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No Impact Man. By Colin Beavan. $25.00. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 288 Pages. No Impact Man
by Colin Beavan

A “liberal schlub” attempts to live in New York without a carbon footprint for a year.

Many strive—but few succeed—to minimize their carbon footprints. But now Colin Beavan has published No Impact Man about his attempt to live in New York City for a year with as little net impact on the environment as possible. The idea came about when Beavan simply got tired of listening to people complain about the world without doing anything about it. “I had mobilized my intellectual and persuasive resources to get someone else to change her behavior,” Beavan writes, “and remained, I saw, utterly complacent about my own.” The goal of the project was to improve the quality of his life, draw attention to issues of environmental sustainability, and help the planet. And, not surprisingly, Beavan has attracted a lot of buzz as a result: His documentary on the same subject debuted to acclaim at Sundance, he was named one of MSN’s Ten Most Influential Men of 2007, and Columbia Pictures is planning a feature film on the book. Wrote Publisher’s Weekly of the book: “While few readers will be tempted to go to Beavan's extremes, most will mull over his thought-provoking reflections and hopefully reconsider their own lifestyles.”