I found this 2009 title laying on a coworker's desk and borrowed it. The basic idea is that this typical upper middle class family with a two year old daughter, living in Manhattan, tries to go a whole year while having zero net impact on the environment.
If you are smitten with the environmental vibe that MMM gives off, this book will float your boat. It is arguably all of the same ideals the site preaches, minus the dollars emphasis. It's about reducing your footprint and learning to love a life that is less driven by consumption and technology and more focused on family and community. I suspect that our host himself read this book before forming the MMM character that writes the blog posts.
Their no impact journey includes making substantial changes in their life to reduce their environmental footprint as much as possible.
This means no motorized transportation. No cars, subways, taxis, or elevators. They bike and walk.
They only eat "locally grown" food that's in season. They pay a premium, buy almost everything from their local farmers market, and learn to cook all of their own meals.
They stop producing trash. They don't buy any packaging of any sort. They give up toilet paper and tampons and disposable diapers.
They don't buy anything new. They spend a lot of money in thrift/antique stores and flea markets.
They don't use electricity. They buy beeswax candles from their farmers market, and generally go to bed when it gets dark.
They turn off their heat. They live in an apartment building so this doesn't seem to matter much, as they effectively just leach from their neighbors.
They volunteer with local environmental organizations to offset the impacts they cannot avoid, like planting trees and picking up other people's trash.
Basically, this guy's idea was to blog about the experience and then make money by publishing a book about his experiment. Someone also made a documentary about his family, which you can watch on Netflix if you're interested.
I thought much of it was kind of publicity-seeking shenanigans, like claiming no impact while stealing ice from their neighbors to keep the kid's milk from spoiling, and continuing to use their stove and oven to cook, and exempting their caffeine addiction from their locally grown criteria. They clearly cheated on several fronts.
On the other hand, some of the book is genuinely philosophical. For example, there's a good discussion about whether or not it makes sense to turn off your electricity given that access to power and access to clean water and sanitation go hand in hand for most of the world. Starving families in Sudan arguably need to increase their environmental footprint, not limit it. But the book is an attempt to see what they can comfortably live without, so he tries it.
He said the hardest part of the whole thing was washing his family's clothes manually. He found they could live without their hot water heater and their stereo and their dishwasher, but the washing machine turned out to be the one appliance that introduced the most misery into his life by its absence.
He also talks a lot about the benefits of the lifestyle. They both lost weight, through some combination of taking the stairs and cooking all of their own food. They became better parents, by devoting more time to their daughter. They connected with their local farmers, and a commmunity of likeminded people who are environmentally conscious.
He closes by conceding that individual actions are not going to save the planet; his family alone cannot make that big of a difference. But he argues that many great things are accomplished by people who know their contribution is minimal, and asks readers to decide whether or not they are the kind of person who willingly contributes to the problem, or the kind of person who is at least willing to try to change it.
I give it a B+. Worth a read if you're into the environmental side of mustachianism.
his blog:
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
