Welcome to my blog. In case you're not sure how you wound up here, let me sum up what this page is about: living with as little environmental impact as possible, for one month.
Here's how it happened. Two years ago, I watched the doco No Impact Man at the Sydney Film Festival and felt uplifted and inspired by Colin Beavan’s life-changing journey – with his fantastically fun wife Michelle and their daughter Isabella – to live, in New York City, with no net environmental impact for a year. They phased it in, focusing on a different issue each month: waste, transport, food, consumerism, electricity…
Here's how it happened. Two years ago, I watched the doco No Impact Man at the Sydney Film Festival and felt uplifted and inspired by Colin Beavan’s life-changing journey – with his fantastically fun wife Michelle and their daughter Isabella – to live, in New York City, with no net environmental impact for a year. They phased it in, focusing on a different issue each month: waste, transport, food, consumerism, electricity…
I bought Colin’s book - No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process - last year, and was inspired anew, by how much fun they had, and how much they connected with each other, as a family, with their wider community, and with the world around us all, through simple but powerful acts such as giving away their television and buying their food at the local growers’ markets
My curiosity pricked up its ears. What would it be like to go No Impact, and write about the process, as Colin did, but here in Australia, in Sydney, and for just a month. That's do-able, right? I’m a writer too, see, and have a yearning to live more simply and closer to the Earth. And much as I admire Colin’s dedication, he has a wife who brings home the free-range bacon. Because I need to earn my living, I thought I'd start small.
There are things I already do, of course, and there will be other people who do more than I do, but we each have to start where we are. For me it’s here: I compost food scraps and have a worm farm, grow veggies (that die), recycle as if my life depended on it (which, really, it does), ride my bike more than I drive my car (though I do have a car, to get to the beach to surf), hardly ever shop, use the “good” light bulbs, don’t eat meat, buy recycled (or wheat pulp) office paper, don’t commute (I work from home). But I know I can do more.
The first hurdle though, is that I am not just a writer but a travel writer. Black mark number one and although I do offset all my flights, international and domestic, someone recently pointed out to me that offsetting doesn’t stop the pollution going into the atmosphere in the first place. So although I do try to minimise my impact when I travel – and mainly write about hiking and kayaking and other nature-based, low-impact experiences, some conservation trips too – the fact that I travel caused another problem. I was never at home long enough to do anything meaningful in my community. So I pressed “Pause” on the travel and stayed home. And here I am.
