Focus: No Impact Man

Though it's not a new book, and one that I've already read, I recently chose to revisit Colin Beavan's memoir-esque book No Impact Man. And it really got me thinking.


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Summary:
Colin Beavan is a regular man living in New York City with his wife and 18-month-old daughter. Feeling guilty about the current environmental crisis, he decides to spend a year making no impact on the environment - hence the name - and in the process makes many discoveries about himself and the way we live our lives.

Review:
I had to read this book over the summer before my freshman year of college, and both after that reading and my more recent revisiting, the book had quite a large impact on me (no pun intended). Though there are criticisms of this book, the experiment, and Beavan himself, I think it's actually a worthwhile read.

There is no denying the environmental crisis the world is suffering right now. Global warming is a fact, and the truth is that something must be done. There simply must be drastic changes made to the way we live our lives, otherwise the earth will be forever altered and damaged and our way of life will be destroyed. These are scary things to think about, and as Beavan points out, thinking about these scary things can make us feel helpless. What can we do, after all, to really affect change?

Beavan attempts to find a solution to the environmental crisis by making drastic changes in his own (and his family's) life: he produces no trash, buys nothing new, turns off electricity, buys only locally grown food, reduces water use, limits the amount of chemicals pumped into the water he does use, and volunteers at environmental organizations to "do enough good to outweigh the harm". These changes, obviously, have a profound effect on his life. His entire family dynamic changes and becomes better, because he and wife find more time to be together and to spend with their daughter. They all feel less rushed, less stressed, and both Beavan and his wife actually lose weight without even trying.

This book is proof of the positive effects of trying to live a lower-impact life. There is an increase in happiness in the Beavan family. And what I find most compelling about this book is Beavan's conscious effort to not sound preachy or high and mighty. You can tell while reading it that he is not trying to dictate how we should all live our lives. He simply reports on the changes he made, the changes that then came about, and states his opinion on what it all means. He states multiple times that he simply wants people to be happy, and if destroying the planet brings people true happiness then he poses no objection. Yet he believes, and in fact provides evidence to back up his belief, that our current way of life is not making us happy. Beavan says that people in first-world countries such as America are living a hamster-wheel type of existence, one in which we work and work to pay for things that make us briefly happy but then after losing that quick rush of joy we work harder to buy more things for that brief rush of joy.... Beavan advocates that we stop, just for a moment, and look at our lives and try to reconsider whether or not the way we are currently living, which is infecting our planet with a sickness from which it will eventually not be able to recover, is truly making us happy.

This book makes me think. A lot. It made me start recycling, as well. But most importantly it made me more conscious of the state the world is in, and how much trash I produce, and whether or not there isn't some better way of living that would make us happier without harming the planet. There must be, right?

Any book that forces the reader to confront these difficult yet important questions deserves praise. Yes, there are valid criticisms out there. Yes, there are counter-arguments to Beavan's theories. Yet this book is still an important one. It shouldn't be ignored; the information and ideas it contains are too important to be ignored. We must, as a people, as a world, do something to help the planet. And this book is a great kick-starter to that movement. For that, I make it required reading; for everyone.