Faux-Thoreaus take blows

No Impact Man, Elizabeth Kolbert, and the civic sphere 5

Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest essay for The New Yorker is another triumph, a perfectly pitched marriage of style and substance.

It’s about Colin Beavan’s blog-turned-book-turned-movie No Impact Man, Vanessa Farquharson’s Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days, and other recent experiments in (well-to-do, white, urban) asceticism. Kolbert’s dry wit is underappreciated. You gotta love this paragraph:

Farquharson’s “green-ovations” range from the significant (“sell my car”) to the useful (“turn down my thermostat,” “fix things rather than replace them”) to the downright ditzy (“go to eco-friendly spas,” “shop at green malls,” “use a natural lubricant instead of K-Y”). The day after she resolves to “use no more toothpicks,” Farquharson is shown a house that’s for sale not far from her apartment in Toronto. It’s newly renovated, with three stories, and, in terms of Farquharson’s ecological footprint, represents an awful lot of toothpicks. She immediately buys it. (“I must have this house,” she writes.) Meanwhile, even though flying is pretty much the most carbon-intensive activity possible, Farquharson is constantly taking to the air. At one point, she flies to Banff for a writers’ workshop. At another, she flies to Portland, Oregon, to undertake, of all things, a sustainability-oriented bike trip. (During the trip, she sleeps with one of the trip’s leaders, and so a few weeks later he flies to Toronto to stay with her.) She flies to Tel Aviv to visit another guy she will eventually sleep with. Finally, she flies to New York, where she seeks out Beavan, because, as she puts it, there’s “no way” she is going to go all the way to Manhattan “without confronting my competi— . . . I mean, meeting my fellow green blogger.” They rendezvous, at Beavan’s suggestion, at the Grey Dog’s Coffee, on University Place, which, Farquharson sniffs, doesn’t seem “especially green in any way.” Naturally, the talk turns to shit.

There’s plenty of fun to be had at the expense of these wannabe Thoreaus, but Kolbert does have a point to make. The problem here is that “lifestyle changes” are conceived of as strictly bounded by the individual’s private sphere. Says Kolbert:

The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

To put a slightly more fine point on this, I’ve long lamented that America seems to have devolved into two spheres, the private, which now contains almost everything of meaning to individuals, and the public, which is “government doing its thing somewhere far away.”

What’s missing is the middle sphere, the civic sphere, in which people do things collectively outside the state (via churches, neighborhood groups, voluntary associations, etc.). Pushing his quest into that sphere would have been much more brave of Beavan; he has less control over it, and progress is much slower and more frustrating, but it would much better illustrate what we’ll all need to do if we want reduce our collective impact.

Anyway, I once wrote a post about this: “10 things we can do: rebuilding civil society.” Give it a read, it’s nice companion piece to Kolbert’s.

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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  1. Matt D Posted 2:30 pm
    25 Aug 2009

    Great post. Sometimes it seems that most environmentalists out there are the thoughtless, fundamentalist kind. I'm glad to see some of them exposed.

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  2. Hal 9000 Posted 4:53 pm
    25 Aug 2009

    Interestingly, I remember Colin Beaven pursuing, albeit briefly, a "sense of the Congress" resolution on the need to address greenhouse gas emissions through Grist comments during his experiment. While I didn't regularly follow Colin's blog my wife did and I had the sense that his experiment was more community-minded--at least in an internet/virtual community kind of way--than Ms. Kolbert's article suggests.However, an admittedly unfortunate side-effect of eco stunts is their use to support the delayer/denier meme, "If Al Gore is so worried about climate change, why hasn't he made radical lifestyle changes? Unless he sells his mansion and gives up air travel, climate change must not really be a problem." Of course, the logical fallacy of this, as Kolbert suggests, is obvious: one person's lifestyle change is the proverbial drop in the bucket. However, the delayer/denier crowd uses the backdrop of eco stunts to legitimize attacks on the personal virtues of environmental leaders and to distract the distractable from the messaging environmental leaders are trying to get out.We need strong leaders like Al Gore pushing for federal legislation and international treaties to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions significantly and rapidly because that's what the science demands (recognizing that some contributers here have concluded that western society is beyond redemption and that whatever incremental steps we take now, societal collapse is our ultimate destiny). Asceticism will never appeal to a broad cross-section of the American public and radical self-sacrifice is inconsequential as a motivator for broad-based action. As interesting and heartful as personal experiments with asceticism may be, they shouldn't distract us from the urgent and primary need, moral and scientific, for the United States to act now at the federal and international levels.

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  3. Hmpf Posted 10:12 am
    26 Aug 2009

    I've been reading Colin Beavan's blog, on and off, for more than a year, and I think Elizabeth Kolbert is selling him a bit short. In the time I've been reading his blog, Beavan has written repeatedly about the larger social implications of his experiment and has encouraged his readers to act as politically conscious citizens. He has encouraged, and (I think) participated in acts of civil disobedience and has asked his readers to contact politicians. He is also currently working on setting up a website and organisation that will help people to change their lives towards sustainability. No Impact Man may have started as one individual's gimmicky eco stunt, but it definitely seems to have worked as a consciousness raising exercise for Beavan, and that's an important step in the journey towards activism.The impression I get from his blog is that Colin Beavan understands that we need, not only individual action, *and* not only political action, either, but a fundamental culture change - and like so many of us, he is trying to work for that culture change as best he can. Conducting and publicising an experiment that shows people that a radically different lifestyle is possible, and may even make people happier than the current one, seems like a very valid approach. Not the only thing we should do, no, but it's good that a blog like that, and a book and movie like that, are out there.

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  4. David Pratt Posted 10:58 am
    27 Aug 2009

     Attacking the imperfect does not advance understanding of
    the true severity of the global warming problem or the remedies that we must
    seek to address it.  It is petty and
    counterproductive for  writers from The
    New Yorker and Grist to be impugning the motives and actions of Thoreau, Beavan, Smith, MacKinnon, or Farquharson.  They all have important places in our exploration for answers, individually,
    politically, and yes, as part of our civic participation.  These individual “aesthetes” with their
    publicly viewable “stunts” serve a purpose for us all.  We must face this difficult challenge on many
    different personal and public levels.  But let’s celebrate those who are trying, however imperfect their trying
    may be.  We learn from mistakes and we
    refine our efforts as we go along, and we do this on many levels.   So let’s enjoy the diverse and imperfect
    process of getting to an answer instead of tearing each other down.Thoreau, Beavan, Smith, MacKinnon, and Farquharson, BRAVO! 

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    1. Andrée Zaleska's avatar

      Andrée Zaleska Posted 12:32 pm
      27 Aug 2009

      I see your point--and why be so negative, right?-- though I have personally been sarcastic about No Impact Man and his ilk.  What bothers me about them--even Thoreau--is the time-limits they set on their projects. As with dieting, small, incremental and permanent changes are more praiseworthy. But they don't make such entertaining books and movies.

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