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Abstract
“No Impact Man” (NIM) Colin Beavan attracted international media attention and a good deal of criticism for his year-long experiment attempting to live making zero net impact on the environment. Whereas Beavan's critics dismissed the project as a mere publicity stunt, this essay reads the NIM blog, book, and documentary film as a compelling performance of green identity in the comic frame. This performance—which links private consumption to ecology and community, and emphasizes flaws, foibles, humor and humility—offers an appealing invitation to engage in both individual and collective action. I argue that comedy is a useful rhetorical tool for addressing global warming, as it enables us to see ourselves not as helpless victims in a tragic doomsday scenario, but as imperfect actors who are both guilty contributors to the problem and agents responsible for its amelioration.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Barb Willard, Joan Faber McAlister, Jennifer Peeples, and especially an anonymous reviewer for constructive feedback on this essay. She also thanks Jen Schneider for assembling a panel on No Impact Man for the 2010 Western States Communication Association Convention in Anchorage. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2010 National Communication Association Annual Convention in San Francisco.
Notes
1. Beavan blogs at http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/. His book, titled 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, was published (using 100% postconsumer recycled paper and cardboard) in September 2009. A documentary film directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, also titled No Impact Man, premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, showed in select theaters starting in September 2009, and was released on DVD early in 2010. According to Variety, Columbia Pictures has acquired the film rights to Beavan's story, so there may also be a feature film version in the works (Fleming, Citation2007).
2. Other blog-turned-book projects include Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, and Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days, by Vanessa Farquharson. Related documentary films include Garbage: The Revolution Starts at Home, about a Canadian family who collects their trash for several months, and Recipes for Disaster, which tells the story of a family in Finland that goes on a year-long “oil diet.”
3. Beavan reported in December 2010 that more than three million people have visited his blog. The NIM project was covered by major newspapers and television channels around the world, and Beavan's book has been translated into 15 languages. The documentary film played in theaters in the USA and abroad, and there have been more than 1,000 community screenings organized around the world.
4. My analysis, particularly the final section of this essay, contributes to the broader conversation in rhetorical studies about Burkean frames, and to the more specific exchange within Environmental Communication over the resources and limitations of various dramatic frames sparked by Steve Schwarze's (Citation2006) Quarterly Journal of Speech essay, “Environmental Melodrama.”
5. Beavan does admit that NIM is, at least in part, a “stunt”; in a radio interview featured in the NIM film, Beavan concedes that his project is part gimmick to sell a book. But he goes on to explain in earnest that the “stunt” is for a greater cause, not his own celebrity. Beavan also wrote a response to Kolbert, titled “A Stunt or Not a Stunt: That is NOT the Question,” published in the Huffington Post, in which he laments how her critique of the performative aspect of NIM deflected attention from debating important substantive issues. He wrote that “[t]he ripple effect, in sections of the environmental blogosphere at least, has been a distraction from the important message … . Instead of a discussion of the merits of what we have to say, bloggers on both sides of this meaningless debate discuss whether we have the right to say it” (para. 5).
6. “The Daily Green” blogger Brian Clark Howard later admitted that “there may have been a bit of professional jealousy on our part, although we rationalized including Beavan in the heartburn feature under the mantra that ‘all press is good press’. Beavan had single-handedly captured the green limelight, appearing on numerous TV and talk shows, and getting hundreds, if not thousands, of inches of coverage by a press fascinated by his experiment” (2009, para. 3).
7. One motivation for investigating environmental identity has been to try to account for a perplexing gap between espousing green values (“talking the talk”) and engaging in pro-environment actions (“walking the walk”). Why is it that many people express support for environmental causes on surveys, or call themselves “environmentalists,” but far fewer actually act upon those professed beliefs? (Kempton & Holland, Citation2003); Meyer, Citation2008; Yale Center, Citation2010). Values and beliefs alone are not sufficient to explain behavior; as Willett Kempton and Dorothy Holland (Citation2003) suggest, “an equally or greater causal factor is the individual's identity, which leads to behavior consistent with that identity” (p. 317).
8. As Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2002) explain, citizenship is an abstract, ambiguous category that leaves public audiences with “an appetite for models of how to be ‘good citizens’” (p. 368). They read iconic photographic images as examples of embodied citizenship; in this essay, I argue that NIM offers a useful example of embodied green identity.
9. In his seminal essay “The Second Persona,” Edwin Black (1970) wrote: “Each one of us, after all, defines himself by what he believes and does. … The quest for identity is the modern pilgrimage. And we look to one another for hints as to whom we should become” (p. 113).
10. John M. Meyer (Citation2008) explores in depth the negative public perceptions of paternalism in environmentalist discourse, which goes something like this: “We—the informed, engaged, public spirited—wish to protect you—the uninformed, apathetic, or egoistic—from the consequences of your environmentally destructive ways” (p. 221, emphasis in original).
11. The holier-than-thou green consumer, for instance, was hilariously lampooned in a 2006 episode of South Park titled “Smug Alert,” where Kyle and his family move to San Francisco (Parker and Stone, Citation2009). Well-to-do Bay Area snobs stand around at the housewarming party drinking their organic biodynamic wine, bragging about their hybrid cars, and appreciating the smell of their own farts. See Stewart and Clark (Citation2011).
12. Informants in Kitchell, Kempton, Holland, and Tesch (Citation2000) study reported unease about being associated with negative stereotypes of environmentalists: Claire says she “doesn't want to be thought of as one of these people that is crazy or eccentric,” while Molly declares, “I don't want to be a walking symbol” (p. 13).
13. In a similar vein, Douglas Torgerson reads the former Vice President as tragic hero, writing that, for Gore, “[t]o prevent destruction thus becomes another tragically heroic mission” (1999, p. 86). Also, John Meyer (Citation2008) critiques Gore for framing his climate change message in a paternalistic manner (p. 229).
14. In fact, Gore hypocritically failed to follow his own checklist for shrinking his carbon footprint. He was roundly criticized in the media for his household's enormous utility bills and other environmental infractions after winning the Oscar for AIT (see, for instance, Tapper, Citation2007).
15. Furthermore, Burke explains that the distinctions between frames are analytical, and that multiple frames often overlap: “None of these poetic categories can be isolated in its chemical purity. They overlap one another, involving the qualitative matter of emphasis” (1984, p. 57).
16. On the rhetorical force of locating “the irreparable,” see Cox (1982).
17. In his book, Beavan (Citation2009a) tells the story of walking home in the rain, Isabella riding on his shoulders under an umbrella. She cries, except for when the umbrella blows over. Beavan finally figures out that Isabella likes getting wet. He writes, “And on this rainy day, here is what happens when I treat my body as something more than a means to transport my head, when I finally learn to treat the landscape as something more than the space that stands between where I am now and where I want to be later: I take Isabella down from my shoulders and let her jump in a puddle, soaking her shoes and her pants. For fun, I jump in the puddle, too. Isabella laughs. She stretches out her arms with her palms facing up to catch the rain. She opens her mouth, sticks her tongue out and leans her head back. I try it, too. When did the child in me disappear? People are running past. They look desperate, miserable, trying to get out of the rain. What has happened to us?” (pp. 87–88).
18. The documentary tactfully broaches the toilet paper issue with a scene starring Isabella, who is in the process of learning to use the potty. Viewers get to eavesdrop as Beavan lays out his thoughts on foregoing toilet paper to his toddler.
19. Smith and Mackinnon were also engaged in a year-long trial of eating only local foods that culminated in the book Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (2007).
20. Green (Citation2009) calls Conlin “the true hero of the experiment” (para. 7); Anderson (2009) notes that the film “might have been called ‘No Impact Woman’” (para. 1); Hiskes (2009) calls Conlin “the most vivid character” and “more sympathetic [than Beavan] because she misses coffee and tires of eating local root vegetables” (para. 7, 9).
21. This is significant, because if gender politics go unexamined, then calls for “a return to a less resource-intensive way of life … can tend to have a ‘woman, get back in the kitchen’ subtext,” argues feminist blogger Jess McCabe (2009, para. 5).
22. From DVD Extra Features, “Sundance Q&A.”
23. Conlin was initially resistant to taking their vacation to “nature,” but later explains that she was deeply moved by their experiences and conversations at the farm. She reflects on her grandparents, who had been homesteaders, and says, “When I listened to the farmer talking about the herd, and how sometimes, something will happen to one of the cattle, but that the herd goes on … I sort of woke up! I felt like I got to reconnect with something.”
24. Burke presciently remarked in the mid-1930s, in a footnote in Attitudes Toward History: “Among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention. He teaches us that the total economy of this planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone, but that the exploiting part must itself eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole …” (p. 150). For further discussion of Burke, ecology, and eco-criticism, see Blankenship (1993), Muir (1999), Seigel (2004), and Wess (2006).
25. Granted, few families have the luxury of time and resources to fully reproduce the No Impact experiment, since the “work” of living no impact was effectively Beavan's full-time job. Beavan (Citation2009a) acknowledges, “One thing I realize about this year of no impact: it's a luxury to be able to make all these adaptations. I'm lucky to have the time. My job, in a way, is to bake the bread and ride my bike and let my life slow down as I refuse so many of the modern culture's so-called efficiencies and conveniences” (p. 133).
26. On Burke and “both/and,” see Rueckert (Citation1982), Ch. 1.
27. Beavan's (Citation2009a) book also has an extensive appendix, titled “You Can Make a Difference!,” filled with a wealth of references and practical tips.
28. A handful of colleges and universities featured NIM as the shared reading book in 2010, and thousands of students across 11 universities have participated in No Impact Week. In January 2011, the No Impact Project hosted a Leadership Training weekend in upstate New York to help cultivate local, grassroots leadership and assist citizens in launching No Impact projects in their own communities.
29. Even if outrage is a necessary and appropriate response to environmental crises, comedic self-examination is a crucial stage in transforming righteous indignation into warrantable outrage, as Simons (Citation2009) argues. He writes that one must “move rhetorically from melodrama to high comedy to ideology critique” (para. 16).
30. Admittedly, Beavan will likely seem like a “fringe wacko,” to use Conlin's phrase, to those who believe that global warming doesn't exist, doesn't matter, or is severely overblown by a liberally-biased media. But for those who are either “Alarmed” or “Concerned” about climate change—10% and 29% of Americans respectively, according to Yale University's Citation2010 report—NIM provides an entertaining and engaging model for how to take action to address environmental problems.