Sorry for the late post on this, Earth Hour happens today at 8 pm in your local time zone! To participate, this means that you need to turn off all non-essential electrical devices in your home.

I wrote about an event similar to this in San Francisco, Lights Out SF, previously. This event is organized by the World Wildlife Fund and is sponsored by National Geographic, HP, and esurance.

To find out more about the event, check out their about page.

Last November, Jon shared some doubts about the San Francisco City Government’s decision to ban plastic bags. According to today’s NPR follow-up story on the ban, That translates into 5 million fewer plastic bags every month. Other cities, including Boston, Phoenix, and Portland (ORE), are considering following San Francisco’s example.

City planners might be interested in talking to Whole Foods about their experience. In January 2008, Whole Foods announced the intention to be “plastic bag free” by Earth Day, April 22, 2008. In my local Whole Foods, they phased out plastic bags for carrying out your groceries, although they don’t yet have many other options if you are buying fruits or vegetables.

I don’t have any empirical data, but I asked the manager of the local Whole Foods what their experience has been so far. She said she was surprised by how many people now bring in their own bags. The transition to paper only was pretty painless….It might help that Whole Foods gives customers a $0.05 cent refund per bag. While I agree with Jon’s point, I also think that behavior change is a step-by-step process. Banning plastic bags is just the first step.

Disclosure: At the time of the writing of this post, I have no financial relationships with any of the organizations mentioned.

I guess that this week is boat week, since my last post was about cargo ships and I am continuing the theme. This post is especially interesting because a prototype boat has been developed that uses wave power to propel it and it began its maiden voyage from Hawaii to Japan on March 17th.

The propulsion system was designed by Yutaka Terao, an engineering professor at Tokai University in Japan, and the ship will be captained by Ken-ichi Horie, a 69-year-old Japanese sailor. Kenichi will sail the boat 4,350 miles from Hawaii to Japan only using the power of waves. The ship is called the Suntory Mermaid II and it uses the up and down motion of the waves to provide thrust for the vessel. A diagram details how the system works after the jump.

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Roughly two-thirds of all goods purchased by U.S. consumers are shipped to the U.S. by cargo ships and each of these cargo ships runs on an inexpensive, unrefined fuel called bunker fuel. As a result, cargo ships are responsible for 16 percent of all sulfur emissions from petroleum and 14 percent of the nitrogen emissions from fossil fuels according to a report by Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, cargo ships are prone to massive oil spills as seen in many parts of the world.

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Help others realize they are ALWAYS free to choose how they respond.

Starting with this truth leads to an understanding of even greater truths and achieving deep happiness.

It’s neither nature or nurture that ultimately make people into who they are; it is their choices. Nature and nurture just happen to be some of the very powerful stimuli that exist. People ultimately choose how they will respond to their “nature”, their environment and the way they were raised. There is a space of time between every stimulus (impulse, drive, force, passion, incentives, accidents, offense, good news, bad news, etc.) and response. Some times that space of time is so short that it feels as if there was no time to make a choice, but there is always a length of time, even if it’s tenths of a second.

I have habits that are so powerful, that I don’t even think twice about the response - like the habit of eating. Maybe you can relate. When I get hungry, I have this habit of getting something to eat. It’s a powerful thought that people could overcome a strong survival impulse by choosing to starve themselves to death by ignoring the drive to survive. This power to make choices that are contrary to an impulse or drive is in all of us. I’m not advocating extremism by any means, but rather behavior that may “feel” extreme because of the extreme difficulty to behave contrary to how you feel. Perhaps the famous marshmallow experiement may shed some light:

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This quote is brought to you at the good folks at the Foundation for a Better Life. This quote is about responsibility. Enjoy!

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

- Talmud (attributed)