The Mission: A Year Without Any Environmental Impact In NYC

NO IMPACT MAN: A Year without harming enviroment

Guest author Olivia Lipski tell us about an incredible project. The Mission? To have no net impact on the environment for an entire year. The Goal: To have no net harm on the environment, while – let’s not forget – living in the middle of New York City.

Wait a minute… what does that mean exactly? That’s impossible!!!” you might say.
Well, it was possible, and to prove it, there’s even a popular 2009 documentary.

So, to recap, the rules of the experiment were:

• Produce no trash asides from compost
• Purchase no goods asides from food grown locally
• Use no carbon-based transportation
• Use no paper product

That means that Colin, or “No Impact Man,” and his family lived a life of no soda cans, no toilet paper, no elevators, no take-out Chinese food, no subways, no new clothes, no TV, no air conditioning, no meat, no cosmetics—and that’s not even half of it!

Place yourself in the shoes of “No Impact Man” for a moment.

Imagine your typical Monday morning. You wake up, but not to your alarm clock—because you don’t have a phone. You can’t listen to the news—because there’s no computer, no TV, no radio, not even a newspaper! You get ready for work with the help of candlelight, because it’s still dark outside. You don’t put on make up because you don’t own any. And when you use the bathroom—there’s no toilet paper. Eventually you run down 10 flights of stairs and you bike to work in the snow, only to be met by another 15 flights of stairs that you have to sprint up because you’re already late.

And that’s just the first 45 minutes of your day.

Many of us cannot even picture a life that resembles this. And to some of us, this probably sounds like hell on earth.

So why did he do it?

On his blog, Colin explains that he could no longer sit around doing nothing.

He believes that if people in cities can’t learn to “reduce their ecological footprint” then the world is “in deep trouble because most of the world’s population now lives in cities.”

Because it’s impossible to have no net impact by restricting consumption and waste output, Colin and his family also took actions to have a positive environmental impact—to offset their “societal ecological debt.” After a year, the family would move forward and keep the parts of their no impact lifestyle that suited them.

Maybe we cannot all be like “No Impact Man.” Maybe we don’t want to be. And maybe we just don’t care about the environment.

But take a second and think about what Colin has to say. Watch the documentary or maybe even read the book. What he and his family are doing, and hoping others will do too, really isn’t that hard. You would be surprised at just how easy it is to negatively impact the environment, and how easily you can adopt a lifestyle that’s a bit more environmentally friendly.

Here are some tips that Colin shared on his blog: “Thirty-one tips for reducing your impact while saving money” If they can do it, and I can do, then you can too.

What “No Impact Man” really wants to teach us is that it is possible to reduce our ecological footprint. And that sometimes, it’s giving up the little things that can make a world of a difference.

And let’s be honest with ourselves for a second—how many of us really want to endure another Polar Vortex???We all know that those pretty blues and purples on the globe above didn’t appear for no reason… Check out this article about how the Polar Vortex may very well be linked to climate change.

Time to start thinking about the choices we make in our daily lives folks. Time to stop wasting energy. Time to be a bit more mindful. Time for us to all be a bit more like Colin Beavan.

If not, Mother Nature may really punish us the next time around.