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 tries to figure out a solution to his daughter’s diapers. He calls the head of the Real Diaper Association, who figures out how many cloth diapers he needs. Michelle, considering this her husband’s experiment, allows him to wrestle with the cloth diaper to put it on Isabella.

At his mother’s house on Christmas, he stresses about the wrapping paper everyone is tearing off their presents, and he fears that he and his family are becoming “freaks” (110). He and his wife decide to play “Russian Roulette,” as they call it, and see if she becomes pregnant. He wonders if this is really the way to live.

While in Massachusetts over Christmas, they rent bikes, and Isabella loves riding in a seat on Beavan’s bike. They ride over the countryside and past the Cape Cod-style house where the author’s grandparents used to live before they died. The author reveals that his uncle killed himself in the basement of the house at age 29 and that his brother, David, had died in the house at 8 months old from a congenital heart defect when the author was 4. They pass by his gravestone and those of his other relatives. Beavan realizes that the No Impact project might have less to do with saving polar bears and more to do with the deaths of his uncle and brother. These events poised him to be dissatisfied with material goods and to look for something else. Michelle likes the experience of biking so much that she asks the author to buy her one in New York and to add a seat for Isabella to his bike.

Beavan writes that it’s easier for people to concentrate on acquiring goods than on asking serious questions about life. He relates the words of Dae Soen Sa Nim, the founder of a school of Zen Buddhism called Chogye Order in Korea: “Everybody says I want this and I want that but nobody really understands this ‘I’” (115). We live to fulfill our desires, but we live in a system that perpetuates unlimited desires while our planet’s resources are limited. The author also cites a poem that is part of the Chogye funeral service; the first line reads: “Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed—that is human” (116).

Beavan buys food from the farmer’s market in Union Square in New York City. He buys turnips, cheese, eggs, apples, and cabbage and has to figure out what to do with them. At first, he thought that to eat sustainably, he could just eat organic food, but people who really understand the subject also only consume “local food” that is produced near where they live. Corporate giants and the USDA have watered down the organic food market so that the label “organic” does not mean much.

The author finds authors named Alisa Smith and James McKennan from Vancouver who had the goal of eating food that was produced within 100 miles from their home. The author speaks with them and finds out that food in North America travels an average of 2,000 miles. There are nonsensical situations such as California strawberries entering New York just when the crop peaks in New York. Agriculture “uses a full 17 percent” (119) of American oil. The author communes with Alisa and James but also feels competitive, as it turns out that they harvested salt from the bay and would only eat bread that was not only baked locally but that also contained locally made flour: “Where competition was concerned, I felt like Popeye about to arm wrestle Bluto—without any locally produced spinach” (120).

Working with people from Just Food, a group founded in the early 1990s to promote urban farming and sustainable eating and the “community-supported agriculture” (CSA) movement, the author decides to eat food produced within a 250-mile radius. He also decides to only eat what is in season—not food grown in greenhouses. Small, local farms not only produce food without producing as many greenhouse gases; they also devote themselves to careful stewardship of the land and the use of its resources. Large, industrial farms produce less food per acre than local farms and use greater amounts of pesticides that wash into the water supply. In addition, they expose countless people to food risks, such as salmonella outbreaks, while local farms do not expose national food supplies to these risks. In addition, farming around New York City protects these lands from development, and local farming promotes biodiversity. The author notes that in 2000, “85 percent of the country's farmland”(123) was used to grow only four crops—corn, wheat, soybeans, and hay.

After World War II, chemicals that had been used to make explosives were turned into fertilizer and pesticides. Organic farming methods, including crop rotation, were shunted aside until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, which exposed the dangers of pesticides. As organic food began to take off among consumers, industrial farmers looked upon it not as a way to grow food in a sustainable way but as a means of attracting consumers. Therefore, the USDA’s organic standards did not reflect sound ethical and environmental tenets, and food produced on an industrial farm could be deemed organic. Local farmers are not necessarily organic, as earning that certification costs a lot of money, but they use crop rotation and integrated pest management. The organic salad in the market may have been shipped thousands of miles and picked many days before, and the author wants something better.

The author reads a UN report that explains that the planet’s 1.5 billion cows contribute “18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases” (126), from cutting down forests to create pastureland and from the cows’ methane-filled burps—more gas than the world’s transportation. Overfishing will deplete the world’s oceans by 2048 unless fishing is managed more responsibly. Therefore, the author’s diet will include locally produced food grown without greenhouse gases and no beef or seafood (but milk for his daughter).

Michelle is in favor of the new diet but is aghast when she learns she can’t have coffee, as it’s not grown locally. Rather than using a cookbook and getting ingredients, the author gets ingredients and figures out what to do with them. Beavan makes frittatas with leeks and cabbage salad, and he and his family talk as they cook—very different from the old days, when they watched TV while eating takeout. They have a social exception clause so that they can have coffee with other people, and the author wonders whether lack of social connection explains our environmental problems because we don’t feel connected to something greater. Meanwhile, Michelle is downing coffee after coffee in anticipation of having to go cold turkey. The author figures out how to make yogurt at home and delights in the results.

He finds time to cook because he is no longer watching TV, which consumes 4.5 hours a day for the average American. He also doesn’t spend time driving to a store and looking for food—which uses up the same time people used to spend making food from scratch. On a bitterly cold day, the author and his wife allow Isabella to choose her present from a secondhand clothing store, and he caves and has a meal at a diner and feels guilty as a result.

He goes to the Hudson River farm of a man named Ronny Osofsky, who has an almost personal relationship with his cows. The author contrasts this type of relationship with what he saw in a Humane Society video in which workers in a confined-animal feeding operation (CAFO) in California tried to force cows—who could not be “downed” (134) or they would not be considered safe to slaughter—to get up by spraying water into their nostrils and dragging them with chains. He realizes that Ronny loves and cares for his cows. The reason Ronny’s farm is not organic is that he gives his cows antibiotics when they are sick rather than slaughtering them, and the cows have much longer lives than they do in industrial farms.

Michelle and Beavan enjoy having people over for food or for charades, and they’ve become more social without their TV. Michelle asks permission to draw on the walls, to give her life some excitement, and the author agrees to let her draw in the bathroom. His father later joins in when he visits. Michelle and Isabella love the new diapers, and the author figures out that getting intimate with his wife is the best use of their newfound non-TV time.