No Impact Man

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.

We can all change the people around us by changing ourselves.

Do we work for and pay for all this convenience in order to live our lives, or do we live our lives in order to work for and pay for all this convenience?

(...) de que o objetivo do ambientalismo não tem a ver com tentar usar menos, mas antes com tentar ser mais. Não tem a ver com beneficiarmos de menos coisas, mas antes com darmos aquilo que de melhor há dentro de nós. O ambientalismo não tem a ver com o ambiente. Tem a ver com as pessoas. Tem a ver com o sonho de uma vida melhor para as pessoas.

Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.

I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people's misdeeds somehow made me virtuous.

I simply feel that now we've so utterly perfected the walkie-talkie to the point where it has become the iPhone, maybe we could turn the great minds that brought us the Nintendo Wii, to, say, getting fresh water to the one billion people on our planet who don't have it.

There is a reason why trash bags aren't made of transparent plastic.

The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food packaging makes up twenty percent of our solid waste nationwide.

I had mobilized my intellectual and persuasive resources to get someone else to change her behavior, and remained, I saw, utterly complacent about my own. It's true that I had occasionally tried to make a difference int he world, but I was coming to think my political views had too often been about changing other people like Michelle, and too seldom about changing myself. I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people's misdeeds somehow made me virtuous. I'd become, I realized, a member of that class of liberals who allowed themselves to glide by on way too few political gestures and lifestyle concessions and then spent the rest of their energy feeling superior to other people who supposedly don't do as much.