Inspiration

No Impact Project

For those of you not familiar with Colin Beavan and the experiment he and his family undertook. I urge you to watch the documentary No Impact Man. I stumbled upon it whilst on a flight from Oz back to the UK and for me, it was like a lightning bolt to the brain. Colin, his wife and their young daughter live in NYC and in stages, over the course of a year, they try to see if they can reduce the negative impact they have on the environment to as little as possible....with the ULTIMATE aim of making NO IMPACT at all. To the point that they are using only people powered transport, they are wiping the bottoms with washable wipes and eventually they even turn the power off completely in their flat. The compassion and honesty of the family stop it from feeling gimmicky and the way it's tackled in stages leaves you with a feeling of "Yeah, I can do that!".

People had been telling me there were better ways to live for a long time but this documentary was the first time I felt like what I did mattered, that it would make a difference and that I might not be able to change the world in a drastic way but I could change me.

The much cited not using toilet roll etc exposed me to certain social conditionings I didn't realise I had. While I have yet to move over to a non-disposable system, it is definitely on the cards and no longer makes me turn my nose up in disgust.

Crunchy Chicken
It was actually during subsequent research of toilet paper (tp) alternatives that I discovered the Crunchy Chicken aka Deanna Duke blog. Her entries on Cloth Wipe Challenges  gave me the hows, whys and advantages of turning away from tp. When you think about the amount of the world that doesn't use it vs. the amount that do, is it really as terrible as you might first think? The Crunchy Chicken blog really helped convince me that I was being close minded and somewhat brainwashed into thinking that tp was the only way.
Anyway, once I get closer to the conversion I'm sure there will be more to share on this delightful subject! :)

Joe The Juicer/Fat,Sick and Nearly Dead
Joe Cross is a straight talking Aussie (is there any other kind? lol) with an amazing documentary about his journey from being overweight and ill to the picture of radiant health. His secret? A re-balancing ("reboot") juice fast. Though I haven't actually done a juice fast per se, Joe's testimonial played a huge part in my impetus to assess what I was actually putting into my body and what kind of an impact it might be having.

I'm sure more inspirational voices will be added to the list over time and I will write more as and when that happens. But to start, in various guises, all three of these people are on FB and Twitter if you feel curious/inspired further.