Event: Let’s Retake Our Plates Film Series - No Impact Man
Date: Sunday, April 18, 2010
Location: 5243 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL
Promoter: Whole Foods Market

As a part of the Let’s Retake Our Plates project and in celebration of Earth Month, Whole Foods Market projected the No Impact Man movie.

This documentary follows Colin Beavan family’s experiment in sustainability.  This New York family decided to live, for a period of one year, avoiding environmental impacts.  Step by step he, his wife, and their daughter started eating only local and organic food bought from farmers’ markets, washing clothes and cleaning the house with homemade green detergents, travelling everywhere by bike or by public transportation, taking stairs instead of elevators, avoiding electricity usage, composting organic wastes, reducing useless purchases.  Colin has written a blog and spread the word about his initiative. The experiment ended, but the blog and a website called No Impact Project still exist and give people advices on how to live without environmental impacts.

This story has been a good point to think on how we can change, step by step, our daily life to reduce our environmental impact. That’s what happened after the movie projection: a panel of environmental organizations and businesses’ members started to talk about their own experience, interacting with the, unfortunately too few, audience. Celia Michener, CGE active member, was part of the panel; she suggested people to take advantage of CEDA weatherization programs and to start their own rain garden, as she already did in her new house.

Personally, I think Colin’s way of acting is a bit too fundamentalist and unsustainable on a long-time-period, as shown by the end of the experiment. But, after watching this movie I had three challenging ideas for my own life.

1) First of all I bought all equipment to grow basil and tomatoes at home. I have always been really bad in growing plants but I hope this time I will be more lucky!
2) Second, I am looking for information on how to compost organic wastes at home; surely there are other ways, less disgusting than the one shown in the documentary, to do so.
3) Third, I am going to use No Impact Man tips to produce homemade detergents.

Let’s see how it will work out…

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Submitted by Elizabeth Porporato, Natropolis Blog Columnist

elizabeth.por {at} gmail(.)com

www.natropolis.net