No Impact Man

Stopping the junk mail tree killers

It’s two months since I began the no impact man stage concerned with stopping trash, but my recycling bin is still filling up with paper I never bought, never used, and never wanted. The junk mail pours in.

Five years ago, I bought my step-mother Beth some flower bulbs. The company has sent me two catalogs a year ever since. The product pushers discovered that Isabella was born but not that she has since aged two years, so we get piles of completely useless baby wear catalogs.

Do I ever look at these bundles of the coagulated flesh of dead trees? Uh, no. Do you?

According to the Native Forest Network guide to stopping junk mail, 100 million trees are ground up each year to make junk mail. Um, didn’t somebody mention that tearing down trees is contributing to global warming?

All in the interests of our economy—right?—except that 44 percent of junk mail gets trashed without ever being opened. Together with other types of paper and paperboard waste, the junk mail adds up to 40% of the solid waste in our landfills.

So here’s what I’m doing to stop the tree killers and keep their trash out of my bin:

1. All the junk mail, including that with plastic windows in the envelopes, goes in the recycling bin. For a guide to recycling in your community, go here.

2. I got my name off the credit card and insurance offer lists by going to the credit bureaus’ centralized service for opting out.

3. I spent a dollar—swear to God, that’s the price—to sign onto the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service, which reportedly will reduce my junk mail by 75%.

4. I began calling the 800 number on the catalogs and asking them to take me off their lists

It’s too soon to tell how well all this works, but I’ll report in a couple of months. Meanwhile, a couple of websites tell you how to make your own recycled paper from junk mail, but well, I’m too busy baking bread from local wheat and washing Isabella’s locally-grown, organic cotton diapers. God save me, please, from myself and this crazy project.

Day one and the whole thing is a big mistake

My journal entry from Nov 20, 2006, the first day of No Impact, when learning to make no trash was top of the agenda:

The first shock is that you can’t buy any individually packed items, walk into Bagel Bob’s and get an everything with tofu to go wrapped in tinfoil, or even get a coffee in a throwaway paper cup from News Bar on University Place. Unless you’re willing to toss something in the garbage within about five minutes of getting it, without ever having really used it, you pretty much can’t get anything.

This is a sudden—though completely obvious—realization. It’s none too welcome, at least not when I’ve worked up a good hunger carrying Isabella to Peggy the babysitter’s. Isn't the whole point of living in New York the fact that you can get exactly what you want exactly when you want it? Not for me. Not now.

Day one and I already have this feeling of self-denial and not being allowed to have things. All of a sudden the whole world is available to everyone else except for me. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

Meanwhile, Michelle has come up with her latest get healthy scheme. This time it is juicing. She has found this place on Third Avenue called Juiceteria. Her friend told her about it. The idea is to go on some sort of juice fast. Of course, this comes after the ultralow calorie diet idea done in conjunction with the very expensive nutritionist who required that Michelle buy these spaceman meals from him in little paper envelopes that you added water too.

Juiceteria is, of course, all about disposable cups and what not. Michelle says she went in and talked to the lady behind the counter about bringing her own bottles or cups. By way of explanation, Michelle told her that she didn’t like plastic. Why is it okay not to like plastic but not okay not to like disposable things? Anyway, Michelle is all happy because the woman was “very supportive” and said of course Michelle could bring her own bottles or cups.

I don’t have the heart to tell Michelle that this is back to the same old buy something to fix it, consumerist, way of thinking that we are trying to get away from. I don’t have the heart to tell her that most of the fruit like guava or whatever it is called is transported from far away by airplane at a huge cost to the environment. Our life is like this huge juggernaut heading in a consume everything direction and somehow I’m supposed to persuade my family and me to change it.

Plus I get confused. If everybody on the whole planet decided to commit suicide, which in a way, they have, would it be the right thing to do to not join in? What’s so great about trying to be right if it keeps you separate? It seems like there is something precious that has to do with holding yourself above or not just joining in and being part of. I don’t know. I’m suddenly realizing that this whole project could be pretty damn hard.

But now I’m contracted to write a book about it. What have I done?

 

What you need to know

The blog is just launching this balmy February day of 2007—yippee!—but our no impact experiment has been going on for two and half months. So, just a little recap and update to let you know what you need to know to understand what is going on and where we’re at.

No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

In mathematical terms, in case you are an engineer or just a geek who likes math, we are trying to achieve an equilibrium that looks something like this:

Negative Impact + Positive Impact = Zero.

No net impact. Get it?

We’re taking a year to do this thing (starting the end of November, 2006) and it’s working in stages. Stage one was figuring out how to live without making garbage: no disposable products, no packaging, etc. Stage two was figuring out how to cause the least environmental impact with our food choices. Stage three is figuring out how to reduce our consumption to only what is necessary and how to do that sustainably. The whole thing gets harder and harder as we add each stage.

What will the future stages be? Who knows? I am no eco-expert. I am just a liberal schlub who got sick of not putting my money where my mouth was. In a way, the whole project is a protest against my highly-principled, lowly-actioned former self. I’m fumbling through, trying to do my best and doing the research as I go along. This blog is my attempt to tell you how it’s going.

That's pretty much everything you need to know to understand this blog. But for more details on the design of No Impact Man, the book, the movie and all of that, see the posts on the left hand side under "What's It's All About."

The No Impact Experiment

The way I see it, waiting for the senators and the CEOs to change the way we treat the world is taking too long. Polar bears are already drowning because the polar ice is melting. In fact, research shows it’s worse: they are so hungry, they are actually starting to eat each other.

I can’t stand my so-called liberal self sitting around not doing anything about it anymore. The question is: what would it be like if I took the situation (or at least my tiny part of it) into my own hands? I’m finding out.

For one year, my wife, my 2-year-old daughter, my dog and I, while living in the middle of New York City, are attempting to live without making any net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets…

What would it be like to try to live a no impact lifestyle? Is it possible? Could it catch on? Is living this way more fun or less fun? More satisfying or less satisfying? Harder or easier? Is it worthwhile or senseless? Are we all doomed or is there hope? These are the questions at the heart of this whole crazy-assed endeavor.

You might be thinking, Colin Beavan is cracked--no one can cause literally NO impact on the planet, right? Well, what I’m talking about is no NET impact. If you don’t get it, or you want to know more about how we’re proceeding? Check out the The Year-Long Plan.

The Year-Long Plan

You hear of one study saying that the energy used washing ceramic coffee cups is as damaging to the environment as the use of disposable plastic cups that won’t biodegrade for thousands of years. You hear of another that says destroying trees to make paper towels is no worse than using hot water and toxic detergent to wash cloth rags.

Everything, if you listen to conventional wisdom, is as bad as everything else. The spin merchants have got us believing that to try to make any difference is futile. You might as well give up. Throw away another plastic coffee cup. Don’t bother with the hybrid car. Go on, guzzle.

Meanwhile, I mention to a very liberal friend, a guy who used to be spokesman for a Democratic senator, that I’m trying to figure out how to live no impact here in New York. “Forget it. It’s impossible,” he says. It’s one thing to try it in the countryside, maybe in the woods, like Henry David Thoreau, or on a farm, where you grow your own food. But in New York City? No way.

The fact is that if city dwellers can’t learn to live without reducing their ecological footprint then we’re in deep trouble because most of the world’s population now lives in cities. Saving the world can’t be left to the country bumpkins. It’s an urban problem.

True, a city like New York does have the environmental advantage of economy of scale—people share transport, buildings and resources—but cities are also responsible for the production and concentration of pollutants in massive amounts. Thanks to car and truck exhaust alone, which makes for 90 percent of Manhattan’s air pollution, the island’s residents face the highest risk in the country of developing cancer from chemicals in the air.

Add to that the annual 9 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from New York’s electricity use, our 8 billion pounds of garbage and half a trillion gallons of sewage and you have a supersized serving of world-killing poisons. Energy efficient city though New York might be, we remain an ecological nightmare, which is why—in addition to the feeling that we just have to do something—my wife Michelle and I began talking about going off the grid for a year, unplugging from the matrix.

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO₂, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Meanwhile, I’ll research and answer many of the niggling questions that have had us and everyone we know throwing our hands in the air when trying to do less harm to the environment. Do you do more harm by living in the country or the city? Is it better to drive a thousand miles or take an airplane? Is it really true that the tiniest moped, because of its lack of a catalytic converter, causes more pollution than an SUV? Could we all, by video conferencing, virtual collaboration and tele-commuting, cut down our travel enough to cause a worthwhile reduction in carbon emissions? What, exactly, comprises sufficient individual effort that, if taken by each of us, would save the planet?

During the course of the year, Michelle, Isabella and I will traverse the range of lifestyles from making a limited number of concessions to the environment to becoming eco-extremists. This means that when we’re done, we can reenter the world of normal consumerdom equipped to decide which parts of our no impact lifestyle we’re willing to keep and which ones we’re not. In other words, in addition to the no impact year, we’ll have figured out our way forward.

 

The No Impact Philosophy

None of the practical questions about no impact living would be relevant if my wife Michelle, my daughter Isabella, our dog Frankie and I intended to approach the challenge by becoming ascetics. Until now, we have been your typical convenience-addicted, New   York City take-out slaves. Asceticism is not a realistic way forward, not for my family and not for the world.

Saving this planet depends on finding a middle path that is neither unconsciously consumerist nor self-consciously anti-materialist. The idea for No Impact Man is not to be anorexic but to be abundant, not to be eco-efficient but “eco-effective,” in the words of the environmental scientists William McDonough and Michael Braungart.

In their book Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart discuss the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, who have harvested wood for sale from their forested land for many generations. In 1870, the Menominee inventoried 1.3 billion standing board feet of timber on their 235,000 acres. Since then, they have harvested nearly twice that amount—2.25 billion board feet. Considering the “clear-cutting” methods of the corporate lumber merchants you hear about, which completely strips land of its trees, you’d expect that the Menominee would have barely a single tree left, not to mention any forest wildlife. In fact, they have 1.7 billion board feet left, more than they had in 1870, and a thriving forest ecosystem.

That’s because the Menominee tend to cut only the weaker trees, leaving behind the strong mother trees and enough of the upper canopy for the arboreal animals to continue to inhabit. They have figured out what the forest can productively offer them instead of considering only what they want to take from it.

This is largely how every other species on earth lives—in harmony with the environment. Lions neither starve themselves nor gorge to the point of wiping out the gazelle population. Instead, they promote the health of the gazelle herd by culling its weaker members and preventing herd overgrowth which in turn prevents overgrazing of the savannah. Animal waste does not poison the ground but fertilizes the soil so that it can produce more vegetation for the animals to eat. Bees feed on the pollen of flowers but far from damaging them they provide the crucial service of pollinating them.

This is what I mean by “eco-effective.” The philosophy is based not only on restricting consumption but on changing what is consumed so that it actually helps or at least does not hinder the world. If bees had the idea that they wanted to save the planet, they would not go on crash diets and start eating less pollen. They would continue to live their lives abundantly, because their lives are already eco-effective.

That is the philosophy Michelle and I hope to realize during our no impact experiment. The emphasis will ultimately not be on tightening our belts so that our consumption does not poison the earth—although there will certainly be an element of that—but on trying to change our consumption patterns so that our abundance helps or at least does not harm the planet in the first place. We will, like the Menominee, figure out what our world can productively offer us rather than considering only what we want.

The Personal Impact of No Impact

My wife Michelle and I decided, before jumping in at the deep end of this year-long project, to try no impact living as an experiment for a week. No garbage. No greenhouse gasses. No toxins. No water pollution. No air pollution. No electricity. No produce shipped from distant lands. No impact. Or so we naively hoped.

We started one Thursday night at 10:00 PM in the middle of the August, 2006 heat wave. Our sweat-soaked tempers frayed immediately. We argued about who would take our 18-month-old daughter, Isabella, to the babysitter since both our schedules now had to accommodate a lot of walking. We had tense discussions about who would be in charge of picking up Isabella’s milk from the only New York dairy farmer who uses reusable glass bottles. We both pretended not to notice the mounting pile of dirty dishes resulting from the dishwasher being out of bounds.

But then Michelle surprised herself by loving her walk to and from the office. It gave her back something she missed since becoming a mom: time alone. With no TV, we found ourselves playing with Isabella more, reading more, talking more and—hurray!—having more, well, you know. Having perennially struggled with finding time for the gym to wrestle off our middle-aged midriffs, a couple of pounds immediately dropped off us both. Who needs a gym when you’re riding bikes and refusing lifts in elevators and walking everywhere?

In that one week, we discovered that, without transportation to rush us around and junk-food media to steal our time, there is a different, calmer life to be had right here in Manhattan. No TV to oppress you with news of Britney’s failure as a mother. No concerns that charging another pair of Diesel jeans might be declined by Amex. No worrying that the bad cooking oil from the Chinese takeout is clogging your coronary artery. We developed a consciousness of our actions that that felt suspiciously akin to the living in the moment that the Dalai Lama keeps coming to New York to tell us about.

We got the glimpse of a life with an entirely different rhythm. We began to think that, by depriving us of our Madison Avenue addictions, the no impact experiment might actually make us happier. It was only a seven-day experiment, but it convinced us that living no impact can be done, it can be done pleasantly, and that we could conceivably end up happier rather than sadder--which is why, God help us, we're in it for a year.

About My Family and Me

Some background: I am 43 years old. Michelle is 39. Both of us are writers (you can read a little synopsis of my professional life here). We’ve been married four years, and the 2-year-old Isabella is our only child. Our four-year-old dog, Frankie, who was saved from a kill shelter in North   Carolina when she was a tiny puppy, is a mix of some sort of hound and border collie.

Ten legs and a tail, I like to call our family. Michelle agitates constantly to make it twelve legs. Only this morning, Michelle made up a baby song for Isabella that went something like “my last egg is dying but my husband doesn’t care…” Unfortunately for me, Isabella took to the tune and danced around the living room in the style of an Oompa Loompa.

We live, the four of us, in a 750-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment, which is one of the reasons I resist the extra set of legs. Members of Michelle's family refer to it alternatively as "the hovel" or "the grotto." Michelle calls it "the Nanoplex." Whatever you call it, it does at least benefit from being in a lower Fifth Avenue building with doormen and elevator operators and a marble-floored lobby.

When No Impact Man began, this high-class hovel, as far as I could tell, contained only one luxury item whose use—manufacture and delivery not withstanding—did not result in clouds of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. That item is a Room and Board ultra-plush, encased coil, king-sized bed which is too large for the bedroom. It causes a lot of bruised shins, but we need it to accommodate the family get-togethers we have every morning, roughhousing with Frankie, making the sheets itchy with breakfast crumbs and teaching Isabella to say “you’re crazy” and “Elmo sucks.”

Some of our best times are had in that bed—no nudges or winks intended. A baby crib two feet away doesn’t make for many nudges. Or winks. Perhaps it is for lack of “natural” entertainment that we used to have so many gadgets in the apartment to keep ourselves occupied. And all of these other luxury items, besides the bed, were carbon-producing.

They included a 52-inch television, which was admittedly too big for the living room, the TiVo box, which luckily was quite small, a computer or two, the cable box, two aforementioned air-conditioners, and an old dishwasher that makes so much noise that it scares Frankie into hiding in the bathtub. Household appliances, by the way, from microwave ovens to televisions, account for the production of 15 percent of each consumer’s greenhouse gas emission in the United States.

Come to think, a nationwide increase in “natural” entertainment might help save the world by reducing the demand for greenhouse-gas-producing distractions. At least, anyway, I plan to continue pitching “natural” entertainment to Michelle to replace the luxuries during throughout our no-impact year.

There's Going to Be a Book!

Okay, it’s true that we will profit from this experiment in a small way—much smaller than I’d like, believe me—because I’ve been contracted to write a book on our no impact experiences by the publishers Farrar, Straus, Giroux (and yeah, I’m totally psyched to be an FSG author).

By profession I’m a writer and by temperament a megalomaniac (though I like to think a nice one). Until now, I’ve happily satisfied my little family’s need for cash (nearly…ok, not even nearly) and my weak ego’s need for recognition by writing history books.

Okay, it’s true that we will profit from this experiment in a small way—much smaller than I’d like, believe me—because I’ve been contracted to write a book on our no impact experiences by the publishers Farrar, Straus, Giroux (and yeah, I’m totally psyched to be an FSG author).

By profession I’m a writer and by temperament a megalomaniac (though I like to think a nice one). Until now, I’ve happily satisfied my little family’s need for cash (nearly…ok, not even nearly) and my weak ego’s need for recognition by writing history books.

There's Going to be a Movie!

My wife Michelle’s best high school friend—actually best friend, period—is this hot chick named Laura Gabbert (sorry, she already has a hot husband and two hot kids). Laura is an independent film maker whose credits include the documentary Sunset Story, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and the Sundance Competition feature Getting to Know You. She is currently at work on the film adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oats novel Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon.

Anyway, shortly after I sold No Impact Man idea as a book to Farrar, Straus, Giroux, Michelle had dinner with Laura and her also hot friends Eden Wurmfeld (producer of Kissing Jessica Stein, Puccini for Beginners, and co-producer with Laura on Sunset Story) and Justin Schein (co-owner of Shadow Box Films). While they ate tapas and woopped it up, I was suffering incredible knee pain on a week long Zen meditation retreat.

Michelle got to telling the three of them about No Impact Man--the book--and Laura, Eden and Justin decided it should also be a documentary. Well, crippled and sensitive from too much meditation, I hated the idea at first, but the idea grew on me. And now, when I’m not in the Writer’s Room writing, or trying to figure out how to get from A to B without using mechanized transport, or shopping for food that was grown within 250 miles, I’m being followed around by a film crew, and so is Michelle.

Clips from the footage will soon be available on this blog. The movie, like the book, will come out in 2009, and meanwhile, we’re looking for investors in No Impact Man, the movie. Want to invest in our ecological thriller? Contact me here.