• 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. Colin Beavan. Farrar Straus Giroux. 274 pages. $25.

Poor Beavan. Before No Impact Man, a document of his yuppie family's ascetic ``zero carbon . . . lifestyle experiment,'' even hit bookstores, the project was trashed in The New York Times, which called it ``an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion.'' The New Yorker was no more impressed: ``Two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his . . . A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan's Fifth Avenue apartment.''

And, yes, anyone whose version of roughing it means giving up Starbucks in the name of pseudo-Zen rhetoric (``What we need is not to draw lines between people. We need to draw lines around them'') is bound to annoy even card-carrying Sierra Club members.

Still, for 365 days, Beavan did it: Occasional cheating aside, he, his wife and his infant daughter gave up TV, taxis, subways, elevators, family vacations, packaged food and toilet paper to embrace biking, local produce, composting, secondhand clothes, Charades and candlelight. One might object to Beavan's premise -- that one can ``live without making any net impact on the environment'' while sitting in an unlit apartment, writing a book and keeping a blog. But one can't argue with his eco-esprit de corps.

Justin Moyer reviewed this book for The Washington Post.

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