Colin Beavan felt guilty at talking tough on the environment, but found his actions wanting. To live up to his professed values, he started an experiment where he and his family would dramatically reduce their carbon footprint. The results were a mixture of mundane work, disillusionment, enlightenment and unexpected joys.
No Impact Man is like one of those novelty books where the author sets himself up some sort of challenge for a period of time and then turns the experience into a book. Colin Beavan, an author of history books, but with no real background in environmentalism, had long experienced pangs of guilt at his urban New York lifestyle. Worse still, he felt like a hypocrite of sorts. Ever ready to angrily criticise or get on his high horse about environmental issues, when Beavan looked at his own personal impact on the environment, he found he was all talk and no action.
To try and get his values in sync with his real life, he set himself and his family the task of dramatically reducing their impact on the environment, hence the book’s title. This was done in stages, ultimately culminating in turning off the electricity entirely in his family’s one bedroom New York unit. The electricity-less lifestyle didn’t last entirely. When his daughter vomited all over her bedding, Beavan couldn’t face having to hand wash the sheets again in the bath and opted to use his apartment building’s washing machines. Reading by candle light could be fun, but washing clothes in the bath was closer to absolute drudgery.
The good things Beavan discovered while reducing his carbon footprint included losing weight by walking up the stairs to his apartment, enjoying buying fresh food and meeting people at his local farmer’s market, more time spent talking to his family and a feeling of being a useful member of his community while doing volunteer work.
There is, however, a threshold. There is a stage where reducing your environmental impact becomes just too difficult, impractical and onerous. Beavan heroically tried to generate solar power from his apartment using a portable solar panel, but through rainy winter days could simply not get enough energy to even power a modest laptop. With the loss of his refrigerator, trips to the farmer’s market had to be stepped up to three times a week to stop food from spoiling.
What’s the take-away after this one year experiment? Most importantly, going without calls on a person’s creativity and ingenuity. Beavan calls it re-inventing your life. What seems impossible at first blush soon turns out, with a bit of tweaking, to be achievable. New habits soon get formed and entrenched. There is more labour involved – more cooking, shopping, cleaning, walking up stairs and cycling. But this type of work turns out to be not so bad at all. Beavan finds relaxation in kneading bread, talking to the farmers at the markets and riding his daughter, Isabella, around town on his bike made specially from 100 per cent recycled materials.
It also becomes clear to Beavan that as a society everything works against the urban inner city dweller who wants to reduce his or her carbon impact. Everything is organised around disposable bags and energy derived from fossil fuels. Try taking in your own jars or muslin bags to shops to save wastage, and funny looks can be expected. Or attempt to run your own apartment on renewable energy. You don’t have a chance. There simply are no options but fossil fuels.
It took me a while to get into this book. Beavan would describe boring aspects from his day to day life, interspersed with factoids about the environment that he’d picked up from surfing Google or books he’d read. But his earnestness grew on me. There’s a faint melancholy in Beavan’s character that emerges as the book comes to its close. No Impact Man shows a family making a genuine attempt to see what it would be like to live with much less. The results are mixed. There’s good and bad. But it seems clear that the bad could be greatly improved with the effort made to find creative solutions. That, and a concerted effort as a society to make improvements collectively.
Beavan himself frequently turns to the world’s great religions, like Judaism and Buddhism, for answers on how to live. In many ways, he’s a quester for the most ethical way to live. No Impact Man turns out to be no quickie, gimmicky environmental book, but a spur to trying different things in your life, no matter how unusual it may seem to others, in order to re-create your own life into a happier, more ethical existence.
No Impact Man: Saving the Planet One Family at a Time, by Colin Beavan. Published by Piatkus Books. ISBN: 9780749953201
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