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

The author introduces the premise of his book—that he, his wife, and his baby daughter try to live for one year in New York City while creating a “net zero impact on the environment”(14). To do so, he tried not to create trash (so he had to give up takeout food), no carbon dioxide production (so no driving or flying), no toxic substances in the water such as from the use of laundry detergent, and no purchasing of produce from faraway places (more than 250 miles), in addition to all the other prohibitions, such as not using plastics, etc.

Beavan then goes into how he arrived at this idea. He and his wife, Michelle, are a study in contrasts. He describes her as “all Daddy’s gold AMEX and taxi company charge account and huge boats”(3), while he describes himself as a wannabe hippie who was raised to hate materialism. He reports that his friend even spoke to his own therapist about Colin’s differences with Michelle. In return for allowing his wife to watch reality TV, which he hates, she agrees not to wear fur. He has become more materialistic than he would like, but he also spends time registering voters and trying to be a good liberal.

However, things come to an impasse when Michelle was offered a white-fox fur shawl from a friend whose father works in the fur business in Minneapolis, her hometown. Beavan drops by his wife’s therapy session and agrees that she can have the fur shawl if she reads portions of the PETA anti-fur brochure. Michelle, moved to sympathy, decides not to wear the fur, but the author has an even greater epiphany: “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” (6). He realizes that his activism focuses too much on changing other people and not himself.

At the same time, more information is coming out about global warming as the US refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, his reaction to these events has been to date just to blame George Bush while still turning on two air conditioners without only a moment of guilt. He lives in Greenwich Village, New York, with his 2-year-old daughter, Isabelle, and his wife—where he witnesses summer-like weather in the winter and a freak snowstorm with lightning and thunder. While the author has just written a book about World War II, he is more concerned about what is happening in today’s world. He reads about polar bears drowning as they try to swim what had formerly been the polar ice cap, and he reads about the bears cannibalizing others’ young because the bears are starving.

He realizes that most people in our society are unhappy with their lives, and their lives, consumed by working, have little meaning. We are working only to survive or, for the lucky few, to have expensive toys that are destroying the planet. On a summery day in the middle of winter, the reality of the author’s non-activism hits him, and he feels as though he is “hitting bottom” (9). He decides that his own lack of initiative is what is causing him to hit bottom.

At a lunch with his agent, Eric Simonoff, in Manhattan, Beavan launches into a rant about global warming. He speaks about the inaction of politicians and the giant plastic shelf in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as well as other consequences of the environmental crisis, including health issues like the high rate of asthma in the South Bronx. He wants to write a book that encourages people to be kinder to each other and to the planet. His agent replies that it will be hard to convince a publisher to spend money on “a book that tells them how screwed up they are” (12). He realizes that as his agent says this, he has no authority to write such a book anyway.

The author tells a Zen koan that captures his dilemma. The koan is about two rival groups of warring monks who fight over the right to have a cat in their respective residences. The Zen master asks them to say one word expressing love about the cat or he will slit the cat’s throat. None of them says anything, as they are more involved in beating out each other than taking care of the cat, so the Zen master slits the cat’s throat. Beavan thinks that he and politicians are like the warring monks—”never exerting much energy towards anything but winning the argument” (13).

The author decides that he has to change himself before changing others and gives his agent another call. At the second lunch, he tells his agent that he wants to change himself first—and that, like Superman trying to save the world from the bottom up, he will be “No Impact Man.” He decides to write a book while keeping a blog on the Internet to document his plan: “I didn’t just want to have no carbon impact. I wanted to have no environmental impact” (14).

He dedicates himself, his wife, his toddler, and his dog to this project and decides to implement the project in stages. First, he will try to produce no garbage. In the second stage, he will try to travel by means that don’t produce carbon, and the third stage will involve changing consumer choices about water, electricity, and heat. In addition, he will try to have a positive impact through efforts such as cleaning up the Hudson River and giving money to charity. He comes up with the following equation:“Negative Impact + Positive Impact=No net impact” (15).

He plans to be more philosophical than scientific and to try to do more good than harm for a year. His idea is not that we should all give up conveniences but to conduct an investigation into how much these conveniences help us or hurt us and whether we can live without them. He wonders whether the environmental consequences of producing a book will be outweighed by the collective good that results. The crux of his inquiry is whether we can address the crisis we are in and whether we can change the world. To answer this question, the author feels that he has to put himself into extreme conditions.

As he was carrying out his project, documentary filmmakers became interested in making a movie about him and his family, and the New York Times also came upon his blog. He became, to his surprise, an environmental leader to whom people turned to find out how they too could make a difference. At first, though, he just wants to change minds in a “non-finger-wagging” (17) way by taking on change himself.