Back Off 'No Impact Man': One Family's Yearlong Adventure Without Modern Conveniences Is Drawing Misguided Criticism
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I have a love/hate relationship with Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man. I used to hate him; now I love him. And his wife, Michelle, too.
Not in a menage a trois-y kinda way, though. I just really like this smart, funny couple who attempted, for a year, to wean themselves and their toddler, Isabella, off the fossil-fueled conveniences we all take for granted. This meant, for starters:
The No Impact Project, which Beavan conceived -- and foisted on an indulgent-though-leery Michelle and eternally cheery Isabella -- was an arbitrary, utterly quixotic endeavor. Beavan's intent was, ostensibly, to ask: "Is it possible to have a good life without wasting so much stuff?"
Oh, and not incidentally, to make some money off a book and a film that would chronicle his attempt to answer that question.
And it's a question we really need to ask: Although we make up just 5 percent of the world's population, Americans hog roughly 30 percent of the planet's resources and generate one-fourth of the world's greenhouse gases in the process.
But Beavan cooked up the whole thing to clinch a book deal chronicling his family's eco-extreme exploits. An article in the New York Times famously branded the project "The Year Without Toilet Paper," generating a bit of a media frenzy and leaving a lot of folks, myself included, with the impression that Beavan was an opportunistic schmuck.
I dismissed Beavan's endeavor as "conspicuous unconsumption." In true holier-than-Holden-Caulfield style, I called Beavan a phony, a peddler of "pseudo-sustainable schlock." I threw in a swipe at Michelle for splurging on two pairs of fancy new boots as a last hurrah before subjecting herself, head to Chloé-clad toes, to Beavan's draconian carbon-footprint binding.
Now, with the release of Beavan's film, and the book of the same name, it's deja "ew!" all over again.
Folks in the media are wasting precious space fixating on how Beavan and his family handled their waste -- the forgoing of toilet paper, the adoption of a bin of red wiggler worms to compost their kitchen scraps.
See more stories tagged with: no impact man, no impact project, colin beavan
Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org. Follow her on Twitter.
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