Could you get along without your car?
Are you willing to eat nothing but dusty root vegetables all winter long?
Will you walk up nine flights of stairs to avoid drawing electricity with the elevator? And would you do that holding a toddler for the climb?
Will you give up the fresh laundry that comes from machines, and the convenient throwaway diapers, and the mid-February fresh strawberry to break up the gloom, or the cup of coffee to get you going in the morning?
These are the questions posed by a fascinating documentary called “No Impact Man,” which will have everyone from the environmentally righteous teenagers to the tricycling toddlers in your family debating what they can live without.
“No Impact Man” follows the apparently sincere stunt of New Yorker Colin Beavan, who wanted to put his environmental ideals to the test. He tried for a year to reduce his impact on the Earth as radically as possible, well beyond the fashionable trend of eating local food. He tried to eliminate electrical use, carbon-based transportation, garbage of any sort . . . you name it, he pondered it and tried to stop it.
But Beavan wasn’t in on this alone, and this is where your own family debates will mirror the squabbles on the screen. Beavan has an articulate wife who is game to try but human in her reactions to new deprivations; they also have a young child, adding on layers of guilt and contingency planning about everything from diapers to cornmeal mush.
Their discussions are intense. Wife Michelle Conlin was an admitted shopaholic with a demanding magazine job; at one point she begs for some caffeine (coffee: not local) to get her through a big editing assignment over a weekend. Beavan may occasionally come across as a scold, but these ideas are important — take an amorphous concept like “environmentalism” to its logical conclusion, and see how life really has to change.
Rated: Not rated, with some crude language and frank discussions of body functions; some confrontational marriage scenes.
Best suited for: Anybody favoring or skeptical of recent low-impact environmental movements; students of family dynamics.
