Review of No Impact Week

So was my 'No Impact Week' a success?  For me it was.  I only found out that it was happening the day before it started and signed up because I thought it would be a good way to focus on a more sustainable way of life for the new year.  In that respect it was successful.

However, I wasn't able to prepare for it and I didn't do everything I was supposed to do.  Having started trying to live more sustainably six years ago I know that extreme measures don't work for me.

I like a comfortable life and I don't want to have to make more effort than necessary, but I believe that my comfort should not come at the expense of someone else's discomfort.

To me a sustainable life is one that works for individual people as well as for the environment and so step by step I want to try to make my life less exploitative of other people, less greedy for the Earth's resources and to make less and less negative impact on the environment - I don't think it is possible for any human to have lived and made no impact on the environment and even less so now.

Waiting for the Communion service at Greenbelt, 2004

The Year of Living Generously (now simply 'Generous') was dreamt up at Greenbelt in 2004, and I was pleased to join up for it that Autumn, being among the first 100 to take part.  The idea was to take a new step towards a more 'generous' life each month.  Indeed, I started my first blog with a view to to record my choice of monthly actions on it. Some things were easy to do, but I found others much harder or even impossible, and these were all small steps in comparison to what 'No Impact Week' (NIW) asks of us.

With my desire to live more sustainably revitalised, in part thanks to the supportive comments people have made here, I shall now see how sustainable I can make my life in 2011.  I shall also try to post about my progress or otherwise in one of each of the areas covered by NIW over the coming weeks.