Colin Beavan

Colin Beavan became known as an American nonfiction writer and environmental advocate who turned a household experiment into a public inquiry about consumption. In No Impact Man, he recounts the year that he, his wife, and their young daughter tried to reduce their environmental impact while living in New York City. Their rules included avoiding packaged goods, motorized transport, and household electricity, but the book is less a technical manual than a memoir about the frictions between ideals, family life, and personal happiness. Picador published the paperback edition in 2010, and the project also became a documentary directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein. Beavan had previously written on very different subjects in Fingerprints, about a formative forensic criminal investigation, and Operation Jedburgh, about an Allied special-operations campaign during World War II. His later How to Be Alive pursued questions about connecting individual choices with social responsibility. Across that range, Beavan uses reported experience to ask how ordinary habits acquire political and ethical weight.