Small Environment-Saving Actions are Sustainable

The New School in New York City is among a handful of forums I focus on for ideas, and I love their little video journal on saving the environment.  What they're doing resonates with the algorithm I am formulating, with the things I am doing personally, and broadly with The Core Algorithm.

Years ago, for example, I biked to my office in Chicago.  To and from home, it was a 100+ mile trek:  Not only did I save loads of money and spare the environment, but also I put myself through fabulous exercise.  Since returning home at the end of 2011, I've worked at my home office, so there is no commute for moi.  But for my meetings downtown, I walked to and from the Metra station, instead of taking the taxi.  Again it was about save money, spare environment, and get exercise.

My wife and daughter, like millions of people in the US and elsewhere, live off bottled water.  In the US, our tap is duly filtered for safe drinking.  Interestingly, the bottled water they buy is so-called purified, which probably means filtered.  I've put a Britta filter on our tap, and encouraged them to refill from it, but to no avail.  I keep thinking that the bottled water industry is such a successful racket.  But so be it:  This is simply the way it is for them.  As for myself, I use the water fountain from our refrigerator, which is basically tap.

I definitely work at reduce | reuse | recycle.  To my family's credit, we are good at recycling plastic, paper and cans, and we use paper plates instead of styrofoam plates.  Also, we use bath and kitchen towels more than once, before we throw them in the laundry basket.

This resonates perfectly with my think big, act small motto. 

As an exercise in one training session I did, in which I related this motto, I had two pairs of students go from one point to another in the room.  One pair I instructed to leap as far forward as they could together, and the other pair I simply asked to walk comfortably.  After just two back-and-forth, the first pair was already spent.  The second pair could've walked indefinitely.

Small actions, when directed toward our purpose and destination, are more effective than leaping steps or strenuous effort precisely because they are sustainable.  And isn't that what The New School is after.