12 One-Year Personal Stunts We Can't Stop Talking About
5. A Year Without 'Made in China'
© Brandi Sims.
Instead of giving up shopping entirely, Sara Bongiorni took on a more focused -- but still challenging -- task: Living for a year without buying any goods made in China.
The freelance writer and her family found that this wasn't just a matter of giving up cheap clothes and plastic toys. "Our coffeemaker broke and all ordinary drip coffeemakers are made in China. So we ended up boiling water in a pan and just pouring it over filters into our coffee mugs," Bongiorni told NPR. "Our blender also broke about mid-year, and we couldn't repair it because the replacement blade was made in China, so that sat there gathering dust."
Though Bongiorni set out on her project in order to find out more about how "ordinary people are connected to the global economy," rather than as an explicitly eco-friendly effort, Treehugger writer Matthew Sparkes called her book, A Year Without "Made in China", "worth a read if you're at all interested in buying more local products."
Her takeaway message is a green one too. "Since the boycott's end, Bongiorni has chosen a middle ground," Reuters wrote. "Her family seeks alternatives but accepts Chinese products when most practical. But one habit from the boycott remains: It required her to think hard about what she buys."
6. The 100-Mile Diet
100-Mile Diet/Promo image.
Food was the focus of Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's "long journey of staying close to home."
Starting in the spring of 2005, the Vancouver-based couple spent one year eating only what came from within a hundred-mile radius of their home, an experiment they later wrote about in the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. Despite the difficulties they encountered, their "100-Mile Diet" has become a widely recognized standard for eating locally.
The pair recently hosted a Planet Green TV show, "The 100-Mile Challenge", where they recruited residents of the small town of Mission, British Columbia, to follow in their footsteps. "The main lesson for the 100-mile challenge is that it's tough to get going, it's tough to make a change in your life," MacKinnon told Planet Green. "It takes a lot of commitment at first, but then people end up getting into the good part of it, the deepening experience and then the changes in their health and changes in how they're feeling and their sense of community, all of that happens way more quickly than people expect that it will."
7. A Year of Food Life: Taking Local Eating to a New Level
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle/Promo image. Barbara Kingsolver and her husband, Steven L. Hoff, on their Virginia farm.
Celebrated author Barbara Kingsolver took the 100-mile challenge and made it more of a 100-meter one, as she and her husband and daughters decamped from Arizona to the old family farm in Virginia to attempt to eat (with a few exceptions) only food grown by themselves or someone they know.
The chronicle of that "year of food life," Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, includes scientific sidebars by Hoff, personal essays by 19-year-old Camille Kingsolver, and recipes and meal plans to supplement the main narrative, which TreeHugger reviewer Kathreen Ricketson called "intense, passionate, and well researched... Full of irony, wit, and love this book is a must read for anyone interested in growing their own food and everyone else interested in how the food they eat arrives at their table and the consequences of our indulgences for the planet."
8. The Julie/Julia Project
. Julie & Julia, the book and the movie.While cooking your way through the 536 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking may not be a specifically green (or healthy) endeavor, Julie Powell's now-famous Julie/Julia Project is full of the favorite TreeHugger theme of developing a more intimate relationship with food.
We might not all want to take that to the extreme of killing live lobsters, but like Child herself, Powell's project inspires people to get back into the kitchen and start cooking.
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