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No Impact Man

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Submitted By khalan
Words 1032
Pages 5
Khalan King
Professor Tate
English 20
10/12/2012

No Impact Man
Today environmentalists have been looking for new ways to live sustainably that would help people be more eco-friendly and help our planet. In Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, Beavan and his family take on a year-long project to prove that one can live comfortably while being carbon-neutral and experience positive aspects of life. Beavan’s motivations for the project including guilt, health, and family, fueled his desire to change the world as a whole at the beginning of the project, but near the end of the project her realized he should first start small by changing himself individually and the community around him to be more eco-friendly.
Wasting energy, creating trash, and contributing to the negative effects of environment gave Beavan a sense of “guilt” about the way he was living his life. In No Impact Man, Beavan states, “the paper towel represented his throwaway lifestyle. It represented the fact that we are trashing the planets resources for conveniences that turn out not to be that convenient (49).” During the Project he and his family found sustainable ways to overcome some of these conveniences by reusing items such as jars and handkerchiefs. Many of these conveniences that Beavan had given up were not easy for him due to his obsession with the incidentals of life before the No Impact Man project, but the desire to change his life due to guilt had pushed him to continue. Near the end of the project Beavan felt guilty for wanting the project to come to an end and worried that he will convert back to his old way of life before the No Impact Man project. At the end of the project Beavan had come to a realization that he and the world are not perfect, and therefore will not be perfect environmentalist. He felt that no matter how hard people tried, they can only limit their consumption of

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