eating and drinking

Like many of us, writer Colin Beavan was frustrated by the slow political response to the threat of climate change. (Can that pace still be referred to as “glacial”?) Unlike the rest of us, he decided to take matters into his own hands by becoming No Impact Man. No Impact Family, actually: “For one year, my wife, my 2-year-old daughter, my dog and I, while living in the middle of New York City, are attempting to live without making any net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets. . . .” Not even caffeine. The experiment began in November, 2006, and you can find out how it went on Beavan’s No Impact Man blog. Or see the movie, which got a standing ovation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Either way, you’ll be entertained and learn a lot — not just about genuinely effective ways to reduce our carbon footprint, but about the ripple effect that one person’s radical act can set into motion.

We heard about GoodGuide.com from Daniel Goleman, the author of Ecological Intelligence, when he was a guest on Bill Moyers Journal. This consumer website rates over 70,000 “safe, healthy and green” products (food, personal care, household chemicals, and toys) on a ten-point scale. Ratings are broken down according to the social, environmental, and health impacts of the product. You can see how Beech-Nut Butternut Squash, Ecover Floor Soap and Surf's-up Beach Barbie stack up against the competition, and easily access the methodology and the sources on which the ratings are based. The site also makes it easy to compare prices and find stores by zip code, and has a “news and recalls” section.

GoodGuide originated as a UC Berkeley research project, when Dara O’Rourke was smearing sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju for the umpteenth time and wondered (for the first time), “What’s really in this stuff?” An Associate Professor of Environmental and Labor Policy at Berkeley, O’Rourke did his homework and was dismayed to discover that the sunscreen contained a toxic ingredient. Realizing how little consumers know about the products on their shelves, he created a team of scientists, technologists and industry professionals to remedy the information gap. This resulting web resource gives us, in Goleman’s words, “radical transparency”: the actual costs of many of the bottles and boxes we choose between every day.