NO IMPACT MAN: How Colin Beavan predicted the “Zero Emission Book”

Colin Beavan’s “No Impact Man” blog—perhaps the most visited Typepad page in history—chronicles a yearlong experiment during which he tested the viability of living in a New York apartment without leaving a footprint, carbon or otherwise. The diary precursed his book, No Impact Man, which Farrar, Straus, & Giroux released this month in jacketless hardcover (dustcovers are wasteful, one assumes). In conjunction with the book’s debut, Oscilloscope Pictures unveiled No Impact Man: The Documentary in Los Angeles and New York in September, thus completing the grandest sort of simultaneous marketing trifecta: heavily trafficked website, book, and film.

As Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein make clear in their documentary, Beavan’s project received as much skepticism as praise. Beavan’s wife Michelle and daughter Isabella participated in the project alongside Colin, sans electricity, sans garbage, sans store-bought cleaning products. When the New York Times covered the Beavan’s in their Home & Garden section, they ran the story with the headline, “The Year Without Toilet Paper” (the Beavan’s used washable cloths instead).

Beavan admits in the film that he cannot reconcile completely his duplex reasoning. From the moment he conceived the experiment, he knew he was laying the groundwork for a book. And yet, the project is, inarguably, an objective investigation into how modern city-dwellers live—which is to say, unsustainably. We throw a lot of things away. In fact, according to the film, the average American discards 1,600 pounds of garbage annually. If you’re in New York, those two tons of paper and plastic and food get trucked to a landfill in the South Bronx. The diesel exhaust from the transport trucks alone is causing health problems (asthma, brain damage) in the children residing near the dump.

Despite facts like those, No Impact Man is hardly invective. Beavan doesn’t spend much time shouting from the pulpit. More often he’s self-effacing and even incredulous about the good he’s doing. He doesn’t operate under the assumption that all Americans—or any, really—can live without causing a net environmental impact. The sacrifices he and his family make while adhering to their mission are daunting: they abstain from using all autonomously-powered transportation; they eat no meat at all, and no produce grown further than 250 miles from their apartment; they discard their refrigerator.

Beavan’s project also raises directly some important questions about publishing. His wife Michelle works for BusinessWeek, a magazine with a weekly circulation of nearly one million. How many trees get cut down to make the paper on which those copies get printed? Over the course of the publication’s lifespan, certainly hundreds of thousands. Flatmancrooked is a small publisher making, accordingly, a small environmental impact. We print in Minneapolis, with a “green” printer. But just because we don’t outsource our production to China doesn’t mean we’re not adversely affecting the planet. Digital publishing is exceptionally green, and as with the rest of the industry vanguard, we’re moving in that direction. But what if someone could produce a physical book that didn’t contribute to global warming? Better yet, what if someone could make a book that offset its own production emissions?

Long before No Impact Man got committed to celluloid, I’d been thinking along just those lines. For the last few months I’ve been developing a book that will delete its own footprint. And I’ll be touring it, by bicycle, from Los Angeles to New York next spring. Because I don’t want to show my hand before it’s in final production, I can’t reveal exactly the details of the project, yet. But this fall I’ll announcing the program officially. I’ll need a lot of help from friends across the country—floors to sleep on, showers to shower in, eggs to eat—as, in all humility, this may be one of the most ambitious book projects ever conceived. There will be an autonomous site going up in the next few months where you can sign up to help. Rest assured, it’s going to be crazy. With any luck, it’ll be revolutionary, too. As Beavan reiterates at the end of No Impact Man, his actions might get people to think about their relationship to the garbage they create. Similarly, the Zero Emission Book may help 21^st Century publishers reconsider the way they make books.

By James Kaelan