Every food purchase you make has an environmental impact -- that is a fact. But what if you decided to try to eliminate that impact? You'd have to apply the same rules as every movie involving time travel -- do your best not to change the world around you, knowing that it's likely impossible.
That's the premise for a documentary being released in New York City and Los Angeles today. In No Impact Man, writer Colin Beavan, as part of a book project, spent a year trying to go off the grid while still living in New York City with his wife and young daughter. They swore off restaurants and grocery stores as part of a quest to be completely neutral in terms of environmental impact.
Some steps were moderate -- knocking out water bottles and styrofoam coffee cups -- but Beavan's family took it farther when they quit eating beef. It gets serious when they spend six months without a refrigerator, although they continue to use their gas stove. They also composted indoors and began a small urban vegetable garden.
It's easy to sympathize with Beavan's wife, Michelle, when she laments: "The food is the hardest part ... because I can't eat anything that tastes good." They apparently eat a lot of porridge.
Besides the economy collapsing if everybody followed all of Bevan's steps, the film raises serious questions about how much you can (or would choose) to live without -- especially in regard to your food. Coffee and bottled water might be labeled as extras, but a refrigerator is basically a necessity.
No Impact Man comes to the Tivoli Cinemas in Westport on October 16.
[Image via Flickr: guaravonomic]
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A man living in a cave and eating only fallen leaves has an impact on the planet. An aborted fetus has an impact on the environment. Hell, I would propose that even the THOUGHT of a person yet unborn consumes some amount of energy in the person pondering this special being. Energy that must be fueled, the fueling of which ultimately has some impact on the environment. �No Impact man�? It�s utterly impossible.
Beavan and his family have a HUGE impact on the environment whether they want to admit it or not. Everything they own from the buttons on their shirts to their hardwood floors came from somewhere. Materials had to be mined, machined, planted, harvested. The structure they live in had to be built. Chemicals had to be mixed, oils and coal had to be burned. Trees had to be felled and water and electricity had to be moved thousands of miles. All the people who were involved in these processes have to live and so they too continue the endless cycle of production and impact on the earth.
Planting a garden on your New York City apartment is symbolic only - a symbol that planting a garden on a rooftop is a drop in the ocean of environmental impact. Having everything already in place that you need to live in the present and then one day saying �we�re going to shut the lights off and have no impact on the planet" is delusional at best; man-hating and psychotic at worst.
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