No Impact Man

No Impact Man documents the year in which writer Colin Beavan and his family attempted to reduce their carbon emissions to zero. They begin by recycling, giving up powered transport (including elevators) and eating only local produce, and work their way up to turning off the electricity in their New York apartment. Along the way Colin becomes a minor celebrity, alternately praised and vilified by an American media that is obsessed with the fact he has made his family give up toilet paper.

These experiments in living occupy a murky area where sincerity and self-promotion bleed into each other, and are inevitably so arbitrary that they succeed or fail on the personality of their protagonist. Sadly, Colin has none of the garrulous humour or charisma of a Morgan Spurlock, and emerges as a control freak with little to say that we don't already know. And he never tells us what he uses instead of toilet paper. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]