So, What Did You Think of the No Impact Man?

Can it already be almost a week since Colin Beavan was here talking at URI? What do you think of his talk? Did he meet or exceed your expectations?

Just as a reminder, URI continues its efforts to raise awareness about Sustainability Issues. This week, there is a screening of The End of Suburbia followed by a Q&A with Prof. Norbert Mundorf, PhD (Communication Studies), Prof. Richard Sheridan, PhD (Landscape Architecture) on Wednesday, September 28 at 6:30pm in the CBLS Building, Room 010. On Thursday, September 29, come to the Quad between 10 and 2pm to check out the Paul Masse Chevrolet Volt demo, meet with Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA), and try the URI Transportation Center Driving Simulator. There will be a RIPTA Bus pass give-away at both the film screening and the Quad. (For the entire Sustainability Program go to http://www.uri.edu/sustainability/noimpact.

And next week, as part of Diversity Week's program, the Common Reading Program will be hosting a panel discussion entitled "How Making Small Changes Can Have Big Results" in the Multicultural Center, Computer Classroom (Rm. 005) with two of our Common Reading Program bloggers: Jenn Brandt, Women’s Studies Program, and Marsha Garcia, Campus Planning & Design. To register for this and other Diversity Week panels go to: http://www.uri.edu/mcc/DiversityWeek/2011/index.html.

Hope to see you at one or all of these events! (MORE)

Common Reading Program and Six-Week Sustainability Program of Events!

Well, Colin Beavan will be here next week--Thursday, September 22 at 3:30pm and 7pm in Edwards Hall. For those of you who haven't seen the film or want to see it again in a group, it will be shown on Wednesday, September 21 at 6:30pm in Swan Hall Auditorium. URI 101 instructor Stephen Marchand will lead the Q&A after the screening. Hope to see some of you there.

In the meantime, check out the complete calendar of events at http://www.uri.edu/sustainability/noimpact (MORE)

Meet: Marsha Garcia, URI Sustainability Officer

Marsha Garcia is working to send a message to University of Rhode Island students, faculty and staff to be mindful of how their lifestyle affects the health of the planet and to take steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

“To me, it’s a common sense approach to living,” said Garcia, the University’s first sustainability officer, who was hired in May after serving in the position for a year on an interim basis. “We all need to be more mindful of how we live on a daily basis and how that impacts the environment.”

She said the concept of sustainability is difficult to explain, especially to those for whom environmental awareness and concern aren’t on their radar. But it’s a vital lesson to ensure future prosperity.

Issues of sustainability permeate the entire URI campus. Garcia works closely with faculty to infuse sustainability into the curriculum, helps campus planners design green buildings, advocates for more local produce in student dining halls, and creates student leadership programs to train students to be peer advisors about green living.

The job of sustainability officer at URI was created in part to manage the University’s responsibilities under the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a document signed by former URI President Robert L. Carothers in 2007, which committed the University to dramatically reduce its contribution to global climate change. Garcia also coordinates the URI President’s Council for Sustainability, a group of faculty, staff and students appointed by President David Dooley who provide strategic guidance on campus sustainability initiatives.

“The University does a great deal to promote sustainability, but it has been somewhat disjointed and it hasn’t come across in a unified way,” Garcia said. “I’ll be working to coordinate our programs related to sustainability and launch new programs.”

While URI has an international reputation for its research on environmental topics, from oceanography and climate change to natural resources and environmental engineering, Garcia said that many of those concepts haven’t been translated into programs and actions that engage the entire campus community.

“It’s a matter of changing the culture on campus,” said Garcia. “A lot of other universities have focused on sustainability longer than we have, so we have some catching up to do. And given the small size of Rhode Island, changing the culture at URI almost involves changing the mindset of the entire state.”

One helpful step in that direction was the University’s choice of No Impact Man as its required reading book for all incoming freshmen. The author of the book, about one man’s yearlong effort to consume as few resources as possible, will speak on campus in September, and Garcia is working with a group of students to develop a series of programs around his visit that she hopes will engage the campus community to embrace the basic principles of sustainability.

Despite the challenge of changing the campus culture, Garcia is enthusiastic about tackling difficult issues, the biggest of which is transportation.

“Transportation affects everyone, it’s the most obvious issue, and fixing it would make the biggest impression and have the biggest impact,” she said. “The public transportation system in Rhode Island is not used very well, and it’s certainly not ingrained in the lifestyle of our students and faculty.”

Few people take the bus or carpool to URI, despite increasing options and incentives to do so. As a result, traffic on Route 138 and through campus at peak hours is gridlocked and complaints about parking are common. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, especially single-occupancy vehicles, are especially high and very difficult to mitigate, according to a study by URI Energy Fellows.

Garcia grew up in Pennsylvania but lived in Washington, D.C., while working for the National Wildlife Federation, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the American Institute of Architects before moving to Rhode Island. She said the first thing she did when she got to Providence was figure out how to use public transportation to get to URI, which she uses at least three times per week.

While she said that she is still working to establish her office with “a team of people who are actively and persistently working on sustainability issues on campus,” her main goal is to reduce the University’s carbon footprint.

“I dream of URI reaching carbon neutrality, which seems like an impossible feat,” she admits. “But it’s important that we move in that direction and get everyone to believe that, together, we can get this campus to be as close to zero as possible.”

Media Contact: Todd McLeish, 401-874-7892
URI Department of Communications & Marketing photo by Michael Salerno Photography. (MORE)

Meet: Betty J. Cotter, Instructor Writing to Inform and Explain

My name is Betty J. Cotter, and I will be teaching at least one section of Writing to Inform and Explain this fall. I’m a newspaper editor and writer of fiction and nonfiction. I am also a Swamp Yankee, which means I approach No Impact Man having had a childhood devoid of most modern conveniences considered “necessities” today. No dishwasher, no clothes dryer, and no shower could be found in our old farmhouse. We washed our dishes by hand, hung clothes outside to dry, and took tub baths. We wore hand-me-down clothes, played with hand-me-down toys and, if the television broke, well, it might be months before it was replaced. We also generated hardly any trash – my father burned paper in the trash barrel in the backyard, and went to the dump only occasionally; he often came back with something, since “dump picking” was allowed back then (one of his big finds was a full set of stainless steel flatware discarded by the Charlestown Navy base; for years, we used knives and forks inscribed with the monogram “USN”). Our amusements were simple – we spent every Sunday having dinner with my grandmother, a funny and generous woman who loaded up her table with delicious roasts and homemade pies, and after dinner we might play Parcheesi with the grownups, help pick vegetables in the garden or run around outside. My parents might fret about money, or our health, but I rarely heard them complain about “not having enough time.”

The thing that struck me about No Impact Man was the relationship between time and our indiscriminate use of resources. My childhood self would not recognize most of the “conveniences” that we think are necessities today: cell phones, iPods, and laptop computers; cleaning products such as Febreze and the Swiffer; foods prepared in a microwave oven. Meanwhile, it requires many more hours of work to pay for these things. When both Mom and Dad come home at 7 p.m., who has time to make dinner? The simple tasks of caring for a house, including making a bed, washing dishes, and cooking, have become dreaded chores, and the more time-consuming tasks – vacuuming, dusting, washing floors – are so onerous that many people have reduced their standards of cleanliness just to avoid doing them. “This rush we’re in – I don’t think people like it,” Beavan writes (p. 137), and that might be the biggest understatement in this book. No, we don’t like it, but we’re so conditioned to think that technology – instant Internet access, Facebook on our phones, e-books, premium cable channels – will make us happy that we are working longer and longer hours to afford it, thus destroying what really makes us happy, which is time with friends and family.

Imagine for a moment that “less” might be “more,” that giving up technology might make you happier. What modern convenience would you be willing to do without? (MORE)

Meet URI Sophomore Chip Redihan, Philosophy and Political Science Major

Hello URI Class of 2015! My name is Chip Redihan, I am a rising sophomore who majors in Philosophy and Political Science and minors in Leadership Studies. I served as a member of the 2011 summer orientation staff and this fall I will be a URI 101 Mentor. In just a few short weeks, you will all embark on the next step of your life journey—college. Those first few weeks of the semester will be a whirlwind of opportunity, where you will begin to decide what you will do and who you will be over the next four years. URI 101 will be a class focused on helping with the transition that you will all face from high school to college. Additionally, this class will serve as a forum for discussion about this summer’s required reading, No Impact Man. One year ago, I was in the same position as all of you; I was an anxious first year student eager to begin collegiate life. A year later, I have a better handle on the workings of this institution, which allows me to further utilize the counseling and academic resources that are available to all students.
After reading No Impact Man I reflected upon both the sustainability of our world’s resources and the role that I played in wasting what precious reserves remain. Simply put, we cannot continue our current lifestyle without long-term repercussions for future generations. As a society, we use too many resources and do not replenish the ones we use. During the past week, I recorded how often I was given plastic bags that I did not need—to carry the Gatorade I bought at the gas station for the two-minute walk to my house, to hold the Subway sandwich that I ate in the Subway restaurant, to hold the novelty sticker I purchased at the airport. In all three scenarios, I was unnecessarily given a plastic bag (bags are major contributors to pollution in our world—see the You Tube mockumentary “The Majestic Plastic Bag” in this down thread) and in turn, I refused it. I was not inconvenienced by this decision, but cut my usage of a major pollution contributor dramatically in doing so. If we all adopted this lifestyle and only used what we needed and nothing more, while agreeing to give back, we would be able to reverse the terrible effects of pollution on our world.
While choosing not to use these plastic bags was just a small part of my day, I believe that this mentality could be applied to all aspects of our lives that include resource use and thereby drastically cut down the resources we do use. We must think to the monk, Dae Soen Sa Nim, who was referenced by Colin Beavan in No Impact Man. (Nim was the monk who had the idea of getting all of the world’s religious leaders into a hot tub to discuss and settle their differences). While Nim was unsuccessful in his attempt to bring all spiritual leaders together, his idea of taking action as opposed to simply identifying the problem is something that we all can try to apply in any scale to our daily lives. So URI Class of 2015 I ask: What active changes can you make in your lives in order to pursue a more eco-friendly world?
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Meet Jenn Brandt: Instructor and Advisor, Women's Studies Program

Welcome class of 2015! I hope you have been enjoying your summer and your copy of No Impact Man as much as I have. The book has inspired me to take a serious look at my own life and consider how my choices impact not only me personally, but also those around me as well as the planet. Awareness is always the first step in making change, and I am proud that URI chose this book for the Common Reading program. Not only has it raised our awareness as individuals, but it also demonstrates the University’s commitment to opening dialogues and creating spaces for important conversations on sustainability, responsible consumerism, and activism.

While the title of the book is No Impact Man, the aspect of it that I most enjoyed was reading about how Colin’s family—as a unit—worked together to make a difference. At first I was a bit skeptical of Colin’s discussion of his wife Michelle, but as the narrative continued, it became clear that this was a team effort, and that it was only through each other’s support that they were able to live this experiment. Making change can be incredibly hard, and I appreciated Colin’s honesty in detailing the struggles that they faced along with the benefits.

This fall I will be teaching the large lecture section of Women’s Studies 150: Introduction to Women’s Studies. In this class we spend a good deal of time discussing the problems we face in the world related to gender and unequal access to resources. We also focus on how activism relates to feminism in the desired goal to bring about positive social and political change. Not only will students in the course read a selection from No Impact Man, but all sections of WMS 150 have an action project that requires students to choose a topic related to gender and justice, devise a project plan, and to actually take action through the implementation of their project. While no one’s project has been as extreme as Colin Beavan’s (at least not yet!), students are always amazed at how much they are able to accomplish and how good it feels to get out and make a difference.

I would love to see you all in WMS 150 at some point during your college career, but even if not, I hope you are all inspired to use your education over the next four years here at URI to make a positive difference in the lives of each other. Best of luck this upcoming year!
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Meet Sara MacSorley

My name is Sara MacSorley. I graduated from URI with an undergraduate degree in Marine Biology and minor in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies in 2008. I currently work for the Rhode Island NSF Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research – an initiative to advance marine life science research and education in the state. I’m also pursuing a Masters in Business Administration.

When I picked up No Impact Man this summer, three days later I was done. I couldn’t put it down, even amongst my workload and homework assignments.
It struck me that Colin Beavan was not a scientist, not incredibly educated about global climate change, and not preachy about saving the planet. He was your average guy wanting to do an experiment toward something he believed was important. I’m happy to see that his blog led to a book and his story has been able to reach so many people. A story that, to me, was truly inspirational.

I’m not planning on cutting off my electric or eating root vegetables all winter, but I do plan on continuing to find ways that I can decrease my impact on the environment. The idea of doing positive things to impact the environment to counteract the negative was fantastic.

I thought that I was already doing pretty good at being “environmentally friendly.” We recycle glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper at my house. We cook at home more often that not instead of going out to eat. I pack a lunch for work most of the time using reusable containers and lunch bag. I’m also transitioning to doing more of my classwork electronically, for example instead of printing out all the articles and presentations for class, I’m downloading and taking notes on them with my iPad.

No Impact Man made me want to do more. I went out a few days after I finished the book to buy handkerchiefs and cloth napkins. I’m trying to make it to the local farmer’s market more often to buy my produce, and if I get it from a local grocery store I’m trying to buy domestic products. Its another reason for me to by the local Brickley’s ice cream instead of Ben & Jerry’s! We also had a television break at our house a few months ago. Instead of going out to buy a fancy new one, we opted to get an old one from my partner’s uncle that he wasn’t using anymore.

Without watching as many movies, it gives my partner and I more time to spend together and to do the things we enjoy on our own, like reading. That leads to the reason I liked “No Impact Man” most – the idea of simplicity. It’s so easy to get caught up in everything going on around us that we forget the things that are really important to us. It amazes me how we can be so “connected” with our mobile devices, social networking, etc. while sometimes being disconnected from the people we care about the most.

I think most people know at least something they could do to help the environment whether it be recycling or walking to work. I think it is even more important to realize the benefits of personal balance and simplicity. Reducing our environmental impact and making positive changes will not only benefit our world but our lives.
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Professor Andrée Rathemacher

Hi class of 2015 freshmen! My name is Andrée Rathemacher, and I'm a professor in the Library, where I coordinate the purchase of the library's books, magazines, and online resources. I decided to read Beavan's book because I like the idea of a common reading that can create a shared conversation on campus.

I thought this book was a good choice for the common reading, but I was a little apprehensive before reading it. I was afraid that the author was concerned only with his own small actions as an individual — through changing his consumer choices. While I was interested in the ways he managed to reduce his impact, I think the most useful part of the book for me was his conclusion that saving the planet is not about limiting ourselves as individuals, but joining together collectively to advocate for better ways to meet our needs and to create options (for transportation, energy, food) that don't yet exist.

It would be great if some of you reading this book are inspired to form a group that works to reduce waste on campus, or to assist dining services in sourcing more local food, for example.

Meanwhile, I'm going to "recycle" my copy of No Impact Man by passing it on to my next-door neighbor.

Best wishes in your first year at URI!
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Meet Associate Professor Jim Kinnie, URI Library Humanities Reference

Traffic on the blog has been quiet this last week. Everyone must be enjoying the warm beach weather, but do take time to read this post from Jim Kinnie:

In the 1960s activists in the United States used “consciousness-raising” sessions to advocate for the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Today that term has broader connotations and certainly could apply to No Impact Man. Based on the comments below I can see that the book is certainly raising consciousness across campus about environmental and sustainability issues.

Don’t stop there! If Colin Beavan has piqued your curiosity about reducing the amount of trash you produce or the amount of electricity you use, or even about making a difference as an engaged citizen, be sure to check out the bibliography at uri.libguides.com/noimpact (the link is under Helpful Links on this page for easy access!). This library guide links you to many of the resources cited in Beavan’s book that are available online and on the shelves of the URI Libraries and the other academic libraries of the HELIN Consortium.

As a librarian at the Carothers Library and a member of the Common Reading Selection Committee, I hope to help you discover a world of information you can tap to feed your curiosity about what you’ve been reading. The library is committed to promoting life-long learning among our patrons and this resource list can lead you in a direction that will help shape your future.

If you have a favorite Web site, video or book about environmental protection, sustainable living or other themes explored in No Impact Man, send the title along to me at jkinnie@uri.edu for inclusion in the bibliography. Let me know if you would like me to include your name with the source. And if you would like to find out more about how the library can help you with your education, inside and outside of the classroom, visit our Library Resources page at uri.libguides.com or come visit us at one of our campus branches. (MORE)

The Majestic Plastic Bag

Here's a bit of Monday afternoon irony narrated by Jeremy Irons, the uber-villain in Die Hard: With a Vengeance. Serious has its place, but sometimes humor works best to get a message out. What do you think? How does Colin Beavan use humor to balance the enormity of what he and his family are attempting to accomplish?

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Meet Mary Brennan

As the Recycling and Solid Waste Coordinator, my responsibilities here on campus are to manage trash and recycling. Although we recycled about 33% of the waste we generated here on campus last year, we can do better.

No Impact Man highlights some of the same key messages that I try to get across to students. Yes, recycling is important, but it is more important is to reduce the amount of trash you generate. Yes, it’s fantastic to put that plastic water bottle into the recycling bin, but what’s even better is to not use a plastic bottle and drink out of a reusable container. Even if you drop that bottle in the recycling bin, it still took energy to produce it, and the bottles are "downcycled" into fleece jackets, park benches or toothbrush handles, all of which eventually ends up in the trash. This means that new plastic is required to make every bottle and every bit of plastic used to make that bottle—even if you end up wearing it or brushing your teeth with it for a while—ends up in the landfill in Johnston RI.

The top of the pyramid is Reduce. That means, not consuming what we don't need to. It is followed by Reuse, which means once we have it, we use it as often as we can before we get another. Finally comes Recycle. Interestingly, I just learned of another “R”: Refuse. Refuse to purchase or use anything with excessive or non-reusable packaging. I like that concept. Just remember that recycling is at the very end of the list; it is a last resort. That doesn't mean that recycling isn’t a worthy cause; what it does mean is that recycling is not without environmental cost, though it has less cost than just throwing stuff away.

My message to you all: Do the planet a favor: think before you act. Refuse to buy anything you don’t need; reduce the amount of packaging you use; reuse what you can; recycle the leftovers.

If anyone has never seen a landfill, you'll get a chance this Fall. As part of a five-week Sustainability Program, Mary Brennan will lead a tour to the Johnston, RI landfill on the afternoon of Thursday, October 6, 2011. Stay tuned for more info on the tour and all the events inspired by the Common Reader, No Impact Man! In the meantime, post your comments and questions about URI's recycling practices to Mary Brennan. (MORE)

Welcome URI Class of 2015 to the Common Reading Blog for Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man!

By now, some of you have read No Impact Man and perhaps you’ve found Beavan’s take on sustainability and net zero impact shocking, thrilling, infuriating or simply unbelievable. (Can any of you imagine living in New York City in this heat without an air conditioner?) This blog is your chance to share your thoughts with your future classmates and the larger URI community. In addition to the Class of 2015, you’ll hear from URI faculty, staff, and more senior undergraduates who have read the book (and in some cases, will teach No Impact Man). This will give you the opportunity to discuss the book not only with your classmates, but also your future professors and fellow undergraduates.

At orientation, Provost Donald H. DeHayes asked you to read No Impact Man and then “select and comment on one or more aspects of the author’s “environmental lifestyle experiments” that you would be willing to make part of your daily life. How would your lifestyle change(s) impact your daily life and the URI community?”

Well, it’s time! How or will you step out of the box to make a change? What are you willing to risk as you embark on one of the biggest changes (and challenges) of your young adulthood? (MORE)