pipes as foils to Beavan and Conlin’s clean living. They got into the no-impact spirit, shooting from a bicycle rickshaw while filming the couple on their bikes.

Find out when the movie is coming to your city, and watch the trailer:

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Photo: ceegee-ceegeeAdvocates of Seattle's Referendum 1, a proposal for a disposable-bag fee that was soundly defeated in Tuesday's primary election, may have lost a battle. But Brady Montz, chair of the local Sierra Club chapter and leader of the effort to pass the referendum, feels confident that the war against plastic bags is going well.

"We've never had a vote before where 42 percent* of people decided, ‘I want to pay for my plastic bags,'" he said. "How well did the first votes on gay marriage work? How well did the first votes on drug legalization work? These things, they build."

The American Chemistry Council dropped big bucks to fight the referendum--$1.4 million in total, compared to just $80,000 raised by the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups and volunteers who worked to pass the referendum. The ACC and plastic-bag manufacturers got a lot of traction with their arguments that the tax was unnecessary and would hurt low-income people, though of course their real motivation was to protect their own bottom lines. Montz said the ACC's paid signature-gatherers misled some pro-fee voters into signing a petition to put the fee on the ballot by implying that there wouldn't be a bag fee if there wasn't a vote. But the fee, originally an ordinance passed by the city council and signed into law by Mayor Greg Nickels, would have automatically taken effect at the beginning of 2009 if it weren't for the ACC's efforts.

Montz said he sees the ACC's aggressive fight against the bag fee as an example of how "the industrial political complex has perfected this strategy of doing deceptive astroturf campaigns." Without the resources to make massive television and radio ad buys, he said, efforts like the Seattle Green Bag Campaign face a huge uphill battle. In this summer of "death panels" and forged letters to members of Congress, progressive groups across the country are searching for new ways to overcome the profit-protection machine. "What we've got to do is figure out how to use what we've got, which is people and the truth," said Montz.

Voters are starting to dig for the real dirt beneath the astroturf, according to Montz. After the corporate campaign against it, many Seattleites who didn't like the bag fee don't like the ACC either, and that could affect similar fights in the future. "When cities can be punished by companies because we dare to make a law restricting one of their products, if people just understand that, that right there is a huge win," Montz said. "[Voters] now know the ACC spends money to overturn laws. So next time is not going to be so easy for them."

The ACC's involvement also raised awareness of the issue and turned it into a hot topic, getting Seattleites to at least think and talk about plastic, even if they aren't ready to bag it yet. "People now in Seattle know about the North Pacific [trash] gyre," Montz said. "If you just focus on [the fact that] this particular fee lost, OK, well, that's bad, but on the issue of how do we change how people behave, how do we make people think about their choices, that we've won."

Montz said the pro–bag fee camp plans to continue to dialogue with Seattle voters and gauge what the next step in the war against plastic should be. In the meantime, environmentalists have a lot to focus on in November's election, with Sierra Club activist Mike McGinn a potential frontrunner in the mayoral race, and fellow Sierra cohort Mike O'Brien leading his city-council race. While Montz said he doesn't think the bag fee will be a big issue in the mayoral race, he doesn't expect it to fall out of the public consciousness. "After this election is over, these bags are not going away," he said. "I'm sure the conversation is going to continue."

For now, Montz and all the other volunteers at the Seattle Green Bag Campaign have reason to get excited about being at the forefront of a growing debate over plastic's role in our world. Even though Seattleites can still get their plastic bags for free, they might think twice before they do.

"At the party [on election] night there were so many happy volunteers, getting drunk and happy," Montz said. "Because if you look at where we are now compared to where we were a year or two ago, it's amazing."

*UPDATE, 26 Aug 2009: As more ballots have been counted, the percentage of "yes" votes has gone up. The latest results have 47 percent voting in favor of Ref. 1 and 53 percent voting against.

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Image: Tom Twigg/GristIn the end, elections always come down to numbers. In the case of Seattle's Aug. 18 primary -- a vote that would decide whether the city would adopt a 20-cent fee for paper and plastic bags at local stores -- the most important number turned out to be not the 20 cents nor the number of votes against, but the amount of money spent on the anti-fee campaign by plastic industry lobbyists.

That number is $1.4 million ... or about 7 million disposable bags at two dimes a piece. Enough, apparently, to defeat the measure by a hefty margin with more than half of the (all mail-in) ballots counted.

In comparison, the pro-bag camp raised just $80,000, and they knew they faced a tough fight, said Heather Trim of People for Puget Sound and the Green Bag Campaign.

Still, Trim is happy with the amount of media attention the issue garnered in the run-up to the vote and says it has inspired more people to bring their own bags. "We've had a huge surge of awareness," she said. "This is only going to help."

For more on the BYOBag debate, see our rundown of disposable-bag restrictions around the world and our list of alternatives from fanny packs to lunch tins.

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Our new neighborhood fresh food market.What I find most striking about my mother-in-law's memories of the neighborhood where I live, and where she spent her childhood in the 1940s, is how many businesses our little residential section of town once boasted. Back then, there was a grocery store, hardware store, barber shop, two drugstores, a tailor, and several corner stores.

Those businesses all disappeared in the following decades, as the streetcar lines were dismantled, families acquired cars, and shopping migrated out to supermarkets and, later, malls and big-box stores. At the low point, my neighborhood hosted little more than a lone convenience store, great for snacks and beer, but not much else.

Recently that began to change: first a restaurant opened and then a tea shop. And then, in what many of my neighbors greeted as nothing short of a gift from heaven, a small fresh food market opened. Stop by at 6 in the evening and you'll find a row of bicycles out front and the store's narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options.

This little store is one of hundreds of new neighborhood businesses that have opened in the last few years in what might be both the beginnings of a revival of small retail and one of the more important strategies we have for countering global warming.

So far, the public debate about cars and climate change has been dominated by fuel economy. But driving has been growing at such a rapid pace -- total miles driven in the U.S. rose 60 percent between 1987 and 2007 -- that even a big advance in fuel economy is likely to be wiped out by ever more miles on the road.

According to calculations by Steve Winkelman of the Center for Clean Air Policy, even if we achieve a major improvement in fuel economy (new vehicles averaging 55 mpg), cut the carbon content of fuel by 15 percent, and slow the growth rate for driving significantly, by 2030 greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation will be only slightly below 1990 levels.

That's nowhere near the 60-80 percent reductions we need by mid-century to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Perhaps electric cars will come online fast enough to close the gap, but we would do well to hedge our bets by also finding ways to make daily life not require quite so much driving.

This is where local stores come in. Academics who study travel behavior say that the presence of neighborhood businesses is a major factor in how much we drive. Dozens of studies have found that people who live near small stores walk more for errands and, when they do drive, their trips are shorter. And that's not all: a more surprising research finding is that small retailers influence how likely people are to take public transit to work.

One study, led by Susan Handy, an expert on travel behavior at the University of California-Davis, examined eight neighborhoods and found that how often people walked for errands closely tracked both the number and proximity of stores. In the neighborhood with the most businesses, where homes were on average only one-fifth of a mile from the nearest store, 87 percent of residents regularly ran errands on foot, averaging 6.3 shopping trips on foot per month. In the neighborhood where the nearest store was an average of three-fifths of a mile away, only one-third of residents reported walking to a store in the previous month and averaged only 1.4 errands on foot per month.

Another study by Handy found that residents of an Austin, Texas, neighborhood that has numerous small stores within a half-mile radius made 20 percent of their food shopping trips on foot and logged 42 percent fewer miles driving to supermarkets than residents of two Austin suburbs that lacked neighborhood stores.

The potential impact of these findings is quite significant. Shopping accounts for 1 in 5 trips we take and has been the fastest growing category of driving by far. In the late 1970s, the average household drove 1,200 miles a year for shopping. That figure has skyrocketed to about 3,600 miles today. What changed? Stores got a lot bigger. Between 1982 and 2002, more than 100,000 small retailers disappeared. The big-box stores that replaced them were many times larger, far fewer in number, and thus served larger geographic areas.

Reversing the super-sizing of retail and bringing back neighborhood stores would not only cut the miles we chalk up running errands. It could also prompt more public transit use. A study of 3,200 households in King County, Wash. (the Seattle area), found that the choice to commute by transit was strongly influenced by the number of retail stores near home and work (probably because people could opt for the bus and still run a few errands on the way home). Overall, the study found, residents of the most walkable neighborhoods logged 26 percent fewer miles than those in the most auto-oriented.

Critics have argued that these studies merely reveal people's preferences: those who like to walk choose neighborhoods where they can walk. But recent research has controlled for this "self-selection" bias -- by, for example, tracking people as they relocate -- and found that preferences matter but so too does the built environment. Those who favor driving walk more and drive less if they move to areas where there are places to walk to.

But the self-selection debate may be moot anyway. Demand for mixed-use neighborhoods is growing rapidly and may have already outstripped supply. In a new report, CEOs for Cities analyzed sales data for 90,000 houses and found that, in 13 of 15 markets, those in neighborhoods with higher Walk Scores have held value better than those in areas lacking destinations within walking distance.

These shifting preferences have the potential to remake the American landscape, but only if our public-policy priorities change too. Right now, everything from federal transportation spending to state economic-development incentives and local land-use policies heavily favor driving over transit, big-box stores over neighborhood businesses, and sprawl over infill.

Reversing these policies will be no small task. But bringing small businesses into the debate could improve the odds in two key ways. For one, having more stores within walking distance is the tangible, enticing upside of planning concepts that otherwise seem abstract, if not downright unappealing, like "density" and "street connectivity."

Engaging independent business owners could also provide a powerful counterweight to big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is now waging an all-out offensive to ensure that, when Congress undertakes its once-every-six-years renewal of federal transportation spending, the new program heavily favors highway expansion.

On the other side of the debate is Transportation for America, a coalition of groups favoring more investment in transit and smarter land-use planning. The coalition recently gained a new member: the American Independent Business Alliance, an eight-year-old national network that represents about 15,000 independent businesses (and on whose board I serve).

"It's no coincidence that you rarely find local retailers in the big shopping centers that develop along highways," explained the group's outreach director, Jeff Milchen. "What we hear from many independent business owners is they compete more successfully integrated into neighborhoods, where their personal service and small scale are assets."

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American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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