Whole Story

what a fantastic concept- like the man who lived biblically, or the woman who abandoned buying goods from China, these explorers give us a glimpse of the thousands of ways we can embrace ourselves and be better partners with our selves, our community, and our earth. I only watched the trailer but plan to see the movie soon!

I thought No Impact man was great. His wife really had to give up everything that made her life easy to follow this idea. I think more people should try it, maybe not go the full year, just start out with a week and add more if they can. I think he had a great idea and the fact that it work but was hard showed the reality of doing an experiment. He was living everyday fresh. Going to local markets to get food, throwing out the television, not only did he save electric, but he lost weight and gained more time with his family. Amazing movie more people should watch.

I thought it brought up some points I could adopt & some I already do (like cloth grocery bags). Like stated before me, I don't live in NYC, so I have to drive to most places. The movie is interesting though, in that it makes you think.

I think it would be very interesting to watch and get some ideas from, we take so much for granted everyday. I try so hard to change small things, I never even thought of getting rid of papertowels and how much of an impact that small change would make. I would never be able to give up my cosmetics though... ever.

I would describe this documentary as fresh and different! Purely on an entertainment level, it was satisfying. If I had a choice, I would have even watched a sequal. The best part is, that I learned a thing or two, and found that I now have a wider awarness of things. I hope to find more documetaries like this.

Colin's wife made the movie for me! Her struggles adjusting to the new lifestyle really resonated with me. I loved it when she snuck down to Starbucks for a quadruple espresso and felt her pain when she realized giving up toilet paper was part of the deal. I've already recommended the documentary to a number of friends. Although it's not realistic to expect most people to adopt as many green changes as this family did, it does remind us that there are many small changes we can make that can effect big change.

While I learned a few things that I didn't already know about how to live with no impact, I found the film to be unsatisfying. It was great to see his wife come around to the life style, but to watch her suffer wasn't fun. They clearly have some issues to work out together that maybe shouldn't have been on camera. As the wife says, it's called 'no impact man' but includes the whole family. I think it would have been better if it was just one man. He makes a great point about one thing; It's not about taking away everything that makes an impact, it's about figuring out how to have the same things, with less impact. His main example was the solar panel. This, to me, should have been the main message of the film. Being an environmentally conscious person myself, it's become apparent that people are not going to lessen their "need" for convenience. We need to put out brains and money into coming up with no impact ways of doing things rather than taking things away. The experiment, while being a great idea, was a bit far fetched. Though, I gave the film 3 stars on netflix (it's streaming right now, btw), I hope that 'no impact man' will make a great impact on people, for the better.

Thanks for letting us know about this film; it sounds really interesting and inspiring. I liked in the end, when they talk about other ways they can look at the year, ie other benefits that they've had.

I stumbled upon this book via Business Week. I have a subscription, and there was an article in one of my issues that was written by the wife of the author, Michelle Conlin. Conlin is an editor at Business Week, but was also a willing, but sometimes not an entirely enthusiastic, participant in Beavan's No Impact Project. I could say that the purpose of the project was to reduce this particular family's carbon footprint to almost zero, but that would be oversimplifying, and would minimize the dozens of other equally important goals that one can find in this book. I love, love, love this book. And I am not even a liberal, but this book offers such a wide spectrum of information, knowledge, and tried-and-true applications for living the eco-life, that the reader is bound to find several points with which to identify regardless of where one falls politically. Beavan was brave and honest about what he was able to accomplish, where he believes that he fell short, and what was reasonable and unreasonable to expect from his wife and young child as they charted this year-long course together. I feel that Beavan was more than straightforward about the fact that this project was a little more difficult in some of the phases than he had originally anticipated, but he and his wife soldiered on and discovered, at least for themselves, what their personal limits were in each of the stages of the project. Bravo to Conlin, for giving her husband a wide berth on those rare occasions, when Beavan himself, thought that he might have gone too far in the name of rule-following rigidity. I was inspired by the original article in Business Week(written by Conlin), and I was twice as inspired by this gem of a book(by Beavan). I am am so thrilled that I asked for it for Christmas(thanks, Honey!), because it is worthy of rereading again and again. I have already made changes as a result of reading this book, but No Impact Man's greatest value is that it causes the reader to think differently about the deeper issues, and how one's life might better reflect the values that one supposedly holds. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

Following the film I was left with excitement for the change that this family experienced together. Not only did they grow individually, but the whole family took it upon themselves to create change. If each one of us did our small part by eradicating some of the extraneous habits we all have, imagine how quickly our waste would go down. I live in Seattle right now and the amount of trash I create has decreased significantly because the city has yard waste containers that are alongside your recycling bin. I hope that each city in America will begin their own compost in order to give back to the Earth instead of creating a landfill that will do no good for anyone.

Loved the trailer, must see the movie.