Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert, a respected New Yorker journalist who writes admirably about issues to do with our climate catastrophe and the environment, wrote a scathing attack on my book, No Impact Man. Sadly, casualties on the battlefield of Kolbert's wrath included not only me, but also the work of James McKinnen and Alisa Smith (authors of 100 Mile Diet), Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden) and other writers who used their own experiments in alternative lifestyles as narrative vehicles to, hopefully, propel into the popular discourse vital cultural issues that transcend the particularities of their experiments.
McKinnen and Smith wrote about their year of eating locally as a means of publicizing--and very successfully--the tremendous failings of our centralized, industrialized food system in delivering healthy food to people in a way the planet can sustain. Thoreau, of course, attempted to use his year in the woods to bring to our attention the diminishing adherence to any sort of transcendent human values as we veered into unmitigated materialism in the wake of the industrial revolution.
Kolbert dismisses these writers and others as something similar to renegade circus clowns who are distracting attention from the Big Top. She derides the use of the year-long-living "stunt" as a distraction from the important environmental and social issues at hand, which she presumably believes are discussed more effectively in her own books. And her work does, of course, have tremendous value.
Indeed, it is Kolbert's deep concern for our planetary climate crises that I suspect--or at least I hope--is at the root of her stridency. She wants attention focused squarely on the dimensions of the crisis and the necessity for swift and effective solutions. Her priorities are correct in this regard and I admire her for them.
Where Kolbert is deeply wrong, I'm afraid, is that it is she herself who has become the cause of the major distraction of the moment. In her extremely powerful position as a top climate journalist, she wasted four pages in one of the nation's most highly regarded magazines to attack my and my colleagues works as "stunts." The ripple effect, in sections of the environmental blogosphere at least, has been a distraction from the important message delivered in my and the other writers' works. Instead of a discussion of the merits of what we have to say, bloggers on both side of this meaningless debate discuss whether we have the right to say it.
This is neither to suggest that there should be no differences of opinion nor to seem ungrateful to those who have publicly defended my honor.
It is to say that Exxon, the coal industry, and the thousands of their lobbyists slithering through halls of Congress with their campaign-contribution checkbooks rub their hands together with glee at this kind of in-fighting by people who should be on the same side. After all, Kolbert's using four pages to attack her fellow environmental writers is four pages less that she could have used to convince the public of the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuel and that we could have a better way of life without it.
Indeed, it is this--the possibility of real progress in this area--rather than Kolbert's misguided emphasis that I want to address. Whether my book No Impact Man and the companion documentary of the same title are remembered as the stories of a stunt or not is ultimately immaterial. Of course, as a writer and a person, it hurts to be trivialized, but the truth is that No Impact Man is both a stunt and not a stunt. Because my hope in living and writing about my year was to put myself in a crucible in which to examine some important cultural issues surrounding our solutions to our environmental crises and the quality of life crisis which is so closely related to them. And yes, I hoped to popularize these important issues.
What issues do I mean? There are three.
First, is it just possible that the meme is wrong that suggests that a culture that it aligns itself with the needs of its habitat will have to be less aspirational and somehow deprive itself? My answer, having lived the no impact year, is a categorical yes. Taking the local eating element of the project alone meant we were healthier because our food was fresh and real. And this was just one of the benefits my family experienced by living environmentally. Examining the possibility of environmental living on a cultural level, it makes sense to me that a renewable energy industry established to align ourselves with the needs of our habitat will also create an economic boost that will provide jobs. I call this sort of synergy the "happier planet, happier people" principle.
Second, is there a place for individual and community-based action in the quest for a more sustainable culture--or must we depend upon and wait until government and industry do something through the pressure of collective action? The sad fact is that the level of change required cannot be created by government alone. Our climate crisis is so profound that we must not only change the way we transport ourselves and create energy, we must reduce how much we use as people. That means changing the way we live. This is not only my own conclusion but that of the International Panel on Climate Change.
Third, is it just possible that, by encouraging people to change their lifestyles for the benefit of themselves--by reducing their expenditures, say--and the environment, we might also be creating an on-ramp for the masses into the politics of environmentalism? To this I answer with a pointed yes. People's politics are informed by the way they live. A victim of a drunk driving is more likely to be an advocate for drunk driving laws. A person who experiences the benefits of environmental living is more likely to advocate for climate change mitigation from either side of the political aisle.
No one will be surprised to hear that I believe most vehemently that I am right in these points. Indeed I have started a non profit project intended to advance them (NoImpactProject.org). Still, I could be wrong. I wish it was the rightness or the wrongness of these points that Kolbert had chosen to discuss. In doing so, she would have advanced a meaningful discussion rather than the silly stunt vs not stunt debate.
Kolbert's mistaken approach is nonetheless instructive. It reminds us that those who care about these issues shouldn't attack each other. We should respect each other's differences while understanding that we all hope to advance the same agenda. That is the only way we can hope for change in the very little time we have to affect it.
Katherine Goldstein: No Impact Man: The Movie Everyone Is Talking About (VIDEO)
You may have heard something about No Impact Man or you may have heard about the guy who was going to live in New York...
This week will give people the opportunity to examine and reduce their ecological footprint by taking part in a short and intense period of conscious consumption supported by local and online communities.
to say that the new yorker wasted our time is just another example of your over-inflated (and misplaced) eco-ego-warriorism.
Yes, it would be great if we could all buy say an electric or hybrid car but
is it affordable?
Not really...unless you still have a job.
Basically, it's up to our government to set the standards...
That's what governments do....do things that individuals can't do themselves.
If you look at Spaceweather.com for September 6, 2009 you will see a couple of paragraphs and
graphs showing Global Surface Temperature, Surface Temperature Components and Anthropogenic
Influence. The data are in and it shows what is really happening..
http://spaceweather.com/
The data shows that the Solar Cycle has little to do with global warming caused by Greenhouse gases.
AND there is evidence that may indicate that we are going into a time of a reduced solar cycle and if that is the case then there will be cooler temps for a while.
In short: A movie I'm not going to twice? "Inconvenient Truth." A movie I'd enjoy seeing again, "No Impact Man."
Showing people you can live like a cave-man is not going to help the environment. It scares people away and weakens the public support for important policy positions like cap and trade, emissions standards, gasoline tax, etc. AND it scares people away from chipping in and doing things that can actually help (like purchasing a more fuel efficient car, thus increasing demand for such products).
If it takes 90 days to change behavior, one year of living "a stunt" will yield a lot of permanent lifestyle modifications.
Part of a local challenge was to COOK for 90 days. We could eat the cooking of our peers, but not restaurants, prepared items, etc. -- and no boxed mixes. I learned how to make crackers, bread, pasta, cake, all from scratch. I learned to make enough pasta to freeze a month's worth. I run my own business and don't have tons of leisure time, but I worked it out, traded with friends, and compared my credit card receipts. In three months of NOT eating out, I saved over $3200, lost 11 pounds without trying, cut my grocery bills by 1/3, made better friends with people I had gotten used to emailing all the time.
Clients enjoyed coming over for a sandwich of home-cooked goods on freshly baked bread (I did eventually get a breadmaker) or over homemade pasta.
That was a year ago and It changed my behavior and outlook.
Your 90-day effort, on principal, seem ludicrous, with the exception that the experience gave you greater appreciation for the art of cooking.
And one thing that few people want to address is the issue of population growth. Around the world, it has to be addressed through birth control. In this country, it is immigration that is fueling our growth from the present 305 million to over 420 million by 2050. This is not a good thing. Every gain we make on reducing pollution and greenhouse gases is negated by a corresponding increase in our population.
I have never understood how a person who purports to be 'green' could ever consider having more than two children. Moreover, one child per family, worldwide, for two or three generations would bring the global population close to the level where many of the environmental problems we face today would disappear or be much easier to solve.
If we don't limit our population ourselves, nature will do it by starvation, thirst, disease &c.
The definition of "stunt," by the way, is : "something unusual done to attract attention." I'd say that fits you and your book, regardless the degree of respect you do or don't deserve for pulling it. As you say above, your whole purpose was to popularize the subject, to make people talk.
Anyway, people shouldn't fixate on the word "stunt." The important issue -- the one Kolbert correctly raised -- is whether your stunt teaches us important things. Does it draws our attention properly to the heart of what you say you're trying to expose. Here, Kolbert's role as a critic is to judge that. Not to "attack" you, as you're wailing above. But to give readers the benefit of her own expertise and a real context in which to understand your work.
Her point -- and one should read the essay before taking any blogger's word about its message -- seemed to me to be that stunts like Colin's might provide entertaining catharsis, but they also send an unhelpful, quietly hypocritical message. Kolbert is like the grown-up entering the room to deliver the dose of reality that everyone needs :
Living weird can sell books, but it can't save the world.
So what if your effort started out as an experiment and an opportunity to write a book. I'm sure that you're experiment has positively changed your life, permanently led to a reduction of your consumption, and potentially could lead others to follow your lead.
I don't know about the lobbyists, but I'm sure gleeful at the in-fighting. I love how you guys get louder and louder and shriller and shriller as people become so darn BORED with the whole "The Sky is Falling!!" cannard you keep pushing.
Ecomomy, War, Healthcare AND we're going through a period of global cooling! Go sale crazy somewhere else, we are waaaay too stocked up here.