Kolbert writes, “Even during the year that Beavan swiss replica watches spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his …. What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middleclass family.” She concludes by noting that if he were sincere about agitating for change, he’d take a train to Albany to have a word with his Congressman.Beavan never pretends his plan is anything but contrived. The typically longwinded title of his first chapter, How A Schlub Like Me Gets Mixed Up in a Stunt Like This, says as much. Sure, he found his calling and ecoconscience because he needed a book deal.
So did Thoreau. But give Beavan this: He doesn’t fold, quits the subway car and airport and elevator, and berates his wife for reading the New York Times, which is, of course, made up of felled trees and swiss replica watches shipped around with fossil fuels. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux printed and shipped 75,000 copies in the book’s first run, but, hey, a man’s gotta eat—turnips and cabbage, to be specific.) I found the book occasionally funny but often cloying. (I havent seen the movie.) The author comes off like the guy on the college lawn camped out to raise awareness for wronged Tibetan monks who knows that what he’s doing is perhaps a little silly. A committed, postmodern stuntman. But it’s worth noting that the extremely smart and wellorganized 350.org movement—a mass demonstration taking place October 24 led by McKibben plus the likes of Conrad Anker and the Dalai Lama—is in essence a big, wellorganized stunt that will hopefully work very well.
Sure, McKibben and co are advocating worldwide energy policy change, not toilet and tamponfree living. But the Beavan family shows us how far a person who has a conscience and happens to live in a city can and can’t go. Should we deride replica brand watches someone for trying to better himself? No. Should we criticize him once he foists his stunt on us in a book and in theaters across the country? That strikes me as a fair question. Chime in, readers: Is the No Impact Man experiment public service or selfaggrandizing gimmickry writ large? —Abe Streep
