10 Ways to Change Your Life

(Not Just Your Light Bulbs)

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by Colin Beavan

posted Nov 11, 2009

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EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

All you have to do is stop eating beef. Worldwide, beef production contributes more to climate change than the entire transportation sector. The carbon footprint of the average meat eater is about 1.5 tons of CO2 larger than that of a vegetarian. Cutting beef out of your diet will reduce your CO2 emissions by 2,400 pounds annually.

DRINK FROM THE TAP

You can save money and your environment by giving up bottled water. The production of plastic water bottles together with the privatization of our drinking water is an environmental and social catastrophe. Bottled water costs more per gallon than gasoline. The average American consumes 30 gallons of bottled water annually. Giving up one bottle of imported water means using up one less liter of fossil fuel and emitting 1.2 pounds less of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

OBSERVE AN ECO-SABBATH

For one day or afternoon or even one hour a week, don’t buy anything, don’t use any machines, don’t switch on anything electric, don’t cook, don’t answer your phone, and, in general, don’t use any resources. In other words, for this regular period, give yourself and the planet a break. Every hour per week that you live no impact cuts your carbon emissions by 0.6 percent annually. Commit to four hours per week, that’s 2.4 percent; do it for a whole day each week to cut your impact by 14.4 percent a year.

TITHE A FIXED PERCENTAGE OF YOUR INCOME

Tithe a fixed percentage of your income to non-profits of your choice. If an average U.S. family contributes 1 percent ($502.33) of its annual income ($50,233) to an environmental non-profit, they could offset 40.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Many of our public health and welfare services are tied to consumer spending which, in turn, depends upon planetary resources. If you want to help, don’t go shopping. Just help.

BUILD A COMMUNITY

Have dinners with friends. Play charades. Sing together. Enjoying each other costs the planet much less than enjoying its resources.

GET THERE UNDER YOUR OWN STEAM

Get around by bike or by foot a certain number of days a month. Not only does this mean using less fossil fuel and creating less greenhouse gases, it means you’ll get exercise and we’ll all breathe fewer fumes. If you can stay off the road just two days a week, you’ll reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 1,590 pounds per year.

COMMIT TO NOT WASTING

Wasting resources costs the planet and your wallet. Let your clothes hang-dry instead of using the dryer. Take half the trips but stay twice as long. Repair instead of rebuy. The list goes on. In the summer, for every degree above 72°F you set your thermostat, you save 120 pounds of CO2 emissions per year, and if you wash your clothes with cold water you can cut your laundry energy use by up to 90 percent.

TAKE YOUR PRINCIPLES TO WORK

We must act as though we care about the world at work as much as we do at home. Company CEOs or product designers have the power to make a gigantic difference through their business, and so do the rest of us. In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for more than 40 percent of electrical energy use, a huge cause of greenhouse gas production. Using motion and occupancy sensors can cut this use by 10 percent.

DONATE A DAY'S TV TIME TO ECO-SERVICE

Take one day off from TV—the average American watches four and a half hours of TV a day—and try voluntary eco-service instead. Those four and a half hours a day watching TV add up to 825 pounds of carbon dioxide each year.

BELIEVE WITH ALL YOUR HEART THAT HOW YOU LIVE YOUR LIFE MAKES A DIFFERENCE

We are all interconnected. Every step toward living a conscious life provides support to everyone else who is trying to do the same thing—whether you’re aware of it or not. We are the masters of our destinies.

Colin Beavan adapted this piece for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Colin Beavan is founder of the No Impact Project, noimpactproject.org. His book No Impact Man was published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Interested?

Christmas with No Presents? Colin Beavan recounts what the holiday season was like for him and his family when they committed to living with no impact for one year.
The No Impact Experiment for You: Colin Beavan invites you to try what he did, just for one week, and promises to connect you with others doing the same.

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. Beavan, C. (2009, November 06). 10 Ways to Change Your Life. Retrieved July 29, 2010, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/climate-action/10-ways-to-change-your-life. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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Reader Comments

no impact, the way to go, for corporations

Posted by Albert Kaufman at Nov 17, 2009 02:44 PM

I agree with everything you write, and also think that it's even more important for corporations to follow this ethic, as well. I'd love to see a version of this for Wal-Mart and other large retailers - no impact for a day - shutting the store on Sundays, for instance :) Operating for one hour less each day...

Thanks!

Albert Kaufman
Portland, Oregon
<http://albertideation.com>

10 ways to live a better life

Posted by Dakota at Nov 17, 2009 10:46 PM

I think the article was very good except for the first suggestion. My family raises beef cattle. It is not only our source of income but also our passoin. I understand that the beef industry contributes to alot of waste but it also supplies a huge amount of families with a source of income. This lifestyle that you have deterred people from has taught me responsibility, compassion, hard work and so much more. As far as I am concerned beef is an important part of our diet, do I believe there is room for improvement when it comes to transportation and production yes but I was very disappointed when the magazine YES which I greatly enjoy would put in such a one-sided statement! Despite what is being portrayed over and over many beef producers care very deeply for their animals, at my house the animals get fed before we do! I have seen our lifestyle slashed over and over again by people who have their hearts in the right place but still can not open their eyes. I truly expected more the producers of this magazine.

Sustainble Ranching

Posted by Lilja Otto at Dec 31, 2009 11:39 AM

Dear Dakota, thank you for sharing your thoughts. The nature of a short list of 10 tips is to simplify the matter, and I believe that Colin Beavan is right in the case of a majority of his audience: those who buy mass-produced meat, and consume a lot of it. However, YES! Magazine has also highlighted sustainable approaches to raising cattle. You can read more on this here: http://www.yesmagazine.org/[…]-can-beef-be-earth-friendly

i am sure a lot of families are supported by coal mining too!

Posted by lance at Jan 12, 2010 09:47 AM

As a child,cars were my absolute passion, as i grew and matured however, i learned what was really happening as a result of this passion, i managed to shift, and now have found PERMACULTURE as my new passion, i certailnly hope you can too:)

Beef production

Posted by Nancy Eckel at Nov 20, 2009 12:23 PM

Dakota commented on her family's ethical production of beef. I agree with Dakota, that YES Magazine may be asking us to throw out the baby with the bathwater when they suggest we stop eating beef. How about being ethical consumers instead?

I am shocked by the idea, which YES takes as a given, that "going shopping" is a favorite leisure-time activity! THAT is an idea whose time-to-dump has come!

Beef Production

Posted by Marie at Dec 11, 2009 04:40 PM

I agree with Nancy and Dakota, that we need to be more conscious when we shop as well as ethical. In fact we should become more conscious of everything we spend our money on...Who we are supporting? Especially the large items like our mortgages. Do we ask who will hold our note? For too long we have been sold things on how much we can afford to pay per month. We need to shift our thinking to where is our money actually going. Look at your credit cards as well.

We purchase our beef from local ranchers, as well as many of our other products from our local co-op and growers markets...and we bank with the local credit union. Even if it costs a little more, it pays in the long run to support our local markets. It makes our local economy stronger, which in turns helps our community.

Eating vegetables

Posted by M Schultz at Dec 14, 2009 12:07 AM

The YES staff and the Mr. Beavan need to read THE VEGETARIAN MYTH by Lierre Keith. Lierre Blows the myth in three different ways, from a political point of view from a moral point of view and from a Nutritional point of view. This is a groundbreaking book written by a former Vegan as she recounts her struggle to unlearn 20 years of her lifestyle to reclaim her health and expose the progressive clichés of the virtues of vegetarianism. YES should interview the author.

Note: I wish there was a way to e-mail the editor. I hope they review these comments

Lierre Keith's book

Posted by g.murphy at Dec 16, 2009 12:52 PM

wow -- I took Schultz's advice and just cut and paste the title and author name into Google, ended up on her blog and read the opening pages of chapter one posted there -- no matter how you feel about veganism or whatever you may choose to eat, this woman packs a punch that will make you take a step back and ask just who's fooling who in this save-the-planet game. Mostly, maybe, it's ourselves fooling ourselves and maybe that's why progress is so terribly slow. I'm with Schultz, I do hope the editors here take a long hard look at what Ms Keith has brought to the table and let us all know if they have a learn-ed rebuttal.

eating veg

Posted by andy woods at Dec 31, 2009 11:26 AM

Having perused the "vegetarian myth" it is apparent that the author is blurring some critical boundaries between the desire for animals not to be harmed and what ecologists call trophic (food) webs. Of course, life is one long journey of interdependency - we all (humans and more-than-humans) all eat something that was previously alive. Shifting to eating only plant-based matter isn't changing that equation in any fundamental way. But ... it does make a strong political statement about the economic means of producing meat-based matter as per the factory farming approach.
The author blurs concern for animal welfare and the welfare of living organisms (including, for example, soy and lentils, the staple in most veg-heads' diet - certainly my own) with the critical inter-dependency of trophic webs. The salient part to take away from this though is something that the author doesn't seem to identify, or if she does and I missed, then I'd suggest needs to be made more explicit is this:
While we are all existentially in-debt, what the Mayans knew and what we have neglected in our mad rush to economic growth & progress is the substantive relationship between the hunter/ farmer and its prey/ produce. The ancients and those who persist in non-western economic transactions premised this relationship of debt on an explicit acknowledgement of indebtedness, which was expressed predominantly as a profound respect for that which sustains one when eaten. From this perspective, there is no greater sacrifice than that given by the prey which falls and dies to feed the hunter. This isn't some misty New Age nonsense with surging sounds of a string glissando: the antelope doesn't want to be eaten by the lion (and one would hope that Nature is merciful in limiting the fallen antelope's pain at the bite and subsequent dismemberment, but who can really say?). However, the lion takes no more than is needed, the carcass will feed a great many more than simply the lion and her family, and the antelope herd survive to graze for further days without overpopulating a given terrain and grazing it beyond return.

So the point is this: we as modern, "developed" and "progressed" humans have foregone our attitude of respect, of taking only what we need as an act of honour and respect, and instead blanket trawl our way through the oceans, the cattle farm, and the produce growing farmland. There is scant little in the way of respect for those we harvest and then eat, and thus, in such ways, we attempt to side-step our existential ecological indebtedness. In short, it doesn't matter what one eats: just do so by remembering its place (and one's own!) in the food web, and that without that which is being eaten, none of us could persist. This is the origin of our debt, and the author is correct in pointing out that we have attempted to side-step honouring that debt. It doesn't mean that one should be vegetarian or a carnivore - that's really a very insubstantial point and has less value than a sound-byte - but it does, as I would understand this, mean that we need to relearn how to cultivate that sense of indebtedness, which through a realisation of such is more likely to foster a greater sense of respect and humility amongst we proud and arrogant animals which consider it our birthright to eat anything and everything as if it were put here for us and that we are the Crown of Creation.

one woman out of thousands?

Posted by megan at Feb 04, 2010 08:36 PM

perhaps you need to re examine your stateich have the correct information. one woman becomes ill and we need to hear her story? give me a break, how about the thousands of people and species we have lost due to meat consumption....??? yeah, i dont think the yes editor is going to rush right out to interview this woman,,,, progressive cliches...whatever... go eat whatever you like and eventually it will catch up with you, physically, spiritually... and ecologically...

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