NO IMPACT MAN
great book
NO IMPACT MAN:The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the ProcessBy Colin Beavan
There’s a certain problem with branding oneself a radical environmentalist superhero and then letting a real old-fashioned book about the experience roll luxuriously off the presses. I don’t care if the thing is printed in beet juice on paper recycled by indigent Amazonian tribespeople under the glow of beeswax candles! When you’ve renounced most worldly goods in the name of saving the planet, as Colin Beavan and his family did for most of 2007, it seems a tad contradictory, if not downright hypocritical, to land with a splat two years later in the crowded stacks of Barnes & Noble. Surely there’s a less material way of making an impact, like perhaps chaining yourself to a tree in Central Park? Shouldn’t readers at least be exhorted, Abbie Hoffman-style, to Share This Book?
But Beavan, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing once for a column about “green” entertaining, is about as far from the yippie of yore as a FedExed pineapple is from the tree. He lives in a modishly decorated prewar co-op on lower Fifth Avenue bought by his wife, Michelle, when she was single, “one of those New York, media-industry, glam-girl fashionistas,” her husband writes tolerantly, who “grew up all Daddy’s gold Amex.” (At times in “No Impact Man,” the reader fears the cause at hand is not the drowning polar bears but the couple’s marriage.) Beavan, meanwhile, had thrifty grandparents who came out of the Depression knowing how to savor a sunset. Perhaps it’s some version of their simpler life he craves, he thinks, alarmed by the unseasonable weather of the past decade. His experiment includes shunning takeout containers (”our entire universe,” he despairs, “is individually wrapped”), motorized transportation and, as you’ve probably heard, toilet paper. He doesn’t merely want to live lightly on the land - he wants to float above it on a magic carpet woven of sustainable hemp.
The book exemplifies an increasingly popular subgenre that involves setting oneself a task, usually for a year, and writing about it in an online diary before committing the account between covers. The approach has its advantages: narrative boundaries are clearly defined; an author can build a following; live reader feedback informs his ideas. But why buy the cow - that is, the book - if you can drink the (hormone-free) milk for free at noimpactman.com? The writer strikes an anguished, defensive tone that suggests not only ecological concern but also repeated buffeting by anonymous commenters. He tries to be Zen, quoting Buddhist monks, but has trouble subduing well-developed urban traits of competitiveness and aggression. “Maybe if their food-acquisition radius was 100 miles, I should make mine 75,” he thinks after consulting a devoted pair of Vancouver locavores. Struck by a BMW while on a bicycle, he fantasizes briefly about mowing down the driver with an S.U.V.
Though Beavan’s project is imbued with undeniable virtue, as reading material it amounts mostly to a series of small and not terribly riveting suspenses (though there’s also a bombshell, heartbreaking revelation that helps explain his dogged midlife search for meaning). Will Michelle be able to give up her espresso shots? Will their toddler daughter, Isabella, take to cloth diapers? And will it all end in a wild binge of Freon and foie gras?
Grim statistics about climate change and water pollution, some highlighted in lists or little boxes, make it emphatically clear that just choosing the frozen organic chicken fingers at the A.&P. isn’t going to save us from rising seas. Still, Americans have progressed; I think of the scene in last season’s “Mad Men” when the Draper family nonchalantly flung their picnic garbage on the grass. It might’ve amused Beavan, too - except, of course, he’s given up TV. You could have the book here.
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