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This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Colin Beavan
Imagine living in New York City and not driving or riding the bus. Or not ordering take-out food, or constantly walking up and down nine floors to your apartment because you refuse to take the elevator. Colin Beavan's 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 reveals how confounding it is to live an entirely eco-friendly life. After realizing that complaining about environmental damage wasn't doing any good, Beavan begins a journey of "no impact" and makes his family (a wife, a toddler, and a dog) take the journey as well. The core of his philosophy is not denial of human pleasures or worldly desires but an "eco-friendly" approach – consumption that, if it doesn't help the planet, at least doesn't hurt it. "I would have to find, over the coming year, some sort of middle path that involved neither the self-indulgence of the unconscious consumer nor the self-denial of the ascetic," writes Beavan, who is keenly aware of the comedy inherent in trying to live a no-impact life. "I wanted to find a way of thoroughly enjoying the fruit without killing the tree." Beavan and his family are also the subjects of a documentary (also titled No Impact Man) that screened at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and will be distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, the distribution label started by Adam Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys. Beavan has written two previous books, Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War and Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science.
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