Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert, a respected New Yorker journalist who writes admirably about issues to do
with our climate catastrophe and the environment, wrote a scathing attack on my
book, No Impact Man. Sadly,
casualties on the battlefield of Kolbert’s wrath included not only me, but also
the work of James McKinnen and Alisa Smith (authors of 100 Mile Diet), Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden) and other writers who used their own experiments in
alternative lifestyles as narrative vehicles to, hopefully, propel into the
popular discourse vital cultural issues that transcend the particularities of
their experiments.
McKinnen and Smith wrote about their year of eating locally
as a means of publicizing—and very successfully—the tremendous failings of our
centralized, industrialized food system in delivering healthy food to people in
a way the planet can sustain. Thoreau, of course, attempted to use his year in
the woods to bring to our attention the diminishing adherence to any
sort of transcendent human values as we veered into unmitigated materialism in
the wake of the industrial revolution.
Kolbert dismisses these writers and others as something
similar to renegade circus clowns who are distracting attention from the Big
Top. She derides the use of the year-long-living “stunt” as a distraction from
the important environmental and social issues at hand, which she presumably
believes are discussed more effectively in her own books. And her work does, of course, have tremendous value.
Indeed, it is Kolbert’s deep concern for our planetary
climate crises that I suspect--or at least hope--is at the root of her bitterness stridence [point taken, Pritha]. She wants
attention focused squarely on the dimensions of the crisis and the necessity
for swift and effective solutions. Her priorities are correct in this regard
and I admire her for them.
Where Kolbert is deeply wrong, I’m afraid, is that it is she
herself who has become the cause of the major distraction of the moment. In her
extremely powerful position as a top climate journalist, she wasted four pages
in one of the nation’s most highly regarded magazines to attack my and my
colleagues works as “stunts.”
The ripple effect, in sections of the
environmental blogosphere at least, has been a distraction from the important
message delivered in my and the other writers’ works. Instead of a discussion
of the merits of what we have to say, bloggers on both side of this meaningless
debate discuss whether we have the right to say it.
This is neither to suggest that there should be no
differences of opinion nor to seem ungrateful to those who have publicly
defended my honor.
It is to say that Exxon, the coal industry, and the
thousands of their lobbyists slithering through halls of Congress with their
campaign-contribution checkbooks rub their hands together with glee at this
kind of in-fighting by people who should be on the same side. After all,
Kolbert’s using four pages to attack her fellow environmental writers is four
pages less that she could have used to convince the public of the dangers of
continuing to burn fossil fuel and that we could have a better way of life
without it.
Indeed, it is this--the possibility of real progress in this area--rather than Kolbert’s misguided emphasis
that I want to address.
Whether my book No Impact Man and the companion documentary of the same title are remembered as the stories of a stunt or not is ultimately
immaterial. Of course, as a writer and a person, it hurts to be trivialized,
but the truth is that No Impact Man
is both a stunt and not a stunt. Because my hope in living and writing about my
year was to put myself in a crucible in which to examine some important
cultural issues surrounding our solutions to our environmental crises as well as the
quality of life crisis which is so closely related to them. And yes, I hoped to
popularize these important issues.
What issues do I mean? There are three.
First, is it just possible that the meme is wrong that
suggests that a culture that it aligns itself with the needs of its habitat
will have to be less aspirational and somehow deprive itself?
My answer, having
lived the no impact year, is a categorical yes. Taking the local eating element
of the project alone meant we were healthier because our food was fresh and
real. And this was just one of the benefits my family experienced by living environmentally. Examining the possibility of environmental living on a cultural level, it makes sense to me that a renewable
energy industry established to align ourselves with the needs of our habitat
will also create an economic boost that will provide jobs. I call this sort of
synergy the “happier planet, happier people” principle.
Second, is there a place for individual and community-based
action in the quest for a more sustainable culture—or must we depend upon and
wait until government and industry do something through the pressure of
collective action?
The sad fact is that the level of change required cannot be
created by government alone. Our climate crisis is so profound that we must not
only change the way we transport ourselves and create energy, we must reduce
how much we use as people. That means changing the way we live. This is not only my own conclusion but that of the
International Panel on Climate Change.
Third, is it just possible that, by encouraging people to
change their lifestyles for the joint benefit of themselves—by reducing their
expenditures, say—and the environment, we might also be creating an on-ramp for
the masses into the politics of environmentalism?
To this I answer with a
pointed yes. People’s politics are informed by the way they live. A victim of drunk driving is more likely to be an advocate for drunk driving laws. A person
who experiences the benefits of environmental living is more likely to advocate
for climate change mitigation from either side of the political aisle.
No one will be surprised to hear that I believe most
vehemently that I am right in these points. Indeed I have started a non profit
project intended to advance them (NoImpactProject.org). Still, I could be wrong. I
wish it was the rightness or the wrongness of these points that Kolbert had
chosen to discuss. In doing so, she would have advanced a meaningful discussion
rather than the silly stunt vs not stunt debate.
Kolbert's mistaken approach is nonetheless instructive. It reminds us that those who care about these issues shouldn’t attack each other.
We should respect each other’s differences while understanding that we all hope
to advance the same agenda. That is the only way we can hope for change in the very little time we have to affect it.
PS Read more about the book here. Read more about the movie here. Most importantly, read about how you can go No Impact yourself here.
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