On the Eco-Stunts

Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent New Yorker commentary on the vogue of “eco-stunt” books is worth reading. It helped me clarify an obscure but persistent discomfort I have with certain trimmings of the Green Movement: these “eco-stunt” books can seem self-promoting, smug, short-sighted, and ultimately ineffective as agents of social change; they’re about the hip eco-consciousness of their writers, rather than about the environment. Yet Kolbert overlooks their gentle redemptive gleam: yes, “eco-stunt” books contribute to the new trendiness of Green, but despite the vanity inherent to such fads, this one is not - we hope - in vain.

"Eco-stunt” books are those books describing the authors’ crazy, nouveau-Thoreauvian “experiments,” such as eating only self- and locally-grown food , divesting from fossil fuels, adopting daily “green” resolutions for a year, etc. The authors are often yuppies with your standard-issue guilty conscience of well-educated and moderately affluent American liberals (yes, I know, I fit this description exactly…), and they’re naturally eager to grab a share of the only literary celebrity our culture begrudgingly continues to grant. So they get a gimmick, package themselves and their social progressivism into something that might titillate attention-deficit readers, and write a blog that will eventually evolve into a book, which they’ll energetically promote on a tour whose fossil fuel wake they’ll counterbalance with high-profile carbon offsetting.

Kolbert begins her essay with the story of the genesis of one of the latest eco-stunt books, Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process: Back in 2006, Beavan wanted to write a book “about what’s important,” and some coeds flaunting bare arms in Manhattan in January helped him pin down the content of this elusively vague subject. Global warming! Impending environmental doom! Seasonally-inappropriate clothing and pastimes (but maybe this is not such a bad thing)! Since his agent thought the theme was a downer that wouldn’t sell books, Beavan came up with the stunt by which to cloak the environmental agenda: he and his family would spend a year shaving their environmental impact down to zero, at least in terms of their diet and domestics.

This means no disposable diapers for the Beavan baby. It means no plastic bags, or bags of chips, or milk cartons. The family works up to shutting off the electricity in their apartment, they abjure the building’s elevator and use the stairs every time they travel between their 9^th floor apartment and the sidewalk. They don’t consume foods or beverages shipped from faraway (which means no coffee for Beavan’s poor, neuralgic wife), don’t buy newspapers, and Beavan even encourages this valiant wife to forgo tampons.

Of course, having money and living in a leaky society whose excess energy you can easily soak in are two important assets to the Beavan Clan’s elected deprivation. Their apartment building is poorly insulated, so they stay plenty warm off of their neighbor’s heating during winter months. Beavan pays the fee to belong to the Writer’s Room near Astor Place, where he can plug in his laptop and connect to the wireless; his wife can get her technological fixes at her midtown BusinessWeek office; and while the parents work, baby Isabella spends wayward days luxuriating in the electricity at the sitter’s apartment.

In fairness, I think we should forgive the Beavan experiment for these inescapable lapses. Other literary eco-stunts have run aground by conceding the inevitable pitfalls and compromises, and at least in Beaven we witness no blinding hypocrisies like flying across North America to participate in an environmentalist bike trip. There are nonetheless some serious flaws inherent to the eco-stunt model of alleged environmental activism (but maybe no one alleges these books are environmental activism; maybe, as aforementioned bicyclist Vanessa Farquharson suggests in a blog response to Kolbert’s article, these books are truly and simply experiments testing the meaning and value of elements of environmental activism – a rejoinder that seems a little disingenuous to me, but still worth considering). First of all, the stunts all run so far outside the mainstream of first-world society that the chroniclers can’t sincerely consider them potential models for their readers. And, as Kolbert and others have pointed out, even at the triumphant culmination of these eco-stunt experiments - even when the power’s been turned off in the Fifth Avenue apartment, and the uncooked food on the dinner plates comes from a rooftop garden in Harlem – the stuntman/writer is being outshone by over two billion human beings who never intentionally set out on the same quest. And these men, women, and children squatting in catholes outside slums in Mumbai, or panhandling on the sidewalk below Beavan’s conveniently-warm-without-rule-defying-heat apartment, certainly don’t beg us to emulate their ecological preeminence. This latter observation illuminates the awkward feature of just about all liberal political causes: they require a certain arbitrary privilege in order to take them up in the first place. All of which remarking appears to have the insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question: What, then, is the point of these exercises?

The point, of course, is self-promotion rather than social change. And, cynic (aka disappointed idealist) that I am, I think Beavan’s agent was right when he warned Beavan off of writing an earnest reproof of his readers’ wasteful habits. No one would have read that. We book-buyers want teenage romances and politicians’ memoirs. We’re not interested in reading about how we should change our lifestyles. Your best chance for kindling our interest is to look like a teenage vampire, a spy, or a celebrity, and these eco-stunt books are crafted in recognition of this cultural imperative, their writers courting fame for a good cause, ish. But as Kolbert’s essay points out, the fame of a few middle-class white American liberals who forswear Starbucks and toilet paper is probably not what the cause most needs (though in the name of fairness, once again, I’d like to suggest that these eco-stunts do inspire temporary, small, but possibly cumulative behavioral changes in readers).

Kolbert concludes her article by suggesting that what the cause actually needs is a new book, which she suggests could be called Impact Man. It would be about working with your neighbors to install an efficient heating and cooling system in your own building, and about provoking local politicians to improve our public transportation. In addition to what Kolbert mentioned, Impact Man could be about investing in alternative sources of energy, and efficiently and humanely distributing food and water resources. It could be about innovative architects and city planners, fairly-remunerated farmers, and sustainable housing projects for disadvantaged populations. It could be about lobbying for climate legislation, about urging your Senators to follow the House in passing climate change legislation (healthcare reform, after all, is not the only progressive issue facing Congress when it resumes this week).

In this final paragraph, Kolbert perhaps unconsciously revives a very interesting question writers have often asked, once framed by Sartre as What is Literature? By suggesting that Beavan’s next project could be to campaign for social and political change, and then to write about it, Kolbert forces us to wonder what the role of writing is, after all. If Beaven’s best work would be to affect legislative change, what would be the point of chronicling it, except perhaps to inspire some emulation? Some people are writers (or doctors, or teachers, lawyers, bankers, mechanics, social workers, composers, landscapers, etc) rather than politicians. I, for one, predict that any impact I might have on the world will come primarily through words. And I also care about politics. Am I deluded to think I might mix the two together?

As a journalist, Kolbert has the chance to instigate change by chafing the complacency of her readers and inciting them to take action once they lay down the magazine. She can be the pest that prompts readers to remind politicians of their commitments, and the reporter whose disclosures move constituents to demand these commitments in the first place. But not every writer is a journalist. Maybe some writers do best by taking a turn as a celebrity, by going on the Colbert Report and submitting their personal lives to a documentary film crew. If Beavan’s stunt of asceticism just inspires a few people to survey their own lives for modest ways they can shave off some waste, we’ll probably still face environmental catastrophe. But Beavan is nevertheless pestering people’s complacency, and this is worthy, and maybe even constructive.