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  • How to win friends and influence people. No seriously, how?

    More on No Impact Man and personal eco-behavior 11

    Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago

    The other day I highlighted a new piece from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, which was critical of No-Impact Man and other "stunts" in hyper-green living. Mainly I used it as an excuse to point to my old piece on the civic sphere, which, ahem, you should read.

    I should have made it clear in the post that I have not read the No-Impact Man book (or the other books mentioned in Kolbert's piece), so I'm not really qualified to comment on whether her criticisms are fair.

    Not surprisingly, Colin Beavan -- No-Impact Man himself -- doesn't think so! Kolbert's main charge is that personal lifestyle changes like his, no matter how committed or extreme, tend to obscure the fact that the big changes needed are collective -- social and political. One person changing doesn't amount to much.

    Beavan wrote me to protest that a) he agrees with Kolbert's point entirely, b) his book actually contains a whole section toward the end about volunteering for NGOs and going to lobby Congress, and c) he has consistently used his platform to push for social action. One of Beavan's supporters also mounts a convincing defense in this post. It does seem that, whatever you could say about the other books in Kolbert's review, she did seem to squeeze Beavan into a box to make a point, a box in which he doesn't really belong.

  • Faux-Thoreaus take blows

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

    Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago

    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.

  • Field of Nightmares

    A conversation with climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert 3

    Posted 3 years, 7 months ago

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