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’s op-ed runs in the New York Times, and then he is featured in an article in the House and Garden section under a headline that reads “The Year Without Toilet Paper.” The title makes a mockery of the project, which upsets Beavan. He is also featured on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, an NPR radio station. He is suddenly faced with endless media requests and feels panicked. To calm his mind, he turns to making bread. He ruminates about the way people before the age of electricity would go to bed and then wake up and do something like converse or make ale for a while before returning to bed. They were better rested than people who slept through the night.

He investigates going off the electrical grid but can’t do so in an apartment in New York City. He even looks into a bicycle generator, but he realizes that the options for people without outdoor space are limited. There is no way to have renewable energy unless companies supply it to him, and he writes that he is “bumping up against the limits of individual action” (168) and realizes that collective action is needed. Although he realizes it’s ludicrous, he thinks he will have to turn his lights off—a step that Michelle supports. However, he needs to find a way to keep his daughter’s milk cold, keep the apartment cool enough on hot days, do laundry, and power his laptop. He writes that one-quarter of the world’s population do not have electricity and cannot do these things.

Beavan describes the process by which he gets power from burning oil in his basement to push water through the radiators as heat and hot water through the faucet. Natural gas is burned to create the flame on his stove. Residences use “only 37 percent” (253) of electricity that is generated, while businesses use 36 and industry uses 27. He describes the process by which during the Carboniferous phase about 300 million years ago, woody plants trapped carbon dioxide and were buried in mud, and, starting in the Industrial Revolution, we began to burn those plants as coal, releasing the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. We can use alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric, and we could increase our energy efficiency by 50 percent. We could also use less fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse emissions. However, global energy use is expected to “rise by 45 percent in the coming twenty years” (172) because the population in growing, and fossil fuels remain cheaper to use than solar or wind.

However, the cheaper costs of using coal are misleading because of what are called “externalities” (172), or hidden costs such as water pollution and health effects. The market does not reflect these costs—a form of “market failure” (172). To correct this problem, government would either need to add these costs to fossil fuels by asking producers to have to pay to emit greenhouse gases, or government would need to subsidize alternative energy sources. Experts believe the catastrophe that will ensue if we don’t do so will eat up 20 percent of global GDP, but we could avoid this by spending 1 percent of GDP. However, currently politicians, the author writes, are doing nothing to take action on climate change.

Beavan writes about the Korean monk Dae Soen Sa Nim who wanted to convene all the world’s leaders in a hot tub to talk about peace. He wanted the Pope to convene the meeting, but after he met with a priest and a bishop, a cardinal put an end to the effort. However, the author believes that the story reflects an ethic of “just try” that we should all have. In speaking with the media, he eschews the advice of experts who want politicians to change and instead says that our entire culture must change.

He investigates other sources of cooking fuel, including an anaerobic digester that uses methane from food scraps and animal feces, but this is not feasible for urban apartment dwellers, and he also rejects a raw food diet and cold showers. He says he would use nuclear energy if governments could make it safe enough to be backed by commercial insurers. He finds a system used in Nigeria to keep food cold. It involves two earthenware pots, one placed within each other, and a layer of sand between them. One of his blog readers tells him to place his clothes in the tub and agitate them by stepping into the tub wearing shorts after the clothes have soaked for a while. He rigs a portable solar-power system to his roof to generate LED lights and his laptop. His friend at his community garden who is a longtime activist tells him to keep trying to achieve change.

Beavan gets his friends together to flip his electrical switch off. He hands them each a beeswax candle. His friends quickly scatter afterward, but he believes his project has made them think. When people ask him what the hardest part of his project is, he says it’s changing his habits. His method of preserving milk does not work, so he uses cheese instead and goes to the farmer’s market more often. His laptop does not have power to run all night, but he enjoys the break it gives him.

While he is often labeled “anti-progress” (186), he does not want to go back to an earlier time in which, for example, there were diseases like tuberculosis. He does, however, believe that we reached a point of perfection and should not push further without eroding our happiness. He writes that among 21 developing countries, we are ranked 20th for the wellbeing of our kids. Meanwhile, he and his family enjoy spending time together in the candlelight. They also see a three-wheeled rickshaw in the farmer’s market and are able to purchase one secondhand, and his wife enjoys using it with Isabella. However, after his daughter pukes all over the sheets repeatedly, he goes back to using a washing machine, and he and his wife also return to drinking coffee.

The author considers the resource of water. By 2025, two-thirds of the planet will be facing water scarcity. In the U.S., the average family uses 70 gallons of water a day, a quarter of which is used to flush toilets. Many parts of the U.S. are also facing water scarcity. In many parts of the world, children die because they do not have clean water. In the developing world and in the U.S., our water supply is contaminated, and our bodies have also been proven to contain these contaminants. If we use chemicals, those show up in our water supply.

The author writes that there are two ways to conserve water on the societal level. One is to build rooftop gardens on city buildings that conserve electricity by providing insulation and that prevent water from running into rivers. Another idea is to have a “gray water” (196) system that filter and reuse water from sinks and washing machines. While living in an apartment, the author does what he can—he uses less water, does not use “privatized [bottled] drinking water” (197), and does not put toxins in the water. He shares bath, flushes less often, does not let faucets drip, and wears clothes for longer. He worries that water will fall into the hands of private concerns who will charge a great deal for it. He uses natural products and brushes his teeth with baking soda. He goes through a typical day, which involves using open windows and no air conditioning, eating local food from the farmer’s market, sharing a bath, traveling by rickshaw, and reading with a solar-powered lamp.

The author starts what he calls the “giving-back phase” (193) by cleaning up along the Westside Highway and volunteering with a group called Sustainable South Bronx that takes care of street trees and with River Trust. He meets other activists, among them kids from Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. He canoes along the dirty Harlem River in the South Bronx. Although the people he meets inspires him, he is looking forward to the end of the project as the darker days of winter descend and he is without power for several rainy days. He meets with Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who later supports a bill that proposes a moratorium on building coal stations.

The author has a scary experience in which he wakes up in the middle of the night and sees his daughter flopping around, and, in the dark apartment, the ambulance men arrive and take her to the hospital. There, he meets a girl named Sharon from the South Bronx who can’t breathe from asthma because of the number of garbage trucks in her neighborhood. Isabella has had a febrile seizure, which isn’t dangerous, and she feels better, but Sharon has to return to an unhealthy neighborhood.

Michelle is pregnant, and even though the author did not want to have another baby, he is resigned to it. She then has a miscarriage, and the experience drives home our essential fragility—something the author knew at a young age from the loss of his brother, David, and his uncle, Bing. He can’t stop these tragedies, yet he believes that we can “waste less life” (210) and help others. At the end of the book, he turns the circuit breaker back on.

The author recaps the questions he most often receives about the No Impact project (including “What was the hardest part?”) and the questions he often asks himself (including “How do we save the planet?”). After he turned the lights back on before Christmas in 2007, Michelle had not seen her family in Minneapolis in over a year. She and Isabella will fly, but the author decides not to go, as a train would cost a great deal of money and take a long time (as the U.S. does not have high-speed trains like Europe). Beavan feels unsettled after living a year with so many rules, and he still can’t bring himself to buy pizza with a paper plate.

He thinks of a writing by Pema Chodron in which she says that most of us have a “middle birth” and are born neither rich nor poor. He thinks that perhaps like Buddha himself, who strayed from his palace and found suffering, we will be subjected to sudden suffering that will change our way of thinking about our planet.

Some modern environmentalists place hope in technology rather than in changing ourselves, but the author thinks that we could still live unsustainable lives with new technology. We would miss the chance to rethink our lifestyle. He also thinks that both collective and individual action are necessary and not mutually exclusive. He believes that we must change as a culture and that our culture is made up individuals so that by changing as individuals, we can create cultural change.

He has maintained some parts of the project. He has a fridge but not a freezer, and he does not have TV or air conditioners. He still brings his coffee cup wherever he goes and uses natural products and does not eat meat (his daughter tried turkey at a friend’s house and did not like it). He says that the most important part of his project was not what he did but that it raised other people’s consciousness. He does not believe he is a martyr, but he does believe, as he writes, in living “deliberately” (224). He ends the book by asking: “So, what are you going to do?” (224).