It’s become a cliche: throw out your TV, your cell phone and your take-out menus and watch how much happier you become. Well, here’s a couple who did just that, making “no impact” on the environment for a full year — and guess what? They too say the benefits of the experience far outweigh the drawbacks.
Author Colin Beavan and his wife, Business Week’s Michelle Conlin, were living in a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment with a toddler and a dog in late 2006 when Beavan proposed the environmental experiment with a view to publishing a book chronicling their life off the grid.
For a full year, the two used no electricity (including no elevators), consumed no food grown more than 250 miles from the city, ordered no takeout, consumed no coffee, watched no TV, used no store-bought beauty products and bought no new clothes.
Aside from the countless sacrifices (no reality TV??), there were many welcome benefits, the two reveal in their various public musings. The couple’s electric and gas bills were reduced to nothing, they wiped out debt, spent more time together as a family and even lost 10 pounds each walking and riding bikes and unmotorized scooters (even public transportation was banned).
“What I learned from No Impact was that there is a steep cost to supporting all your stuff. To a life devoted to getting and having,” Conlin writes in her account of the experience on BusinessWeek.com. “In my days of high consumption, I’d been searching for something. It turned out that it was right in my own home.”
Conlin admits the project was much more difficult for her than it was for her husband. “In our 10 years together, Colin has bought himself three things: a second-hand cell phone, a used PC, and a folding bike. He bought me a diamond ring from a flea market. So no spending problems there. I, however, was an inveterate credit dipper,” she writes. Still, she becomes a convert, if not for life, then at least for the proposed year.
Beavan blogged about the experience (his computer was powered by solar panels the couple installed) and has now published his book, “No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process.” What the book’s title lacks in thrift (is that the longestsubtitle you’ve ever seen?), the book itself is constructed of recycled paper, chlorine-free cardboard and energy supplied by biogas. A documentary by the same name and produced by friends of the couple opens nationwide on Sept. 11.
While it’s unlikely many people will want to forgo all the conveniences of modern consumption, those who would like to try the No Impact lifestyle for a week are invited to do so on the project’s website.
Go ahead, I dare you. I, however, will have to support you from the sidelines where I will be carrying on in my usual low-impact way. Hey, I’m a realist!
Photo courtesy of Hollywood Podcast via Flickr.