Writer Colin Beavan still isn’t saying what it’s like to live for months in a New York apartment without toilet paper, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. Beavan’s new book, No Impact Man, describes a self-imposed 12-month experiment in asceticism, intended to reduce his “impact” on the environment as much as possible. Yet his outlandish premise has always seemed less a thoughtful attempt to model an environmentally responsible lifestyle than a semicomical, self-promotional stunt. That might explain why he won’t give away any of his “excretory” secrets in pre-publication interviews.
What Beavan will admit, said Penelope Green in The New York Times, is that he, his wife, and their young daughter have cut themselves some slack since the end of the book project. The electricity in their ninth-floor apartment has been turned back on, Beavan no longer forswears elevator service in order to reduce his carbon footprint, and his personal ban on non–locally produced consumables has been waived for both toothpastes and coffee. (Without her quadruple shots from Starbucks, his wife had suffered caffeine withdrawal headaches.) But the family hasn’t completely reverted to its old ways; they’re still looking for opportunities to reduce waste and more generally find “the sweet spot” of resource usage. So they choose to sweat rather than abide even an electric fan, and they run an electric fridge but don’t have a freezer. No word yet on toilet paper use, but Beavan claims that he still washes his hair with baking soda instead of shampoo.
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