The hidden life of garbage essay

Colin Beavan NO IMPACT MAN

Is it really possible to live eco-effectively? With No Impact Man, Colin Beavan tries to find out. He swears off plastic, goes

organic, becomes a bicycle nut, turns off his power, and generally tries to save the planet from environmental catastrophe while dragging his young daughter and his Prada-wearing wife along for the ride. He is No Impact Man, and this is his adventure: the surprising, delightful, deeply affecting story of one man’s decision to put his money where his mouth is and make zero net impact on the environment while trying to live an everyday life—in New York City, no less. That means no trash, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subways, no products in packaging, no air- conditioning, no television, no toilet paper . . . What is it like to live a no-impact lifestyle? Can it catch on? Is it satisfying, or

exasperating, to live this way? Are we all doomed to be conspicuous consumers, or can our society reduce the barriers to sustainable living so it becomes as easy as unscrewing a lightbulb? These are the questions at the heart of this whole mad endeavor, and Colin Beavan hopes to show the rest of us that no-impact living is worthwhile—and richer, fuller, and more satisfying in the bargain.

Colin Beavan posts regularly at www.noimpactman.com. He lives in a ninth-floor apartment in New York City.

http://www.noimpactman.com
Praise for NO IMPACT MAN

“No Impact Man is a deeply honest and riveting account of the year in which Colin Beavan and his family attempted to do what most of us would consider impossible. What might seem inconvenient to the point of absurdity instead teaches lessons that all of us need to learn. We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference.”

—Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat

“Colin Beavan has the disarming and uniquely remedial ability to make you laugh while making you feel like a swine, and what’s more, to make you not only want to, but to actually do something, about it.”

—Norah Vincent, author of Voluntary Madness

“There’s something of Thoreau in Colin Beavan’s great project—but a fully engaged, connected, and right-this-minute helpful version. We’re at a moment when we need to have as little impact in our own lives as possible—and as much impact in our political lives as we can possibly muster. Beavan shows how!”

—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

“No Impact Man is a subversive book—not because it preaches a radical environmental agenda but because it gives the secret to personal rebellion against the bitterness of a man’s own compromises.”

—Arthur C. Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness

“Millions of Americans are now asking how their lifestyles are affecting the planet. If you’re one of them, Colin and Michelle’s remarkable odyssey through a year of shrinking their ecological footprint is an engrossing must-read. You’ll discover how what you eat, switch on, and throw out matters, but more important, how they found a much richer and happier life. Hop into the rickshaw for a hilarious, smartly informative, and deeply moving ride.”

—Juliet B. Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College, and author of the forthcoming Plenitude: Economics for an Age of Ecological Decline

“No Impact Man is an erudite, funny, and self-conscious Walden for our urban and postmodern age. Few of us will choose to replicate the experiment Colin Beavan took his family on, but we should be grateful to him for revealing the limits and possibilities for achieving happiness in an age of material excess.”

—Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility

ALSO BY COLIN BEAVAN

Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War

Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and

the Murder Case That Launched Forensic Science

NO IMPACT MAN

COLIN BEAVAN FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2009 by Colin Beavan All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Annie Leonard

for permission to reprint material from the Story of Stuff project.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beavan, Colin. 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 process / Colin Beavan.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-22288-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-374-22288-6 (hardccover : alk. paper) 1. Environmental protection—Citizen participation. 2. Sustainable living. 3.

Beavan, Colin—Homes and haunts. I. Title. TD171.7.B43 2009 333.72—dc22 [B]

2009010188

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

http://www.fsgbooks.com
To you, Michelle, with my deepest love and the hope that you will always write on walls

Our sages taught: A man should not move stones from his ground to public ground. A certain man was moving stones from his ground onto public ground when a pious

man found him doing so and said to him, “Fool, why do you move stones from ground which is not yours to ground which is

yours?” The man laughed at him. Some days later, the man had to sell his field, and when he was walking on that

public ground he stumbled over those stones. He then said, “How well did that pious man say to me, ‘Why do you move stones

from ground which is not yours to ground which is yours?’ ”

—Talmud Bavli, Masekhet Bava Kama 50b

Contents

1. How a Schlub Like Me Gets Mixed Up in a Stunt Like This 2. Day One and the Whole Thing Is a Big Mistake 3. What You Think When You Find Your Life in the Trash 4. If Only Pizza Didn’t Come on Paper Plates 5. How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Anger Your Mom at the Same Time 6. The Cabbage Diet Saves the World 7. Conspicuous Nonconsumption 8. Click and the Lights Go Out 9. Trying to Do Enough Good to Outweigh the Harm Epilogue: Life After the Year Without Toilet Paper

Note on Production Appendix: You Can Make a Difference! Notes Acknowledgments Index

NO IMPACT MAN

ONE

How a Schlub Like Me Gets Mixed Up in a Stunt Like This

For one year, my wife, baby daughter, and I, while residing in the middle of New York City, attempted to live without making any net impact on the environment. Ultimately, this meant we did our best to create no trash (so no take-out food), cause no carbon dioxide emissions (so no driving or flying), pour no toxins in the water (so no laundry detergent), buy no produce from distant lands (so no New Zealand fruit). Not to mention: no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no buying anything new . . . But before we get into all that, I should explain what drove me to become No

Impact Man. To start, I’m going to tell a story that is more a confession, a pre- changing-of-my-ways stocktaking, a prodigal-son, mea-culpa sort of thing. The story starts with a deal I made with my wife, Michelle. By way of background: Michelle grew up all Daddy’s gold Amex and taxi

company charge account and huge boats and three country clubs and pledge allegiance to the flag. I, on the other hand, grew up all long hair to my shoulders, designer labels are silly, wish I was old enough to be a draft dodger and take LSD, alternative schooling, short on cash, save the whales, and we don’t want to be rich anyway because we hate materialism. Once, during a visit to my mother’s house in Westport, Massachusetts, Michelle lay

on the bed in my former bedroom and stared up at the ugly foam ceiling tiles. “You know, I grew up with much nicer ceilings than you did,” she said. That, her facial expression seemed to say, explained everything. My best friend, Tanner, meanwhile, once called me to tell me that his therapist had

said that he “despairs of Michelle and Colin’s differences.” Why Tanner’s therapist analyzed my marriage was a question best left for Tanner to explore in his next session, but the point was that Michelle and I had a lot to negotiate. And the story I’m telling here has to do with one of our negotiations. For my part, I agreed to put up with the cacophony that comes with Michelle

watching back-to-back episodes of Bridezilla, The Bachelor, and all the other trash- talk TV. I hate reality shows. Michelle conceded, on her shopping sprees, not to purchase anything made of or even trimmed with fur. That was the compromise. Michelle liked a little fur. Not long fur coats per se, but fur hats and fur linings and

stuff like that. Michelle was a Daily Candy girl, a Marc Jacobs white Stella handbag girl, a kind of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw grows up, gets married, and has a baby girl. On the other hand, call me a pussy, but I felt bad every time I saw one of those

raccoons or possums with their guts spilled out on the Palisades Parkway. I also felt bad for little animals getting killed for nothing but their skins. Yet I managed to exempt, back then, my leather shoes from my concern that

humanity puts vanity before kindness to animals. In the cold glare of my own I Want To Buy, my disdain for designer labels and all things consumerist became a little, shall we say, mushy. I was the type of guy who shopped for the fifty-two-inch television, then thought he was a rebel against consumerism because he bought the discounted floor model. I don’t mean to imply that I was a total do-nothing liberal. I did go to Pennsylvania

to canvass voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections. I made get-out-the-vote phone calls for MoveOn.org when they asked me to. I tried to adopt some sort of an attitude of service in my daily encounters and to generally avoid doing harm. I volunteered at the World Trade Center site after 9/11. I even prayed for George Bush, on the premise that hating him just created a hateful world. The question was, given the state of world affairs, whether I shouldn’t have been

asking more of myself. A few months after our TV-fur negotiation, Michelle got offered a brand-new,

thousand-dollar, white-fox shawl by a friend whose father is a furrier in Michelle’s hometown, Minneapolis. It’s free and the fox is already dead, went Michelle’s reasoning. It’s not one fox, it’s ten, went mine. I’ve already suffered your free-basing bad

television, and we have a deal about this, I said. But those are your standards, replied Michelle. Then came her trump card: I want to

discuss it at couple’s therapy. Not that what we actually went to was couple’s therapy. What really happened was,

I would drop by sometimes during one of Michelle’s sessions with her own therapist. Anyway, I trundled along to the Upper East Side office, and Michelle explained the situation. Free fox shawl, on the one hand. No fur, on the other—which is Colin’s standard. Why, Michelle asked, should I have to adhere to his ethic? When the therapist turned to me and said, “Colin?” I surprised both of them by

saying that Michelle could buy all the fur she wants. Except, I said, there’s one

http://MoveOn.org
condition to my releasing her from our deal—and here’s the part where I look like a jerk—namely, that Michelle read out loud certain passages of a PETA brochure about the fur trade that I’d highlighted in green. “I can read them when I get home,” Michelle said. “Nope,” I said. “The deal is, if you want to renege on our fur deal, you read it out

loud, here.” Sport that she is, Michelle grabbed the papers, cleared her throat, and began to read.

Two results came of all this: First, Michelle decided that she didn’t want to buy fur anymore because she actually has the biggest heart known to humankind and because we are nowhere near so different on the inside as we seem on the outside. Second— and here’s the point of the story—I showed myself to be a smug little jerk. I had mobilized my intellectual and persuasive resources to get someone else to change her behavior, and remained, I saw, utterly complacent about my own. It’s true that I had occasionally tried to make a difference in the world, but I was

coming to think my political views had too often been about changing other people, like Michelle, and too seldom about changing myself. I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people’s misdeeds somehow

made me virtuous. I’d become, I realized, a member of that class of liberals who allowed themselves to glide by on way too few political gestures and lifestyle concessions and then spent the rest of their energy feeling superior to other people who supposedly don’t do as much. A year or so later, news about global warming started coming out. I mean, it’s been

out for twenty years, but somehow it hadn’t entered my liberal consciousness. We can’t maintain this way of life, the scientists said, the world can’t sustain it. The ice caps will melt, the sea levels will rise, there will be droughts—or, in short, the planet will be done for and millions of people will suffer. The countries of the world had negotiated the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations

Framework on Climate Change, assigning mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases to signatory nations. But the United States, a signatory to the protocol, as well as the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, refused to ratify it.

I made the mistake of thinking that condemning other people’s misdeeds somehow made me virtuous.

What had I done in light of our country’s deaf ear to environmental concerns? Well, if it rained torrentially, I would say gloomily to whoever was listening, “I blame George Bush for this strange weather.” If in conversation someone said global warming was just a theory, I’d say, “Actually, the scientists say it’s a fact,” and I’d

also get a really angry look on my face to show just how adamant I was. And if it was so hot out that I felt the need to turn on both air conditioners, I’d sometimes even feel despondent for a moment or two about the fact that I was contributing to the problem.

Cut to 2006. At the age of forty-two, I have a little girl, Isabella, who is nearly one. We live on lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village. It is January but seventy degrees outside. The middle of winter, and joggers run past in shorts. Young women from the nearby NYU dorm saunter by my building in tank tops. I’m on the street. I’m walking our dog, Frankie. People around me are happy but I

am not. Instead, I’m worried. I put the key in the front door of my building. I walk through the granite-floored lobby. I step into the elevator. The operator, Tommy, an older gray-haired man from Greece, says, “It’s too warm, no?” “Yeah, well, imagine how warm it would be if there was such a thing as global

warming,” I say. I was being sarcastic, of course. People back then still argued about whether global

warming existed. Not me. This was around the time when I had begun to feel really ill at ease. What I read in the news only confirmed, I believed, what I could already feel in my bones. Summer seemed to toggle straight into winter, and then back to summer—the long

fall and spring seasons of my childhood had disappeared. I’d witnessed, that December, a winter storm in which thunder clapped violently and lightning flashed the white blanket of snow into eerie green. Never in my recollection of northeastern winters had there ever been thunder and lightning in a snowstorm. Tommy chuckled at my sarcastic remark. He threw the lever forward and the

elevator lurched upward. After all, what could we do? For the last few months I had traveled around, discussing a book I wrote about a

secret Allied operation in France during World War II. For the last few months, in other words, I’d spent my time talking about sixty years’ worth of yesterdays when I was really scared to death of what was happening today. Here’s what was on my mind when I rode the elevator that day: I’d read that the Arctic ice was melting so fast that polar bears were drowning as

they tried to swim what had become hundreds of miles between ice floes in search of food. Researchers knew this because they found their limp white bodies bobbing on the waves in the middle of the sea. Worse: sometimes, too, desperate in their starvation, the polar bears cannibalized

each other’s young. We burn too many fossil fuels, the sky gets blanketed with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the planet warms up, the ice caps melt, the polar bears can’t get to their food, they eat each other’s babies.

You’ve heard it all before. But back then, in 2006, this was news, at least to me. What really filled me with despair, though, was that I didn’t believe that the way of

life that was steadily wrecking the planet even made us happy. It would be one thing if we woke up the morning after a big blowout party, saw that we’d trashed our home, but could at least say we had had a rip-roaring good time. But if I had to generalize, I would say that, on average, the 6.5 billion people who share this globe are nowhere near as happy as they could be. Leaving aside the people who have severely limited access to food and clean

drinking water, so many people I knew, both in New York and elsewhere in the world’s go-fast consumer culture, were dissatisfied with the lives they had worked to get—the lives they were supposed to want. Many of us work so hard that we don’t get to spend enough time with the people

we love, and so we feel isolated. We don’t really believe in our work, and so we feel prostituted. The boss has no need of our most creative talents, and so we feel unfulfilled. We have too little connection with something bigger, and so we have no sense of meaning. Those of us lucky enough to be well compensated for these sacrifices get to distract

ourselves with expensive toys and adventures—big cars and boats and plasma TVs and world travel in airplanes. But while the consolation prizes temporarily divert us from our dissatisfaction, they never actually take it away. And, to top it all off, I thought in the elevator on that unseasonably warm day, not

only have so many of us discovered that we’ve been working our years away to maintain a way of life that we don’t really like, but we are waking up to the fact—I hope—that this same way of life is killing the planet. Thanks to global warming, we hear, the planet is facing, among other things, plagues of malaria, monsoons and hurricanes with unprecedented power and frequency, and a rise in sea level that will cause widespread destruction of people’s homelands.

Back on that summery day in the middle of winter, I seemed to be hitting bottom.

What things to have to think about. Back on that summery day in the middle of winter, I seemed to be hitting bottom.

At first I thought it was about the state of the world. Yet I had an inkling, as I rode in the elevator, that that wasn’t it. I’d been complaining to anyone who would listen, telling people that we lived in an

emergency. Yet, as much as I complained, I lived and acted as though everything was normal. I just led my usual workaday life. Wake up, take my daughter, Isabella, to the babysitter, spend the day writing, pick her up, watch TV, start all over. I didn’t feel I

could do anything about world problems. After all, if the government wasn’t doing anything, what could I do? Write another history book? But is that what I wanted from myself? Is that what I was willing to accept? That I

could be in a state of despair and do absolutely nothing about it? Was I really hitting bottom with the state of the world? Or was I hitting bottom with my state of self- imposed helplessness? For some reason, that warm winter day in the elevator, I suddenly realized that my

problem might not actually be the state of the world. My problem was my inaction. I was worried sick about something and doing nothing about it. I wasn’t sick of the world. I was sick of myself. I was sick of my comfortable and easy pretension of helplessness. Tommy brought the elevator to a stop at the ninth floor, where I live. It was just an

elevator ride. It was just a couple of seconds. It was just a day when it is seventy degrees when it should be thirty. But I suddenly had these questions: Am I really helpless? Is it true that a guy like me can’t make a difference? Or am I

just too lazy or frightened to try?

Winter leapfrogged into summer—another missing spring—and I had lunch with my literary agent, Eric Simonoff. We went to Beacon in midtown Manhattan, where lots of publishing types meet. Glasses clinked. Colleagues nodded. We were there to discuss my next book project. “I can’t write history anymore,” I tell him. “Don’t tell me you want to write novels,” he says. Eric is accustomed to helping people like me to eke out a living from our writing. “No, I don’t want to write novels,” I say, and then I launch into my dinner-party

rant about global warming. I inform poor Eric, who was simply trying to enjoy his lunch, that while reports

pour in exclaiming the urgency of our environmental problems, government and big business move only at a snail’s pace, if at all. We need, say the urgent reports, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent at the very least by 2050 in order to prevent global warming from spiraling out of control. Instead of acting, companies like Exxon use stealth PR tactics to discredit the organizations that try to warn us. Meanwhile, politicians try to “reposition global warming as a theory, rather than fact.”

A sailboat ride west from Hawaii would soon have you crashing through a gigantic patch of floating plastic garbage, twice the size of the

continental United States.

I doubted, back then, that a Democrat in the White House would move a whole hell of a lot faster on the environment. In the voting booth, whether you pull the red handle or the blue handle, you always pull a big-business handle. And big business wasn’t exactly filling the politicians’ war chests with millions of do-something-about- global-warming dollars. “What are we doing to our planet, Eric?” I cried, and continued my rant. A sailboat ride west from Hawaii would soon have you crashing through a gigantic

patch of floating plastic garbage, twice the size of the continental United States, that swirls around itself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or you could go fishing and come up emptyhanded in one of 14,000 Canadian lakes that no longer support marine life, thanks to acid rain. Or try going for a walk in the forest, hoping to see some birds but instead coming face-to-face with a big yellow bulldozer in the 32 million acres of woodland we chop down around the world every year to make toilet paper and disposable coffee cups. Then there’s what we’re doing to ourselves. Here in New York City, for example,

one in four kids who live in the South Bronx suffers from asthma, resulting largely from the exhaust fumes of trucks that haul away New Yorkers’ trash. Meanwhile, experts find that an array of health problems, including lung disease, infertility, Parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and childhood autism, to name just a few, are related to the unwholesome amounts of toxic chemicals we spew into our air, water, and soil. So it’s not that while trashing the planet the human race is having a party. Quite the

opposite. We feel a malaise and a guilt that at another time in history might have motivated action, but that this time seems instead to be coupled with a terrible sense of helplessness.

My point, I told Eric, is that I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. I want, I told Eric, to find a way to encourage a society that emphasizes a little less self-indulgence and a little more kindness to one another and to the planet. Here’s what Eric had to say: “The way you talk about it is a bummer. It’s a drag. It’s not that you’re wrong, but

how will I be able to convince a publisher that people will spend twenty-four ninety- five on a book that tells them how screwed up they are? And even if anybody wanted to hear it, why would they want to hear it from you, a history writer with no credentials in this area? “Have you considered writing novels?” Erik joked.

As I opened the door to my apartment that afternoon, I felt an unnatural rush of cool air. I knew Eric was right. If I was the type of person who left his air conditioners on when no one was home, not only did I not have the professional authority to talk about the environment, I didn’t have the moral authority, either. It was the whole Michelle-and-the-fur scenario all over again. It was as though I wanted to change other people but was unwilling or unable to look in the mirror. If I was still a student, I’d have marched against myself.

There is a Zen koan that captures the fix I was in. As the koan goes, long ago in China, a stray cat wandered into Zen master Nam Cheon’s monastery. Sometimes the cat would cuddle up in the laps of the monks who lived in the east residence and sometimes in the laps of the monks who lived in the west residence. Instead of taking care of the cat together, the monks from the east and west halls became jealous of each other. “We love the cat more than you, so it should live with us.” “No, we know how to take care of the cat better. It should stay with us!” One day, the argument broke out in the middle of the dharma room, where the

monks were supposed to be meditating. Finally, Zen master Nam Cheon stormed into the room. He picked up the cat, held a knife to its throat, and said, “You monks. Give me one true word of love for this cat and I’ll save it. If you cannot, I will kill it.” Nam Cheon was testing the monks. Did any of them really love the cat, or did they

just want to win the argument? Were they willing to demonstrate real responsibility for its life, or had they become too distracted by their fight for control of it? As the story goes, none of the monks said or did anything. They were all still trying to figure out how to prove the other side wrong. So Nam Cheon slit the cat’s throat. What began to worry me was that I and the political system I participated in were a

lot like those monks in the dharma room when it came to the health of the planet. Never exerting much energy toward anything but winning the argument. Too rarely taking any real action. Forgetting that the proverbial cat’s life was at stake while we argued over who owned it.

This brings me back to the question I asked regarding my own progress in the arena of kindness and restraint: Am I self-evolved or just self-righteous? I had begun with the idea of trying to encourage a little less self-indulgence and a

little more kindness in our society. Now, I realized, maybe I ought not to be writing a book about changing other people. Maybe I ought first to worry about changing

myself. I called Eric and made a date for another lunch.

“I have a new idea for a book about the environment that has nothing at all to do with trying to get everyone else to change,” I told him. “No polemic?” “No. I’ll only try to change myself. As a lifestyle experiment, I’ll try, with my

family, to live as environmentally as possible.” “One guy tries to save the world? Like Superman or Spider-Man?” “Or,” I said, “how about No Impact Man?” Comic allusions to superheroes aside, what if, when it came to our environmental

crisis, I tried to lead by example? Perhaps I had no power to change things from the top down, but what if, in my own limited way, I began trying to change things from the bottom up? I planned to write a book about what I was doing, and in the meantime I’d keep a

blog on the Internet. I would breach the norms of our normally consumptive society inside a transparent bubble, into which, I imagined, a small number of blog readers and, later, a larger number of book readers would eventually get to look. I wouldn’t preach (or at least I’d try not to). As an experiment, I’d simply dedicate

a year of my life to researching, developing, and adopting a way of life for me and my small family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing as little harm to the environment as possible. What would that feel like? Was it possible to live environmentally in our modern culture? Would it seem so unappealing that no one would follow my lead? Would I be making myself into a freak? Or would what I was doing have some real value?

I didn’t just want to have no carbon impact. I wanted to have no environmental impact.

I was not talking about taking easy environmental half-measures, by the way. I was not talking about just using energy-saving fluorescent lightbulbs or being a diligent recycler. My idea was to go as far as possible and try to maintain as close to no net environmental impact as I could. I aimed to go zero carbon—yes—but also zero waste in the ground, zero pollution in the air, zero resources sucked from the earth, zero toxins in the water. I didn’t just want to have no carbon impact. I wanted to have no environmental impact. I realized it would be hard. I decided that—if I didn’t want my wife and family to

move out—I should ease us in by stages. Stage one was trying to figure out how to live without making garbage: no

disposable products, no packaging, and so on. Stage two involved traveling only in ways that emitted no carbon. In stage three, we would figure out how to cause the least environmental impact with our food choices. Then we’d proceed through stages involving making as little environmental impact as possible in the areas of consumer purchases, household operations like heat and electricity, and water use and pollution. The whole thing would get harder and harder, or so I imagined, as we made each new adaptation. I also decided I’d have to balance what negative impact we couldn’t eliminate with

some sort of positive impact. We would do this by cleaning up garbage in the Hudson River, helping care for newly planted trees, giving money to charity—environmental activism, maybe. In blunt mathematical terms, in case you are an engineer or just a geek who likes

math, we would try to achieve an equilibrium that looked something like this:

Negative Impact + Positive Impact = No Net Impact This wasn’t meant to be scientific so much as philosophical. Could we decrease our

negative impact and increase our positive impact enough so that they would balance out? Could I, at least for one year, live my life doing more good than harm? So this book, in short, is about my attempt with my little family to live for a year

causing as little negative environmental impact as possible. If what I’ve described so far sounds extreme, that’s because it’s meant to be. My intention with this book is not to advocate that, as a culture, we should all give up elevators, washing machines, and toilet paper. This is a book about a lifestyle experiment. It chronicles a year of inquiry: How truly necessary are many of the conveniences we take for granted but that, in their manufacture and use, hurt our habitat? How much of our consumption of the planet’s resources actually makes us happier and how much just keeps us chained up as wage slaves? What would it be like to try to live a no-impact lifestyle? Is it possible? Could it

catch on? Would living this way be more fun or less fun? More satisfying or less satisfying? Harder or easier? Worthwhile or senseless? Are we all doomed or is there hope? Is individual action lived out loud really just individual action? Would the environmental costs of producing this very book undo all the good, or would the message it purveyed outweigh the damage and add to the good?

It was to be an experiment in putting the habitat first and seeing how that affected us.

But perhaps most important, at least when it came to addressing my own despair,

was I as helpless to help change the imperiled world we live in as I’d thought? These are the questions at the heart of this whole crazy-ass endeavor. Answering

them for myself required extreme measures. How could I figure it all out if I didn’t put myself in the crucible of going all the way? This was not intended to be an experiment in seeing if we could preserve the habitat we live in and still stay comfortable. It was to be an experiment in putting the habitat first and seeing how that affected us. As it would turn out, my environmental exercise would wind up drawing the

attention of both some independent filmmakers, who wanted to make a documentary about the No Impact project, and The New York Times, which halfway through the year would stumble upon my blog and write a profile of my family. The result of that profile was as much a surprise to me as anyone. The world media was fascinated by my experiment, and I found myself in the middle of a press storm, sometimes centering, to my chagrin, on the somewhat trivial fact that, as part of the project, I’d chosen to find a more environment-friendly approach to bathroom hygiene than toilet paper. I was thrust into a debate about collective versus individual action and unwittingly

became something of an environmental spokesman. I got thousands of e-mails from people asking what they should do, how they should live their lives. I suddenly found that I was, though I hesitate to say it, an accidental leader. So much has changed since I began this project. My thinking. My career. My

friendships. My fatherhood. My marriage. But on the eve of the start of the No Impact project, I simply thought that by taking

a personal approach to the problem of the health, safety, and happiness of our species, maybe I had found a non-finger-wagging way to change some minds after all. But if I couldn’t, when all was said and done, at least I would have been able to change myself. At least if I couldn’t solve the problems, I’d be able to say that I had tried.

TWO

Day One and the Whole Thing Is a Big Mistake

On what does one blow one’s nose? That’s the big question on the first day. For all my grand ideas about saving the

world and figuring out a happier way of life and changing people’s minds and living according to my principles and—let’s face it—being way overearnest, it turns out that becoming No Impact Man does not mean running into a phone booth and coming out transformed into some sort of eco-hero with my underwear stretched over my trousers. It doesn’t, in fact, feel heroic at all. What it feels like, waking up at 6:00 a.m. and hoping to get just a little more shut-

eye before your eighteen-month-old greets the day by jumping up and down on your head, is enforced martyrdom of the most trivial and ridiculous kind. Because day one starts with me standing in my skivvies, looking through the purple dawn light and into the bathroom closet at a roll of paper towel (which I’ve always preferred to flimsy tissues), really needing to blow my nose, and suddenly realizing I’m not supposed to use the paper towel. Today is the first day of my environmental lifestyle experiment. The one that is

supposed to make me feel like I’m not contributing to the planet’s destruction. The one that I have decided to ease myself into by starting with the seemingly simple first step of not making trash. The one, in other words, that means that I should not use a paper towel to blow my nose. So what do I do now that I am officially No Impact Man? Now that I have chosen a

nom de guerre that makes me sound like an environmental superhero? Now that I have begun living in a self-imposed blog, book, and documentary bubble where for the next 364 days, 23 hours, and 50 frigging minutes anyone can look and judge how well I’m living up to my public declaration about making no negative environmental impact? What would anybody do? I reach for the paper towel. I tear off a piece, blow my nose, realize what an awful

mess I’ve gotten myself into with this project, start feeling depressed before I even wake up, turn around, and shuffle back to the bedroom. I discover Isabella standing in

the crib, opening and closing her hands and saying, “Uppie, Daddy, uppie.”

I blew my nose on a dead tree.

Instantly my self-recrimination begins: I’m selfish. I blew my nose on a dead tree. And now God has punished me by making the sound of my honking wake up Isabella so that she can jump up and down on my head.

Ten minutes into this project and I already realized there was a big reason why I had never changed my life to live in accord with my values. This was going to be hard. I’d be bound to fail at times. It’s a lot easier to say that

you shouldn’t use disposable paper products than it is to actually not use them. There’s a wider lesson in there somewhere. Like, it’s a lot easier to say that our culture should be more sustainable than to actually make it that way. It might be easier, too, to understand the challenges for our culture in solving our environmental emergency if I didn’t repudiate the culture. Both those lessons would take a long time to sink in. But I’m getting ahead of myself. On that first day, I still held the mistaken belief

that I was about to spend a year, at least in part, wrestling with my desires and trying to figure out how to suppress them in order to be moral. I picked up Isabella, carried her to our bed, and lay down, hoping she would do the

same. But no. Isabella, as predicted, planted her diaper-covered butt on my face, giggled, and began bouncing up and down as though her body were a jackhammer and my head was a rock that, for some unknown reason, urgently needed to be cracked.

“Paper bag or plastic?” A few days earlier, before the project proper began, I was next in line at the cash register in the crowded little organic grocery store run by the Integral Yoga Center on West Thirteenth Street. I got to the front, put my groceries on the counter, and a young woman in dreadlocks now waited for my answer. I’d been haunted by this paper-or-plastic question ever since my mother sent me, as

a child, on my first errand. I turned the question back on her. “What’s better?” I asked. “Well, I find that paper rips,” the dreadlocked woman said. “Not that,” I said. “What’s better for the environment?” She shrugged. “Everybody says it works out the same, but I like plastic better for

the handles.” That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for.

Earlier that same week, I had called a press officer at one of the big environmental organizations. I told her I was trying to figure out how to live a no-impact life in New York City and that all the information seemed confusing. “Yeah,” she said, “we’re good at scaring people, but we haven’t gotten good yet at telling them what to do.” She promised to e-mail me some guidance but never did. I’d gone on the “living simply” websites, thinking their reduced-consumption

philosophy might help the environment. I found ways to save soap scraps and compress them into whole new bars. I found directions for making cookie cutters out of tuna cans. But everyone knows that tuna fishing kills dolphins, and, besides, who needs a cookie cutter? Back in the grocery store, not yet realizing that the answer is to carry a reusable

bag, I accepted, for then, the cashier’s recommendation and walked away feeling vaguely dismayed. Whatever the right answer to the paper-or-plastic question was, the vegans didn’t seem to know it. The world seemed truly screwed.

• No one can live without making some environmental impact. Even breathing creates carbon dioxide. You can turn your own lights out, but residing in a culture that provides street lighting means you still have an impact. The very fact that I had chosen to call this project No Impact went to the underlying

point: I was naïve and idealistic. I was not an environmentalist or an activist. I had no credentials. All I had was the knowledge that world events were freaking me out and the faith that we could do better. I knew nothing, at that stage, about environmental living or environmental choices

or carbon offsets or green spin or the relative worth of individual versus political action or, for that matter, anything else relevant to the question of maintaining a safe habitat for humanity. Hell, I still didn’t know the answer to the paper-or-plastic question. But that was the point. The idea was not to become an environmental expert and then apply what I’d

learned. The idea was to start from scratch—with not a clue about how to deal with our planetary emergency—and stumble forward. To see what I could find out. To see how I evolved. What I learned in that moment in the yoga grocery store was that I would find no

well-blazed path to follow. I would have to figure out my extreme eco-lifestyle for myself. Lack of well-sourced information mixed with a surfeit of corporate PR resulted

only in confusion. I’d hear of one study saying that the energy used washing ceramic

cups damages the environment as much as the use of disposable plastic cups that won’t degrade for a thousand years. I’d hear of another that said using hot water and detergent to wash cloth rags harms the planet more than cutting down trees to make paper towels. If I listened to the promulgated wisdom, it seemed that everything was as bad as everything else. The spin merchants seemed to want to convince me that trying to make any

difference was futile. I might as well give up. Toss away another plastic cup. Forget about electric cars because of the deleterious effects of disposing of their worn-out batteries. Go on, guzzle, the spurious wisdom seemed to say. There is no right way to live lightly on the land. Consider the reusable-cloth-versus-plastic-diaper debate. Only about thirty cloth diapers are needed to raise a child if you wash them twice a

week. Admittedly, laundering diapers impacts the planet (the heating of the water and the water use itself, for example). On the other hand, that same child, by age two, would go through some 4,000 plastic diapers. How could pumping oil out of fields in the Middle East, shipping it to factories in, say, China to manufacture plastic diapers, delivering those diapers back to the United States, and then burying those poop-filled 4,000 diapers not be worse than washing the thirty pieces of cloth 104 times? My point here is that there didn’t seem to be any reliable environmental-living road

map to follow. The “science” did not seem to be so much about making things clear, but more about confusing us and wearing us down so that we just carried on the way things were. “Stasis through obfuscation,” my wife, Michelle, called it. I read an article in The New York Times about the corporate rush to label products

“green.” Companies were slapping environmentally friendly labels on everything from tree-killing chainsaws that used less gas to highly toxic bug sprays. “Greenwashing” abounded, and to obsessively try to figure out which products truly harmed the planet less seemed like a fast path to an ulcer.

A child, by age two, goes through some 4,000 plastic diapers.

Then I began to wonder: Instead of driving ourselves nuts trying to find a way through the maze of product spin, might it not be simpler just to climb out of the maze? The trick to environmental living might not be in choosing different products. Instead—at least for profligate citizens of the United States and Western Europe—it might partly be about choosing fewer products. It might not just be about using different resources. It might be about using fewer resources. As the ancient Chinese Tao Te Ching says, “The man who knows that enough is

enough will always have enough.”

What about a handkerchief? I was lying in bed, playing with Isabella, and my sinuses were filling up. I was

realizing I was going to have to tear off another evil sheet of paper towel, another desiccated strip of dead tree, when suddenly I remembered a drawer full of cloth towels and napkins in the kitchen. Wedding gifts. Birthday gifts from acquaintances. Things we never used but couldn’t bring ourselves to get rid of. I could use one of these cloths as a handkerchief and throw it in the laundry with everything else. I threw back the covers, went into the kitchen, found the red-print rag that would

henceforth be known as my “cloth,” and blew my nose. What a relief! And not just in a physical way but also in a philosophical one. Let’s assume that I can say wit