I Love This Book

I just finished reading No Impact Man by Colin Beavan today. I was already familiar with the author's blog chronicling his year-long experiment in no-impact-living in NYC, and I occasionally viewed it, because I'm a fan of that type of project. I love The Year of Living Biblically and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and other books that have resulted from individuals wondering what would happen if they lived a different way.

I'm a fan of environmentalism. Clearly, since I've recently completely a trip that involved 8 airplane trips in less than 4 months, I've set up the environmental parameters in which I'm willing to live, and they include things like airplane travel and Charmin toilet paper, but a certain kind of conscious environmentalism nicely dovetails with some of my larger worldviews, like feeling a certain responsibility for the communities in which I live and voting and acting accordingly and believing that I don't need everything in the world, that I try to prioritize experiences and relationships over the acquisition of stuff (even though there are still many new things I would like to own).

That's why I love Colin Beavan's book. The author experimented with zero-impact living, but the idea is to see which environmental decisions are workable on a personal level and to what degree. The book started out a little slow for me, but I was absolutely fascinated by the author's decision to create no garbage and the steps he took to manage that in an urban center, and I really enjoyed the philosophical musings provoked by the experiment (largely because they agree with my own feelings, and I love a well-articulated validation of my personal beliefs).

Two quotes I really like from the book:

[in response to complaints that he's anti-progress]
I simply feel that now that we've so utterly perfected the walkie-talkie to the point where it has become the iPhone, maybe we could turn the great minds that brought us the Nintendo Wii to, say, getting fresh water to the 1 billion people on our planet who don't have it.
[to read some interesting information about what today's brilliant minds are doing to solve world problems, read Superfreakonomics; there's a chapter about it]

The question becomes not whether we use resources but what we use them for. Do we use them to improve lives? Or do we waste them? My life itself is a resource. How shall I use it?

Read it!