No Impact Man Book Review

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Although Colin Beavan started his book, No Impact Man, by realizing that he needed to do something as an individual to better the environment, by the time he was done with his year-long experiment with his family one of his biggest conclusions was that living in an eco-friendly way made life much more enjoyable and also much simpler. The biggest hurdle in finding that life, he claimed, was just going beyond our cultural norm - by abandoning the things that our culture tells us we want, he found out the things that we truly want almost inadvertently. The way he lived after the changes was a better life on both an individual level, often in the form of basic things like getting more sleep, and on a social level - he got to know even his own family far better simply because they took the time to eat together.…show more content…
For him, the first challenge was resetting his mind from the cultural need for the “self-indulgence of the unconscious consumer” to the need to appreciate what we already have for what it is and what we could have if we tried (Beavan 26). Our culture tells us we want new and better, but he argued that if he enjoyed what he had to its full potential he didn’t need anything new. And that was all the mental change it took. Everything from there on out was simply changing old habits into new habits. This is encouraging, because it means that even though the way our culture is now may be unsuited to this lifestyle it isn’t that far away. And the most promising conclusion his argument reached was that our fear of a “green” lifestyle being incredibly restrictive was wrong - he describes how he actually had far more free time and variety in his life having left the constants of television, driving, and other similar “conveniences,” which our culture sees as good but which he argues are actually very monotonous and
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