Jordan Sanchez
May 5, 2015
Professor Sours
English 214
No Impact Man An environment consists of the surroundings or conditions in which a person lives in or functions. The environment we live in is a home shared by every human and species all around the earth. As the dominant species on earth, we should protect it from any type of danger. However people threaten our current environment by our everyday habits. Earth’s weather is getting warmer every year and soon the polar caps will disappear. We are putting Earth in danger every second by the actions we do everyday such as driving cars, using water bottles and much more. Humans must find a new lifestyle to fix all the negative impact they have done to Earth. An exceptional individual has set an example of a different way of living that can possibly save the Earth. Colin Beavan in his book, No Impact Man, shares his story about attempting to live on earth for a year without negatively impacting the world and creating a whole eco-effective lifestyle. He dragged along with him his family into this new lifestyle, by minimizing the use of power, producing no waste along with anything that emitted carbon dioxide, and anything to avoid an impact on the environment. This was indubitably a good experience and a benefit to him, however people outside his immediate circle may think otherwise. People argue between his project of it had either positive or negative impact to the Earth. Others argue about whether if he even accomplished anything. One of Beavens main concerns was the use of plastic that is currently polluting our Earth every year. Most plastics are being thrown every day and only being used once. One particular item he comes across was the use of baby diapers. He argues, “ By age two, would go through some 4000 plastic diapers” (Beavan 23). Babies and even the elderly use diapers on their everyday life and throw them right away once used. Diapers are a necessity that some people need to buy occasionally that will end up adding up to a lot of spending. He saw this as an issue because 4,000 diapers is a lot of plastic that is contributing to the garbage load. His solution to this problem was a different approach and similar to once used back in the early days of humans. His idea “thirty pieces of cloth, 104 times” (Beavan 23) is similar to the times when there were no plastic diapers. This idea helped not using unnecessary plastic that can contaminate the Earth. This method also helped him save a great amount of money that he would be spending on buying regular plastic diapers. However this method may be difficult due to the time someone would have to put in order to keep the cloth clean. The whole process of cleaning the cloth would be longer in contrary were someone would just simply throw the dirty plastic diaper and use a brand new one. In this generation, people are very busy and it would be hard finding time to clean the dirty cloth, also considering that people have babies that they have to take care of. This alternative method is a smart move into saving money and help protect the earth from plastic, but it is a hard task because of the time that it would take from people busy life’s. However for Beavan, this was a huge accomplishment because by doing this he did not damage Earth and in the other hand saved tons of money. During the whole No Impact project, Beavan kept creating many other alternative ways to help protect the Earth. But in order for this to occur he had to break away from the social norms. One unique method he did during his project, which is slowly turning into a norm, was to use jars instead of plastic bags for grocery shopping. Most of people use plastic bags to carry their groceries back home, however he had a different approach, so instead he gathered a bunch of empty jars he had back home and goes to grocery. As he arrives at his local market, Internal Yoga, he goes into action, “scoop various grocery needs into