Week+1

** 8th September 2011 **
 * Week 1 **

** NO IMPACT DOCUMENTARY QUESTIONS **

**1.** **List the ways in which “No Impact Man” changes his family’s lifestyle.** (i) Colin Beavan and his family take the stairs in order to avoid consuming electricity in an elevator. (ii) They do not consume soda cans, or water in plastic bottles, toilet paper, and throw-away plastic razors. (iii) They do not purchase any new products or clothing and have cancelled their magazine subscriptions. (iv) They do not take the aeroplane, or subway or taxis, or use the television anymore. (v) They only purchase food and vegetables from local farmers and organic farms. They stopped buying processed and canned foods. (vi) They do not drink coffee anymore or buy meat because they are not completely natural products and harm animals. (vii) The buy worms and make their own compost at home and started growing vegetables in a patch of land. (viii) Michelle Beavan rides to work on a Scooty for kids and has stopped using cosmetics.

**2.** **Describe which of the family’s actions made the most significant impact in achieving Bevan’s goals.** It was part of Colin Beavan’s goal to lead a healthier lifestyle in addition to reducing carbon emissions and consuming less toxic products for the environment. I believe that he did achieve this goal with the improvement of his lifestyle, the careful monitoring of what he cooked, and purchased at the supermarket or farmer’s market. His family’s diet and his level of exercise changed drastically and resulted in him losing 20 pounds that year without having to go to the gym once. His wife also reversed her pre-diabetic condition with their new pattern of consumption or rather lack of.

**3.** **Beavan traces much of our wasteful culture back to consumerism and the “hedonic treadmill,” the notion that there is always something better out there than what was just purchased.** **Can you identify purchases or habits in your own life that fit this psychological profile?** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**What consumer products truly improve your life? What are the true necessities?** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**What could you do without altogether?** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Beavan is aware of the fact that consumer culture depends heavily on disposable products that have a limited shelf life and need to be bought again and again. For the sake of convenience, manufacturers have compromised quality and have therefore become major contributors to the world’s landfills. All items that are for one-time use or limited use are products that we need to do without. Ziploc bags, disposable shaving blades, plastic bottles, coffee cups, disposable cleaning gloves, ball-point pens, etc., are everyday items that I purchase and lead to a lot of physical waste. If I was to invest in glass or durable plastic containers, or shaved the way Colin Beavan did, bought a flask instead of coffee cups and plastic bottles, bought rubber gloves for cleaning or refillable fountain pens or pencils, I might be able to reduce my consumption level. I could do without plastic bags altogether. I try to not get them from the store, but if I’m not charged for them, I do not hesitate to use them. I could reuse them instead or buying trash bags perhaps. Nothing is really necessary. There is always another way to do something or other tools that you could use to do a job. I think plastic products we could do without altogether. There are always other materials to take its place.

<span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**4.** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**Beavan runs into many situations in //No Impact Man// regarding the profusion of packaging waste: paper or plastic at the grocery store, paper plates at the pizza joint, delivery in Styrofoam clamshells.** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**How much packaging waste do you accumulate? How does your community manage landfills and recycling programs?** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**Should it be up to individuals, businesses, or governments to reduce waste?** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I live in a house of 4 and we generate about 1 large trash bag of plastic waste everyday on average. Being students we are dependent heavily on plastic containers, bottles and paper cups, etc. All our groceries are wrapped in plastic, Styrofoam and plastic casing. Even the cutlery we pick up from the cafeteria is plastic. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Our community on campus is encouraged to separate the organic from the recyclable and dispose of it in the garbage room. A truck comes to pick up the bulk of it at the end of the week and the sorting is left to a third party. There are a number of recycling bins located around campus alongside waste bins for the individual bits of plastic and paper but there is no mass separation that takes place during garbage disposal on campus. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I believe recycling should be in the hands of the government because individuals are not immediately concerned with their impact on the environment, and businesses have other agendas as well as a profit motive. The urgency required as well as the resources to successfully reduce waste and keep a check on consumption lies with the government and its legislation. It’s not a question of educating people anymore; it’s about taking positive action. I feel that this can only happen through the government.

<span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** 5. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** Beavan’s experiment took green living to an extreme. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** If you were to choose just **** a few of his actions to implement in your own life, what would they be? Which **** conveniences or behaviors should society change in order to reduce our collective **** environmental impact? ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I would try to buy local and seasonal food since I believe the health aspect of it to be extremely important. I do not think I could forfeit coffee though. I would try to walk to work or cycle if it was an option and the weather permitted. I would also not use plastic bottles and bags. Growing vegetables is not an easy thing to do given the availability of land, the resources needed to grow the plants and the gestation period.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I believe that the biggest impact could be made if we stopped using disposable goods. Advertisers and manufacturers make convenience and time-saving the most important of our values, but it is this misconception that makes us buy cheap and easily storable products that we need not take care of. This principle has now switched to the telecommunications industry and we find that cell phones and cars can be disposed of and swapped for better, newer models. This is the area that we need to work on most.

<span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**6.** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**Happiness forms a theme in //No Impact Man//.** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**Would you be happier if you slowed down, dispensed with the instant conveniences, and did more things the old fashioned way?** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 9pt;">**What are your options for slowing down? What holds you back?** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I would have a sense of satisfaction if I had gown my own vegetables or done something independently that I would have relied on someone else for. But in today’s world people don’t have the time to do everything themselves. If there was an alternative way to do things that required less emissions and it was popularized then it would definitely catch on. What limits me is the need to be quick and efficient. In between class and work its easier to just use pasta sauce then actually make the sauce from scratch with natural ingredients. It saves time and that’s the hook for disposable and ready-made goods.

<span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** 7. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** Colin Beavan’s experiment is similar to Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn to Walden Pond in the mid-nineteenth century. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** Is it human nature to want a simpler life (Thoreau craved it before the Industrial Revolution), or is it natural to want to be a consumer? ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** What difference did it make when Thoreau decided to remove himself from society, while Beavan consciously remained an active part of his community? ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** How would the No Impact experiment look in a rural location? What were the challenges and benefits of performing the experiment in New York City, or Toronto? ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I think its human nature to want to be a part of the system and use the most efficient means to own's ends. Right now, society and urban lifestyle requires us to produce results in a short amount of time and the way we do things follows that pattern. If a new way of doing things is going to be put into place it needs to be able to deliver the same way as the previous. People would be ready to take on a simple life or be a rapid consumer based on this ability to still be functional and a part of society. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Beavan realized the futility of the experiment if he had escaped the environment of consumption in New York. He also wanted to show how it was possible to manage such a lifestyle whilst being in the thick of things. Thoreau did not address this and as a result had to deal with tax evasion when he got back from his experiment in the wilderness. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I feel that if the No Impact project was conducted in a rural place, they would not have been met with so much skepticism and perhaps there might have been people who would adopt their lifestyle and learn from them, seeing as they lived healthier and cheaper. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I think the biggest benefit to the project's location is that it poses a real challenge. Being in one of the most industrialized, busy cities of the world makes the challenge unquestionable if proven successful. It illustrates how someone living in a big city can be green and healthy despite being in an unhealthy, unsupportive environment.

<span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** 8. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** For most people, giving up a car would be a complicated life change. Impact Man aspires to give up all fossil-fuel transportation. ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** What would be your biggest adjustments if you sold your car, gave up taxis, buses, trains, and planes, and commuted entirely by bike or on foot? What would spur you to do this? What would the drawbacks be? ** <span style="color: #66a6ff; font-family: Georgia,serif;">** The Alliance for Biking and Walking (www. peoplepoweredmovement.org) has great tips for making this change, including how **** to create communities that are practical and safe for bicyclists and pedestrians. Is it possible to do this in the Mississauga/Oakville area? ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I would only give up the use of a car, train, bus and taxi if it was possible to get to my work place or school by bike. If special bike lanes and side streets were constructed to make distances shorter between two points in the city, I believe it would be more incentive to walk or cycle about. Cheaper bikes and equipment, more stores catering to their maintenance, benefits and other reward systems would definitely inspire a shift from fuel consumption to biking. Offices and school, as well as buildings and malls should have bikes racks, direct access to the building and perhaps facilities to smarten up after a long bike ride before work at the office. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Drawbacks would only occur if the population was split and there was still an abundance of cars jeopardizing the safety of bikers/ skaters, pedestrians, etc. Also automobile lobbyists as well as petrol companies might pose huge challenges to this effort. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">I believe that this change is possible as long as the government and infrastructure in Mississauga and Oakville compliment the system and not just preach it.