Growth Among New York Concrete: No Impact Man

Dear readers, we share with you a recommendation, and (because how can you not?), a critique of the documentary, No Impact Man.

We just finished watching it last night and we have to say that we do recommend it. The premise of one family reducing their carbon footprint is radical as it is hopeful in its gesture. They go through phases, from eating locally and only walking or riding bikes, to eliminating their paper goods, and finally, abstaining from electricity.

Colin Beavan blogged about his families experiences for the year on his blog. Some people argued that Beavan's new found interest in carbon reduction was highly self-serving, as it was linked to the promotion of his new book. It is important to note that his book and the documentary that subsequently followed were NOT impact neutral.

Much of the critism came from a place of "how dare you tell me to live without?!" and seemed to reinforce our birthright to consumption, the fear that without things, our lives would be meaningless. Other criticism seemed to be much deeper, touching upon notions of privilage and oppertunism.

Basically, Beavan had many contradictions in what he was doing. However, aren't we all riddled with contradictions as we live in a system that promotes a very distructive lifestyle? None of us can really live outside of the system, but we can make changes within the system. We can also push the system to change. In the end, we think that Beavan did some of these things; Beavan offered us moments of self-reflexivity.

Given the amount of impact our culture has on the environment, there are surprisingly few movies that begin to scratch the surface of how much we destroy for our lifestyle. There should be hundreds or thousands of movies in this genre, but there aren't.

We welcome No Impact Man, and we have begun to ask ourselves, what reductions from the movie can we adopt? More on that come in the next post.

Cheers,

s&t