I recently found a link to No Impact Man about a family working to live for a year with zero net impact in Manhatten. I won’t go in to all the details because you can read it there if you want, but they’re taking it in stages, starting with generating minimal or no waste, and moving on to using no electricity.
The problems they encounter, and their solutions, make for interesting reading and I can see things my family and I could change to reduce our impact and probably enjoy ourselves as much or more in the process, but in the end, a No Impact philosophy does seem to be quite an onion of implications. The more you start peeling off the layers, the harder it becomes to calculate the impact.
There are plenty of critical comments about the family, their motives, and the real impacts of their specific choices in the comments on the blog. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s just being critical, because it’s very easy to be critical of a simple idea with a complicated implementation. I had a lot of ideas for questions in the spirit of investigation and experimentation but I’ll stick to just one.
What about clean water? They posted a snapshot of their laundry washing technique. It involves the bathtub, some detergent or cleaning agent that’s presumably low-impact, and agitating the laundry around with their feet, similar to smooshing grapes to make wine. It’s a pretty lucky situation they have, aiming for low impact while being able to turn on the faucet and for all practical purposes, out comes as much potable water as they could want. It seems like they’re aiming for personal net zero impact but hugely benefiting from the positive impact of the teeming millions all around them in NYC, not to mention the years of infrastructure that have been built up to support those lifestyles.