No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process

Beavan relates that his wife, Michelle, cannot cook. When they were dating, she made him spaghetti carbonara and forgot to add the egg to the runny sauce and crunchy pasta. Beavan will be the person cooking during the No Impact Man project, and he imagines himself a kind of “Provençal housewife” (51) selecting fresh, unpackaged ingredients and carrying them home in a bag made out of netting as the French do.

His first step is to find a reusable bag. The U.S. lags in this regard, as countries as diverse as Uganda and Ireland had already taxed or restricted plastic bags so that they were no longer widely used. Each year, the author writes, we throw away “4 to 5 trillion plastic bags” around the world: “They are the world’s most ubiquitous consumer item and, not coincidentally, its most pervasive throwaway product” (53). We only recycle “less than 1 percent” of plastic bags, which make up approximately “4 million tons of waste in the United States” (53). They emit poison when burned, and many float away from garbage dumps and wind up in the ocean or on trees. In 1988, marine biologists determined that plastic bags had caused the deaths of leatherback turtles off Long Island.

The problem is that plastic articles are designed to last forever. According to data from the United Nations Environment Program, there are “46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of ocean […] [and]an estimated 100,000” sea turtles, fish, and other animals “starve to death” (54) annually as a result of plastic in their digestive tracts. Subsequently, the plastic bits that plankton-eaters consume wind up in the fish we eat. We have present in our bodies “up to one hundred industrial chemicals” (5%) that were unknown 50 years ago, and these chemicals may result in cancers, reduced fertility, and other issues.

The author ventures out to make his first meal that doesn’t make trash, but he can’t find the fish-net bags anywhere. He runs out of time and winds up ordering takeout rather than making the tofu scramble he had planned. The next day, he brings reusable bags from home and heads to a grocery store that sells unpackaged foods in bulk bins, bringing empty glass jars from home in which to carry the foods. He even weighs the jars ahead of time, but when he gets to the front of the line, the cashier just sighs upon seeing his jars.

Beavan begins to idealize the Menominees after modeling his life on their wood-harvesting philosophy and their ability to take only what the planet can sustain, but he facetiously asks if they have crises of confidence as he does. He wonders how they deal with hardships such as drought or situations when they desire more than the forest can give them.

However, the author has made progress since the cashier at the grocery store scowled at him. For example, his family does not order takeout in plastic containers, and they have cancelled their newspaper subscriptions and haven’t bought anything that has packaging. They’ve toted reusable cups wherever they go and have replaced throwaway items such as Bic pens and plastic razors with reusable ones such as fountain pens and straight razors. He even found a muslin bag so that he doesn’t have to detract its weight from what he buys, and he has befriended the cashier who once scowled at him.

He hits a snag when he wants desperately to get a pizza slice but can’t because of the paper plate, and he must refuse other delicacies like bagels with scallion tofu, Hershey’s Kisses, and popcorn at the movies. He feels that he has to pay the price for environmentally poor decisions others have made, such as putting pizza on paper plates. He’s found Ronnybrook Farm at his farmer’s market that sells milk in reusable glass containers, and other vendors who sell products without packaging or with reusable packaging, but he hates having to deny himself pizza. He wonders if the Menominees feel self-pity as he watches a man in a comfy BMW with Bose speakers who rides through the city while there is a public transportation system.

Michelle arrives home with juice from a juice fast diet in a disposable cup. She is a dedicated fashionista who went on a shopping spree before the No Impact project to find it. Her maternal grandparents had survived the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl, and her family wanted to enjoy their later financial success as a sign of gratitude. The author wonders when our practices will evolve to have sustainable packaging so that people like Michelle can have their juice and celebrate her family’s culture and be sustainable too.

The author enumerates a 14-point list that captures his thought process. He wonders why humans have to exercise “superhuman restraint” (64) to not exhaust the planet’s resources. The idea that people are selfish goes against what the author believes, and he comes to realize that it’s not our desires, but the way the society delivers them, that is the problem. He recalls the Keep America Beautiful (KAB) campaign and finds out that the inventors of the throwaway bottle funded it. To him, this furthers the idea that individuals can solve our planet’s crisis rather than industry. The author writes that before 1900, people didn’t even have trash cans. Everything they generated, such as even old clothes, were regenerated (for example, old clothes were turned into paper) before industrialization began to produce waste products from manufacturing (for example, trees were used to make paper). This means that our corporate culture creates pollution and trash. While other nations such as Germany make producers responsible for their products after their usefulness has been depleted, the U.S. does not. This realization, however, means that corporate culture has to change—which is exceedingly difficult to do. However, people write into his blog with words of wisdom from Hindu writings and the Old Testament to inspire him, and he believes he should go forward.

He writes that of the consumer products we use, “98.5 percent” of the waste is generated in making the product, and “only “1.5 percent” (68) is generated to create what we actually hold in our hands. He thinks consumers can challenge producers to cut the waste they expend on production by 1.5 percent so that we wind up with 3 percent of the manufacturing process in what we hold in our hands. Therefore, because it would double what we need, it would result in cutting down pollution and waste by 50 percent.

Beavan and Michelle talk about their desires growing up. She, the richest kid in Bismarck, North Dakota, wanted to live in a ranch house like “normal” people, while the author wanted the motorboat of the richest kid in his town, Skippy Manchester. He realizes that people always want things, and what they want is a proxy for wanting to feel loved and accepted. We’re willing to buy things to feel accepted.

Michelle decides to give away their 46-inch TV because she realizes they are being controlled by it. Even their 2-year-old daughter, Isabella, has asked to watch Bridezillas. The author writes that we are subjected to “2,000 to 5,000 advertisements” a day about consumption, and he realizes that his TV has been telling him: “To be No Impact Man [...] was to be a loser” (71). He and Michelle give their TV to a family that might have otherwise bought a new one.