Lessons from a Low-Impact Week

“Will you join me in lowering our impact?”

That was the subject line on a recent e-mail I sent out to family, friends, column readers and radio listeners asking them to join me for a week in trying to reduce our individual environmental footprint. Inspired by Colin Beaven’s prophetic book ​“No Impact Man,” I proposed four pollution- and waste-reducing steps many people could try for a few days: Stop consuming meat, devote one meal a day to eating only locally grown products, avoid producing non-recyclable garbage and refrain from riding in a fossil-fuel burning vehicle with fewer than three people. 

Having now completed this Low-Impact Week, I can report that it was not easy and that I did not achieve perfection – not even close. However, I can also say I learned a few things beyond how to manage bicycle-seat discomfort.

For one, I discovered that you can find affordable food that isn’t flown in at great energy expense – but it takes initiative. You have to check food labels at the grocery or hunt down a farmers market.

I was also reminded that we waste an obscene amount of paper and plastic. Coffee cups, disposable utensils, food wrappers – this offal is everywhere and most of it is used for less than 15 minutes and then discarded. Avoiding this trash for a week makes you think about the monstrous amount of energy used in producing, distributing and tossing it.

When it came to transportation, I discovered that the inconvenience of eco-friendly choices can come with unforeseen benefits. Sure, it took effort to get my bike working. Sure, my ​“not a morning person” gene didn’t love sweating my way to the office at dawn. But my ​“I hate traffic” and ​“I like saving money” genes enjoyed avoiding congestion and gasoline bills. 

These embarrassingly self-evident realizations led to my two biggest Low-Impact Week epiphanies of all. 

The first is that a lot of environmental pollution comes from our aversion to basic forethought and from our on-demand culture. Think about it: We use so many disposable products simply because we don’t even think to bring our own. Many people have come to rely on cars – rather than public transit, bicycling or walking – in part because we’re not willing to plan ahead for train times, organize car pools or perspire a bit, and we like the idea of driving whenever we want to drive, rather than conforming to a schedule. And many don’t eat locally grown food, not because it’s necessarily expensive, but because we just don’t enjoy inspecting labels – and because we feel entitled to eat whatever we desire, regardless of season.

My second realization is about the nature of environmental solutions. Dick Cheney famously told America that ​“conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” And lots of liberals will insist, as one reader recently did, that ​“do-gooder” attempts to reduce personal pollution harm environmental causes because they ​“make conservation a purely individual effort.” 

But with global temperatures rising and a Texas-sized island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, it’s clear that we need both individual and collective action. Arguments to the contrary – claims that individual actions are insignificant and that the only important actions come from government – are self-interested cop-outs designed to let a nation of buck-passers simultaneously feign conscientiousness and rationalize individual gluttony.

Accepting these truisms over the course of a week only makes me want to once again ask: Will you join me in lowering our impact? You can pretend that question isn’t important, but the truth is obvious: Our planet’s future rests on your answer.