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In 2006, Colin Beavan decided he wanted to do something about climate change, U.S. oil consumption, and its military campaigns in the Middle East.  And if that’s not systemic enough, he also decided that (as a journalist) simply writing about it was not going to do any good.  Instead, in his own words, “I wanted to find a way to engage Americans  who were not typically interested in politics. For this reason, I wanted to draw people in through the power of story instead of polemic.”

So he and his family lived for a year in the middle of Manhattan in such a way as to cause as little impact as possible, which yielded surprisingly  popular blog posts, a book, and a documentary film.  The “No Impact Man” recently summarized the lessons he learned about how (and how not) to engage people in the climate crisis, a set of learnings so creative and interesting we’ve reproduced them here: Read the rest of this entry »