No Impact Man

We watched "No Impact Man" a few days ago. I was really looking forward to the movie, as I've often thought about the same exact themes in my own life.

I found the movie to be informative, entertaining, but I also fell that it fell short in a number of important ways.

The basic idea of the movie is to ask if it's possible to live in such a way that you produce as little impact as possible on the environment around you. Impact is defined in a number of ways:

• Trash
• Personal transportation (= direct pollution)
• Food transportation, electricity generation (= indirect pollution)
• Buying stuff (= consumer culture, which also leads to direct and indirect pollution)

The movie explores how much we need in order to live a happy life vs. how much we want for the sake of convenience, or because modern society has conditioned us for to want it. The protagonist and his family take some of the following steps to reduce their impact:

• Don't buy new things as much as possible.
• Instead, buy old things that someone else no longer wants.
• For instance, no new clothes, buy all clothes used.
• This reduces direct impact (no packaging trash) and indirect impact (no resources consumed to produce new items).
• This is a reaction to modern consumer culture.
• Reuse things as much as possible.
• For instance, no kleenex (use a handkerchief), no toilet paper (use textile rags that can be washed and reused).
• This is a reaction to the culture of using something once and throwing it away.
• Buy food locally.
• Locally here is defined as a 250 mile radius around NY.
• This is a reaction to the fact that modern agriculture is very oil-intensive: food is produced using fertilizer (generally, oil-derived) and transported from far away (also using oil).
• Stop using electricity.
• Live by sun-light alone, use candles at night.
• Electricity generation is very dirty, more than 50% of electricity in the world today comes from coal.
• Don't drive anywhere.
• Bike or walk.

Overall, the family manages to pull through this year long experiment and find that their life, while radically changed in many ways, was still largely happy and enjoyable. For instance, they traded TV for more quality time with friends and family; they lost weight and got into much better physical shape from eating less sugar-rich highly-processed foods and biking/walking everywhere; and so on.

What the movie did not address, unfortunately, is that such a life-style, while possible, depends on a number of unstated assumptions:

1. Time. You need lots more time to walk everywhere, cook meals from raw materials (as opposed to buying them pre-processed), and so on. In my own life, time is a scarce commodity, even though I'm keenly aware of it and try to budget it carefully.
2. Money. You have to pay the rent, pretty much no matter where you live. The movie hardly explored the fact that the wife had a high-paying job that covered their bills, and allowed the husband to basically not work for a year and stay home to conduct this experiment (with all that entails).
3. Distance. To make such a lifestyle possible, you have to be able to walk or bike reasonable distances to get food, or to go to work, etc. This is possible in NY, since it's one of the densest cities in the world. This may not be possible in a more rural, or even less dense city somewhere else.
4. Luck. Trading the fridge turned out to be very difficult because their food spoiled fast. In my opinion, the family was lucky that they didn't get sick during the second half of the movie. They probably mitigated this by buying their food daily or every other day and not storing it over any length of time. This is possible, but requires even more time investment.

Some of these issues could be addressed by living on a self-sufficient farm -- a mostly closed-loop system that provides for most of your needs, without needing to go outside it for other stuff. It's much less clear to me if an impact-free life is possible in a modern urban environment, especially one that depends on fossil fuel for energy. After all, your food must come from outside the city, and for that you basically need oil for transportation.

Even with these shortcomings, the movie was still entertaining and informative. I liked the fact that the movie took a very optimistic tone and genuinely tried to look at these problems and see what solutions might exist.

The movie also highlighted the fact that one person's actions do matter. Many people get discouraged by the fact that they might be alone in a sea of other people who don't care or are unwilling to change, so why bother? The protagonist answers, and I agree: "Being optimistic [...] is the most radical political act there is."

In terms of our own life, it prompted me to think harder about what other changes could we make to reduce our impact:

• Could we reduce single-use items (like Kleenex, shaving cream cans) in favor of multiple-use items (like handkerchiefs, shaving soap)?
• Could we go to the farmers market down the street every week instead of buying so much packaged food at grocery stores?
• Could we reduce TV/Internet use in favor of other activities?
• Could we buy more stuff used (craigslist, antique stores, etc.) instead of new?

Given where we live and where my job is located, it is unlikely that I will be able to reduce the impact of transportation, at least for the time being. But I remain optimistic.