Back Off 'No Impact Man': One Family's Yearlong Adventure Without Modern Conveniences Is Drawing Misguided Criticism

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:

• No driving, no flying, or even relying on mass transit. They got to where they needed to go on foot, bike or scooter.
• No more elevators, either; they took the stairs to reach their ninth-floor apartment (several exceptions to these rules were made: two train rides to visit upstate farms, and an occasional elevator ride when security measures or double-digit floors in a midtown New York high-rise required it).
• No buying new stuff, except for foods produced within 250 miles of Manhattan. So, no more takeout, out-of-season produce or coffee (although Michelle fought for, and won, a concession on the coffee front). And no meat, because livestock production is such a fossil-fuel-intensive process.
• No watching TV; the family eventually went off the grid entirely, playing cards by candlelight and otherwise amusing themselves without electricity.
• No washing machine or refrigerator. Abstaining from these two appliances proved especially challenging, as No Impact Man, the film documenting Beavan's endeavor, memorably shows.

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.

This time, though, I won't be piling onto the bash Beavan bandwagon. I realized, after hearing him speak at Cooper Union's Great Hall, that I had been wrong to mock him. I came away from the Cooper Union lecture convinced that Beavan's Jimmy Stewart-style earnestness was genuine. I became a fan, a friend and a defender.

So when No Impact Man co-director Justin Schein asked if I would be willing to go on the record and explain my change of heart, I said yes. Because, with all the controversy over the effectiveness of Beavan's methods, as well as his motives, two things stand out to me: