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No Impact Man: More Pleasure Than Pain

Sally Hill | 18.09.10

Last week I watched ‘No Impact Man’ at one of the (too few) screenings of the film in London. The film, and book of the same name, follows the experience of Colin Bevan and his family when he makes the decision to live for one year without making any environmental impact.

Colin and family - his wife and four-year old daughter - sacrifice cars, planes, packaged food, and even electricity from their inner-city New York lifestyle.

It's interesting that I've already found myself using the word 'sacrifice' when I think that the most important message to glean from the film is that by leading this more sustainable lifestyle there was so much to gain, and very little real sacrifice. Even in this version of a sustainable lifestyle that would be considered extreme for most people there were obvious positive impacts upon the people taking part.

As Colin says in the trailer to No Impact Man he could have called it ‘the year I lost 20 pounds without going to the gym once, or the year we didn’t watch tv and we became much better parents as a result, or the year we ate locally and seasonally and it ended up reversing my wife’s pre-diabetic condition’.

During the year, Colin also reaches out to people in his community, for example, those who he co-operates with to grow food. It’s quite lovely to see him befriend a gardener who has a plot in the thick of Manhattan and watch them turn their small harvest together – a rare site in the city I’m sure.

Many of the headlines Colin received were along the lines of ‘The Year Without Toilet Paper’ but as Colin so rightly points out ‘It’s not about deprivation, it’s not about not taking care of yourself.. it’s the opposite’.

In deciding how and whether to live sustainably, are we afraid of giving up our quality of life and making a 'sacrfice' when there would not necessarily be any loss at all?

This Guardian article 'Do Environmentalists Hold Back Sustainable Lifestyles?' asks whether environmentalists hold people back from sustainable lifestyle by communicating the idea of 'sacrifice'.

You may be inspired like I was by this woman's story. Another person who 'gave it all up' only to gain a lot more: 'Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness'.

I too believe it’s possible to have not just have a good life, but a better one, without continuing to have a negative impact on the environment.

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