Posted By jim on March 6, 2010

I like this little film. It reminds me of the experiment my wife, Amy, and I started in the 90’s. We didn’t know it was an experiment at the time. I was renting a four bedroom house, two car garage in beautiful downtown Tyson’s Corner in Virginia for $500 (just $125 for each housemate!).
We had our wedding party gather wild flowers for our wedding, became vegetarians, hung up a clothes line to block out the view of a parking garage across the street, used a push mower on those parts of the lawn we didn’t let grow into garden, wildflowers, blackberry bushes, and to be honest: weeds. We tried to avoid chain stores and chain restaurants when we could because they destroyed locality (I hated going someplace new and finding the same old chain stores). We could walk to Gucci, Hermes, and the Tyson’s Mall if we cared to. We bought used stuff at thrift stores. We grew some food and scavenged enough berries and apples from forgotten apple trees to freeze and can them. When Amy moved in with me, we shared our space with the one remaining housemate and began investigating cohousing. We started a compost pile and we bought some worms to eat our garbage in the basement. One weekend I decided that we should go on an energy fast and we unplugged everything in the house accept the refrigerator.

Once, our car broke down in rural Pennsylvania. Fortunately there was a couple out in the front yard. They told us where the nearest inexpensive hotel was and then they did something that humbles me still; this couple, fundamentalists, who I am sure wouldn’t have approved of the Pro-Choice bumper sticker on the back of our car, gave us the keys to their shiny red pick up truck and let us drive off to the hotel without even asking our names. After we had sold our car for scrap ($200) and got a ride to the bus station from this couple, Amy suggested we go without a car and we did (for almost two years). One day a visitor told us earnestly that “If everyone lived like this, it would be the end of our economy.” I suppose it was the evening I understood that we were in an experiment and my vocation as a Utopian Economist began. But things happened: kids, we didn’t quite make it to Blueberry Hill Cohousing. We still use a lot of the lessons that we learned there to this day. We did it for a lot of reasons: environmental, social justice, selfish economics, and often for the sheer pleasure of it.
When global warming and carbon footprint became the cause du jour (I don’t mean that derisively), I was a bit loathe to follow every new book or news story on how I (not me) went without a car in the suburbs, how I local for a year, how I bought nothing new for a year, zero canning, etc. for a year, or this guy who seemed to want to do them all: No Impact Man.

We heard Colin Beavin speak at the Trash Summit put on by Alice Ferguson Foundation. We do a yearly creek clean up sponsored by them at the Northern Virginia Ethical Society. His enthusiasm for what he and his family did in his one year experiment was disarming. I was reminded of our experiment and why it was important. I was also reminded of what an adventure it was and my family decided to watch the film.
The movie “follows the Beaven family as they abandon their high consumption Fifth Avenue lifestyle in an attempt to make a no-net environmental impact for the course of one year.” You can feel an on going tension between individual and collective (or political) action. The film captures Colin’s struggle with his detractors and his own doubts. Sure you’ll wonder why they never the use of natural gas to cook their food or you’ll notice that you’ve met or are doing some of the things they are doing or may even being doing better, but it’s worth the ride.

So here are some lessons I took away from the movie No Impact Man.

Experiment
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a scene in the movie when Colin and his family have given up television and they have to make their own entertainment. Colin makes the remark that the days seemed to last forever. Experiments are like that. There are new problems to solve, new experiences. Experiments are adventure, but they also fail. Once the electricity goes out in the Beaven household, it is clear that Colin’s scheme for keeping the locally grown and purchased milk cool is not going to work. It takes a little adaption and compromise to work it out. But the beauty of the experiment is they do it with a net-they could always turn the electricity back on.
Seek out Wisdom
Colin and his family are unable to grow any of their own food because the community gardens in the city have a waiting list. But Colin works with and gets advice from one of the veteran gardeners. This leads to some interesting conversations which I won’t spoil here.

Humility
Colin has a book deal and a movie. He obviously is self-interested in the project. I can hear him address this responding to something else on his blog: “what I’m trying to do this year is to very imperfectly take responsibility for how I treat the world. It’s really hard and I make lots of mistakes and I have selfish motives as well as altruistic ones and I’m human. And I guess that probably goes for just about everyone.”
No matter how original I thought my own experiment was I always found someone who would roll their eyes and one up me. “No car in the suburbs? That’s why I live in the city and I walk to the food co-op.” Colin and his family get a lot of flak. I won’t spoil the movie for you so this is from his blog: He and his family get rid of excess consumer stuff in their household and someone writes to him from India: 10 wardrobes each? that’s a luxury for most people in her country. Another person posts that his whole project is pointless because his whole motivation is just a ridiculous gloom and doom scenario like Paul Ehrich’s population bomb (which didn’t blow up, according to the poster). There are times in the movie when you think he or his wife may throw in the towel, but what I think pulls him (and them) through this is that living up to his convictions makes him healthier and happier than not.
There is one poignant scene in the movie where the camera pans in on the family’s trash for an entire month: it can’t cover the bottom of a small waste paper basket. Later Colin and his daughter walk past a huge pile of garbage on New York City streets (just a week’s worth, I’m sure). Trying to have no impact on the earth makes quite an impact in that scene.

Agnosticism
I don’t mean agnosticism about god, I mean about what we know (knowledge). That all the assumptions we make when we do something may be wrong can be pretty scary. I think this ties to humility and goes to the whole question of: What if I’m wrong, what then? Will I look like a fool? Do I lose my self esteem? Reality television quickly becomes a constant theme in the movie and it captures moments of doubt and the conflict that can occur when other people are involved in your experiment. I think the reason some people like reality television is that they enjoy seeing fools. But one way not to be a fool is to be like everybody else. Doing the unconventional can even get you killed, say, from contaminated, unrefrigerated food. So all the more reason to seek out the wisdom of people on a similar path.