While decrying the devastation humanity has wreaked on the planet, in voice, most environmentalists live their lives much as the author of No Impact Man, Colin Beavan, did before he began the No Impact project: They drive cars, fly in jets, use grid electricity, go shopping and may even eat a steak from time to time. Heaven forbid.
Sure, they may keep a garden, seal their taps, swap out incandescent bulbs for longer-lasting compact fluorescents, throw a few solar panels up on the roof and drive a Prius—but, on the whole, their lifestyle is part and parcel with the general consumptive trends that are, sadly, thrashing the planet. And yet very few are as honest about this fact as Beavan, who not only admits his guilt, but tries to do something to remedy the situation.
Not content with taking any half measures, he decides to set off on a yearlong experiment in Zero Impact living, In his own words, “I wanted to find a way of doing things that sucked no new resources out of the ground. Cut no tress down. Excavated no new mountains. Polluted no new streams or rivers to make what I used”—and he wanted to do it all in the fourth largest metropolis in the world, the Big Apple, New York. And, what's more, he wanted his family to join him on the adventure.
The result of this experiment is the pragmatic tale of one man—an “everyman” as he calls himself—dragging his wife and one-year-old daughter on a rain-soaked, leg-powered, candle-lit, handmade quest to reduce their ecological footprint as much as possible, and to make up for whatever impacts they couldn't reduce by doing ecological good turns: like picking up trash along the Hudson river, volunteering to help plant trees, and lobby for political change.
If this experiment sounds extreme to you, that’s because it is. And Beavan himself would be the first person to admit it. Yet this is not the tale of some “eco-martyr” bent on doing eco-penance. As Beavan makes clear, the No Impact project is not about deprivation—it’s about removing himself from what the Positive psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill” of working to consume to work to consume, ad nausem, and living, as Thoreau or Emerson would say, more deliberately. And as he and his at-first-begrudging wife would come to find out, the simple, deliberate, no-impact life dovetails perfectly with the good life.
At the end of his experiment, Beavan is a changed man. You can even see it in the style of his writing, which begins in the tone of a practical, down-to-earth New Yorker—a man on a mission—and ends up metamorphasizing into a Thich Nhat Hanh-esque lecture on the groundlessness of being. Informative, inspiring, funny and soulful, No Impact Man is a story that anyone can appreciate and enjoy, a book that will help you on your own quest to live a happy, fulfilling life.
Note: Apparently there is also a No Impact Man documentary out there, although I haven't seen it yet. You can get nmore information about the documentary and the book from his official blog @ http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
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