No Impact Man

A great life need not cost the earth

I could spend my time working to pay for and watching things like this:

Or I could take that same time--as I did this weekend--and spend it with my three-year-old Isabella doing stuff instead of watching stuff:

The politicians and so many others worry that using fewer planetary resources means deprivation and that deprivation won't sell. But they're lacking the vision of something better.

I can't help thinking this treadmill we're on means we're already deprived. The message is that in saving the planet we could have more--not more stuff but more life.

Because great lives need not cost the earth.

Guidelines for discussion--a reminder

I want the comments section of this blog to have real value for its participants. To accomplish that, up until now, I haven't felt the need to moderate the discussion at all. My recent gardening experience, however, has taught me that a little judicious pruning can make an organism more healthy!

So: I've decided to both to begin enforcing the guidelines for discussion and to revise them to make them a little more clear. The guidelines can always be found on the left hand side of the blog, but here they are, too, as a gentle reminder:

• The comments section of this blog is intended to provide a forum for discussions about positive change.
• Please post your comments on the blog entry you are referring to, and keep them relevant to the topic of the post.
• Please pursue long back and forth discussions by private email rather than in the comments.
• Please advance ideas and add positive knowledge; nitpicking has its place but it isn't here.
• Be courteous.
• Discuss ideas and refrain from personal attacks.
• Give accurate information in the spirit of being helpful.
• Disagree respectfully.
• Credit others when you quote them.
• Be brief (ish).
• Admit the possibility of fault and respect different points of views.
• Accept that your comment may be deleted if it doesn't adhere to these guidelines.

Today is answer the critics day

Now then, I've had an incredible amount of support for the project from all over the world the last few days, and I've had rather a large amount of, well, hate mail. Someone wants to spray Michelle and I with an Uzi and get Isabella adopted by Angelina Jolie, for example.

On the other hand, there have been a number of helpful criticisms and questions. I'll get to them as time goes on. One I want to answer--again--is about the fact that I write books and am making a film. I've pulled a comment and my response from an earlier post for that purpose.

Before we get to that, though, I just want to say this--again. No Impact Man is a year-long experiment to do with me and my family trying to see what will happen if we really put our money where our mouths are and try to live in a radical way according to our values. It is not an attempt to convince anyone else to live according to our values (unless of course they want to). In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I do hope that our project might inspire other people to live more closely to their own values (which is one reason for the book but more on that below).

At the end of the year, we will assess and see what changes we're willing to keep and discard those we decide are trivial. But how can we know what is trivial and what is worthwhile if we don't try the whole range? We are dismantling a lot of the life we inherited from the culture and then putting it back together in a more deliberate way. A lifestyle redesign.

Also, people say "this proves environmentalists are nuts." I am not and have never been an environmentalist. I did once give money to Greenpeace. What I am is a schlub who got tired of despising himself for doing things that didn't jibe with his political and philosophical beliefs.

Not all the changes we're making are in place, which is why, as some commenters complain, we don't use TP but still use a laundry machine. If you want to understand how we're progressively working things into and out of our life, read the posts on the left under "What it's all about."

But enough. The critics aren't going to set the agenda on this blog. This is one of what will be an occasional concession to the naysayers.

What I really want us to discuss are the solutions to the inherent problems of trying to green our lives. If you really believe reduced consumption would cause the economy to collapse and ultimately hurt the poor, for example, instead of just calling me an idiot, how about suggesting other alternatives that would both ensure the well-being of the planet and its people?

Anyway, onto the comments to do with my book and movie, and after this, we'll be moving on:

I love that you guys are doing this, but why not get the word out through word of mouth? Wouldnt that be more non-impact? What's with the public display of non-impactness? Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt LCD monitors and buy a bound volume of post-consumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc. sounds like non-impact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your non-impact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (wait, maybe I should stop there.)

 

Posted by: bruce | March 07, 2007 at 01:09 PM

Bruce--
Thanks so much for your comment. I hope you will come back often and keep me on my toes!

As for how we will measure our impact, there is a rather trivial way to measure it at http://myfootprint.org and a much more detailed way that can be downloaded at http://redefiningprogress.org/programs/sustainabilityindicators/ef/ef_household_0203.xls. I'm sure there are other ways too but I'm not there yet in my research.

At the moment, apparently, if everybody lived the way we live, one and a half planets would be required to support the population. We have a way to go! On the other hand, there are things we are responsible for that we can't change, like the environmental cost of NYC's infrastructure. I think we're doing pretty well though. The average American lives, I think, a seven planet lifestyle.

As for the your reference to "self-centered" ways of measuring our non-impact, part of the experiment is to ask whether people in general might be able to live in a less impactful way and what benefits there are to it. So, if I find and can pursuade other people that saving the planet has its personal benefits, wouldn't you applaud me for appealing to self-interest in a positive way?

As for the book and the film and their impact. I know. I know. I wrestled with this. But each of us has what they are willing to give up for the environment and what they are not. I am not yet willing to give up being a writer. But I am using my position in media to try to change it some little bit. FSG will publish the book in Tyvek, same as Cradle to Cradle, which is a reusable material [actually it's not Tyvek but another completely reusable material, I've since been told], unless we find something better. If you believe things change incrementally, that's a little something, no?

As for the film, I originally told the film-makers who approached me no. I was very worried about the issues you raised. But then I told them that if they were willing to try to change their lives and the way they make movies to be less impactful, I would consider it. And they agreed.

It's a question of whether you change things from the inside or the outside. I believe in both. It takes all types. Are you one, Bruce, who changes things from the outside? If so, I applaud you and support you. Maybe I will one day too.

Could I ask you one little friendly question? You wondered why I was encouraging people to spend energy looking at the blog on their "50W monitors." My question for you is, if you believe your own logic, what were *you* doing spending energy looking at the blog? ;)

All the best and please comment away a lot more,
Colin

Posted by: Colin Beavan | March 07, 2007 at 04:08 PM

 

A million questions—just a few answers

So many people emailed me yesterday, thanks! I’m answering your questions here instead of by email so everyone can see. I’ll answer more in subsequent posts. Also, thanks to everyone for all the comments on the posts. I have to read through them still, but I’ll try to answer questions there soon, too.

Can you buy educational games or toys for your daughter?

Isabella got a lovely, second hand rocking horse from the Housing Works thrift store the other day. Of course, when we got it home we realized it had the name “Miles” etched on its neck but we decided that that was the name not of the owner but of the “worsey,” as Isabella calls it. The rule is that we can buy second hand stuff only (with the exception of socks and underwear). But honestly, Isabella would rather bang together pots and pans and walk down the street with her hands in her pockets than play with toys.

Are you allowed to use over-the-counter drugs if you get sick?

Yup.

Have you considered the climate/waste/energy input associated with eating dairy?

Please don’t try to make us give up our milk and cheese and homemade yogurt. I’m begging you. Since we’re eating only unpackaged local and seasonal food, that would pretty much leave us with nothing but apples a la cabbage and cabbage a la apples. Besides, we buy our milk from the local Ronnybrook Farms, where the cows are fed grass and homegrown corn.

How do you make fruit scrap vinegar?

Great book: Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Get your scraps of fruit—apple cores, dregs of berries (though no berries for us cause they’re not in season), whatever—and chop up coarsely. Dissolve a quarter cup of honey (recipe calls for sugar but I can’t get it locally) in one quart water. Throw the scraps in and cover with a cloth. Let ferment for two or three weeks, stirring occasionally. Adds great flavor to—you guessed it—cabbage.

What about books (I couldn’t live without them)?

No purchase of anything new except socks and underwear and a couple of other personal items is the rule. As for books, we use the library and we can buy a second hand book from the Strand, around the corner, if we sell a book (no accumulation of resources).

Would you mind telling me the address of the Yahoo group mentioned during your appearance on the Brian Lehrer show?

That was the Compact. The big overall group is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact/ . The New York Compact is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompactnyc.

Please could you post pictures of you and your family?

I thought you’d never ask. See above.

Could you write a bit on why you decided to pursue a career outside of academic science? And how, if at all, your doctorate training in physics has affected your subsequent career. Was making the choice to leave academia easy or difficult?

What a random and fun question. Do I detect a PhD student who wants to quit? My doctoral studies—in electronic engineering actually—were in a galaxy far away and long ago. Liverpool University. Mid-eighties. I hated working in a lab. If I had had any courage at all, I would have quit way before I finished my doctorate, but I was young and scared of making those kind of decisions. It was a very hard choice but the only one possible if I wanted to stay happy. All the same, the training—essentially in how to teach yourself things—has been invaluable in my life. You didn’t ask, but after that I went into public relations for not-for-profits, also in Liverpool, then moved back to the States, drove taxis in Martha’s Vineyard (eek, don’t tell the people who read my blog that I drove!), and then decided to move to New York, twelve years ago, to try my hand as a writer, which is what I wanted to do since about age six.

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.