NEW YORK — Colin Beavan sat under the light of a single bulb, freaking out.
Along with his wife and young daughter, he had just spent a year trying to reduce their net environmental impact to almost zero.
With a flip of a switch, they had cut their Manhattan apartment off from the electrical grid. They had stopped using anything disposable or buying anything new. In a city of skyscrapers, they had given up elevators. They went everywhere by bicycle, bought food directly from local farmers, had even sworn off toilet paper.
It had been a year of rules, a year in which nearly every aspect of their lives had been shaped by what they were not allowed to do.
And now it was over.
So Beavan sat at home. If he had to get up to go to the bathroom, he would walk to the other room and turn on the light there — and then run back to turn off the first light. He just couldn’t let himself light up more than one bulb at once. He walked around the apartment unplugging things.
Beavan’s experiment with the extreme had played out in public. He blogged about it on his site “No Impact Man” (which begat a book under the same name, published last month, and a documentary).
But now, like so many of us who are grappling with a growing awareness of the dangers faced by the planet and the damage our lifestyles cause, Beavan and his family were faced with the challenge of finding their own middle ground.
With the years of excess that came before and their year of simplicity behind them, how would they choose to live?
Beavan and his wife, Michelle Conlin, didn’t want to set any more rules for themselves. After all the restrictions, they wanted to finally let it all go and see what felt right.
Mostly, they stuck to buying their food at the farmer’s market. But if they were short on groceries after a late night at work, they would stop at the supermarket — despite the packaging on the food, despite the distance it had traveled.
While the amount of garbage they produced increased from a single quart every four days to five gallons, this was a far cry from the 90 gallons they produced before the experiment. The refrigerator is back on, but the freezer is gone.
They started buying olive oil and some seasonings, even though they’re not made nearby.
They began saying yes when friends invited them out to dinner.
And they started using toilet paper again — but now it was made from recycled paper.
As Beavan sees it, it’s just like a graph he sketched during the year of no impact.
With either extremely high or low resource use, quality of life was poor. But there was a virtual sweet spot, right at the peak, when they had enough to be happy but not so much that they were weighed down.
Since the year ended and left them to their own devices, they have been trying to find a way to get back to that point.
