_No Impact Man_, Colin Beavan (kindle)

Subtitled: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process

This book has an appendix for where to go to find out more about how you too can reduce your impact, arranged by chapter. The chapters are arranged by the stages in which Beavan reduced his impact. Some of bibliographical information is really disturbing; I've read and own many of the books Beavan includes in his list.

This is another in a non-fiction genre that's become really trendy in the last few years: younger-than-boomer author decides to spend a year living their life according to a set of clearly unattainable rules, writes a book about the process, describing what they liked, what was hard, how their friends and family reacted, and what they intend to stick with in the future, also, how it Changed Their Lives in expected and unexpected ways. Beavan, however, is very meta about it. When he's trying to reduce the impact of his food choices, he gets in touch with the couple who had then not yet written their book that would become _Plenty_ in the US and _The 100 Miles Diet_ in Canada.

Like Spurlock and other young-than-boomers who attempting to enact political change by massively rearranging their personal lives, a whole lotta zen speak. Also, a lot of charming detail about his and his wife's personal histories. Not in a what did they use instead of toilet paper way; in a class consciousness way.

Beavan is competitive and control freaky. He's engaging in this project in conjunction with a daily blog and, after a while, with a New York Times reporter trailing along behind him and his small family. This could have been really unpleasant, but he's so into self-criticism in a non-wallowing-in-despair sort of way that it instead takes the edge off what could otherwise be an incredibly annoying screed. The other thing that helps is his constant focus on the equal importance of getting power to the people in the world who do not have power to help them with things like laundry (boy, howdy, I sorta wish he'd gotten into the hauling water thing. Yeah, doing laundry in the tub sucks, buddy, but try hauling that water out of a well, too.). This is not an environmentalist who has never heard of social justice. It is refreshing.

While he mentions only in passing that just by living in Manhattan, his impact is a third that of a typical resident of the US, he does not otherwise make that much out of it. And even better, rather than advocating a bunch of stuff and then admitting he hates all of it, a la the author of _Green Metropolis_, Beavan clearly loves New York, and loves the effects on his life and relationships of many of the changes he makes for his project.

Beavan has a wonderfully driving prose style: after having to slog through other books I was, honestly, a lot more interested in reading, and far more motivated to extract information from, _No Impact Man_ was a swift breeze. The book is a pleasure, and worth the brief time it takes to sail through it. Break his rules, buy a copy -- then make sure you loan it out to all your friends. Or use your library card: first to check this out, then to work your way through his suggested reads. Even if you don't intend to make any changes, you might stumble into one or two anyway.

a bit more about _No Impact Man_

Having posted a how-was-the-book review, I figured I'd post a little bit about what I thought of the project. Like _Practically Perfect in Every Way_, _No Impact Man_ takes a variety of related self- improvement projects and turns them into a year long experiment. Where Niesslein was attempting to become a better mother/wife/domestic goddess/etc., Beavan is attempting to be a better guilty liberal/environmentalist/climate activist. Where Niesslein went and got books on clearing out the clutter and improving one's marriage and parenting skills, Beavan got in touch with locavores, the various women who write about trash and reducing it, dove right into human powered transportation, etc.

Niesslein and Beavan both discovered a couple very similar insights that had nothing in particular to do with the details of which self-improvement they were adopting, but had a lot to do with the process of paying such close attention to oneself in conjunction with attempting to become better. First, it is inescapable, however we frame it, that we have decided by doing this that our pre-project selves are somehow inadequate. Second, there's a bit of a letdown at the end, then we notice that we changed more than we realized -- some habits don't end with the project, but stick with us for always, and it isn't completely obvious in the middle which ones those will be. Let alone at the beginning.

Both books were interesting to me in particular, because I had read a lot of what Niesslein and Beavan had read, and had engaged in related (altho much, much less disciplined and inspected) efforts to change in related ways. I got what they were doing; I had fairly strong opinions about what tradeoffs I thought made sense. So when Beavan gets up the day he starts his project, which he has decided to begin by reducing his trash, and blows his nose into a paper towel and feels horribly guilty, I had to laugh. Really, really hard. This was a part of the project where Beavan felt like he was a pioneer, but he is not. A lot of us have been down the path to cloth napkins, kitchen towels, cloth diapers, cloth wipes, lunapads, handkerchiefs. Not all of us saved our trash for a week, mostly because you just have to look in the bucket where you throw the trash to realize something is dominating the mix and from there it's a short step to figuring out how to make that go away.

It was hard to tell whether Beavan was sincere about his sense of discovery, in much the same way I often felt like Ellen Ruppel Shell was putting one on to connect to her audience when she reveled in the Feeling of Getting a Deal. But stepping back, I have no reason to believe either one is yanking my chain. Beavan probably had not ever contemplated the lowly handkerchief.

In some ways, I was a little sad that Beavan brought no historical perspective to the book. It felt very much like Beavan was turning the clock back, that his version of No Impact Man was really 1920 man, then 1910 man, then 1900 man. He didn't get back too far into the nineteenth century. There's no indication he even went all the way to the coldwater flat, for example, for all that he did turn off the power he did not give up electricity, much less the phone. Then, too, I felt a little cheated. Why should I and the other people sharing the house with me during the day have no air-conditioning, if even No Impact Man thought it was okay to have AC at the office? Beavan does a little hand waving at the limits of individual action, but it is quite hand waving, and I'm on the side of his political activist friends who exhibited skepticism about the project.

On the other hand, Beavan and Niesslein do something really great when they enact what theorists advise: what would it mean for us to reduce our emissions this far? What would it feel like to keep a house clutter free? Are these goals compatible with living a good life? How much is it going to piss off our families? And both came to some largely sane conclusions -- some things are better not to have, some things are easy to give up, some things we really want some of the time, but don't need every day. And some things I'm going to fight really hard to keep.

Where Shell's _Cheap_ and Owen's _Green Metropolis_ talk about a problem, in one case offering no particular solution individual or general, and in the other, offering a solution both individual and general while avowing he can't imagine actually doing it himself, Niesslein and Beavan take solutions and take them for a test drive. Their report back has so much more merit, the rubber having encountered the road, that I am starting to really understand _why_ this genre of non-fiction has taken off so wildly.

doing the math on the locavore train

Ignoring, for the moment, all arguments for being a locavore other than the climate impact of food-miles, I'd like to hammer away at that food-miles idea for a moment. Specifically, whether that lettuce moved by truck or by rail.

http://www.seafoodbusiness.com/archives.asp?ItemID=4082&pcid=267&cid=268&archive=yes

This is another one of those, see, our product isn't that bad! The Carnegie Mellon guys said so! Whatever. Here's the bit I was after:

"Carbon dioxide emissions for air freight are 3.7 times those for truck, 37.7 times (yes – that’s nearly 40 times) those for rail transport and 48.5 times (nearly 50 times) those for ocean shipping by container, according to recent work by Weber and Matthews."

This suggests a 10X for rail vs. asphalt road. I _had_ been assuming more like a 4X, so the argument works either way.

A bunch of locavores have run up against the I-can't-get-wheat-or-beans-locally problem, because (and I think I've blogged about this before) it has been more economical to raise grains and beans in the Midwest and ship it than raise it within coastal regions and move it a much shorter distance for well over a hundred years now. Here's the math why Northeastern locavores should not give a fuck, but should instead just mail order their wheat and/or beans and have it shipped UPS or FedEx ground from Eden Organics or similar. Eden is in Clinton, MI (and thereabouts). To Boston or NYC, it is well under a thousand miles. At 10x, that's easily within the 100 truck miles limit. At 4x it's within the typically used for NYC 250 truck miles limit. How to guarantee it moves by rail for most of its trip? That'll happen automatically, as long as you pick the deliver it slooooowwwwly option, which, trust me, you will with 50 pound bags of grain or beans. UPS or FedEx will drop it at your house with a truck, but the boxes of bags are almost guaranteed to be moving on UPS or FedEx dedicated containers or trucks-on-flatbeds for most of their journey.

Now, this does _nothing_ to support the guy raising wheat down the road from you. If there _is_ a guy raising wheat down the road from you, by all means, buy his stuff -- you'll want to, because paying shipping to Eden Organics will double the price (and yet still will be a breakeven or better including paying for the electric mill to turn it into flour, when compared to buying those tiny bags of organic whole grain flour if you can even find it). But otherwise, if you're doing locavore stuff for food-miles/greenhouse gas/climate change, exploit the hell out of the shippers-move-stuff-long-distances-by-rail loophole. For what it's worth, local grocers were bitching and wailing about people using railroad express services to ship groceries and avoid paying the local market's markup.

ETA:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f?cookieSet=1

That's much better -- original research! The numbers in the chart give both energy cost and CO2 emissions -- and while rail is worse than ocean shipping, the difference between the two compared to everything else just vanishes. It looks like the CO2 is a 10x between truck and rail, and the energy is a 9x between truck and rail.

ETAYA:

You know, if you're willing to let someone truck it 250 miles, you should probably be perfectly happy drinking orange juice on the East Coast. There's a juice train from Florida to Jersey City, so if you figure 1200 rail miles = 120 truck miles and you're using the 250 mile radius that NYC locavores use, anyone within 130 miles of NYC should be able to drink Tropicana orange juice guiltlessly (there's another train to Cincinnati; I'll leave that to Midwesterners to calculate).

Still working on the coffee, thing, tho. [ETA: Someone want to tackle this as a container shipping problem? Maybe for Kona coffee, so we can be all Buy American? The obvious alternative would be to find some fair trade organic mexican coffee that might plausibly be traveling on Kansas City Southern of Mexico and cross your fingers and hope for the best.]

ETA Just a bit more: Why yes, I _did_ specifically mean Tropicana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_Train