Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man finished his year of living light a couple of weeks ago.  His project, far more extreme than mine, had strict rules about local eating, energy use, and waste generation, in an attempt to have no net impact on the planet for one year.  Like me, he figured that the hardest place in the world to do this would be New York's urban environment, where he ended up finding a whole network of resources and friendly people trying to live in similar ways.  He generated a lot of media attention, and, lucky for me, sends a lot of readers my way -- thanks Colin!

He's calling the new phase of his project "living in the gray," in which he's relaxing the black-and-white rules (which are never really black-and-white, are they?) to come up with some new long-term guidelines for living his life in a more environmentally-friendly way.  Upon reading this, I was first relieved that his blog wouldn't be going away yet, and then a little validated that I've been taking this route all along.  Of course I felt twinges last February when I first found out about his project: I began to doubt my experiment, questioning whether I should have set up stricter rules for myself, getting hard on myself when I couldn't write every day, etc. etc.   Over the year, though, I've been able to reaffirm Fix for myself here and there: all along I wanted to test how an ambitious, single youngish brokeish person with no book deal (see also Judith Levine, another hero) could eliminate convenience buying and eating, as well as incorporate environmental thinking into her daily routine.  I was thinking that living this way might help me understand social change better and become a little more creative when thinking about policy on any kind of scale.

I have found that it's difficult to change just one habit when I feel stressed, sick, poor, busy - which is the general state of affairs for a lot of people in NYC and elsewhere.  Trying to change any habits, be they spending habits, eating habits, exercise habits, thinking habits etc., makes me think of people transitioning from welfare to work, losing weight because they risk diabetes, trying to feed their children more healthfully -- and then I'm thankful that my experiment is a choice.  I'm still not certain I've permanently altered even one thing to be a little more environmentally friendly.

In some ways, it seems that "living in the gray" is harder than living with strict rules - one doesn't have an automatic answer to apply to every situation, and the variables seem increasingly complicated.   I'm facing that myself when I reach Dec 31: which things do I buy?  how much research do I do before I buy something?  should I take on more narrowly-focused challenges (local eating, sewing, cooking) for shorter periods of time?  I don't think I'll stop exactly at the New Year - there are many, many things I wanted to look into and think about within this context that I haven't gotten to yet.  I also don't feel right about running out and buying a bunch of stuff just because it's January and I can.  Like Colin, I won't switch off the blog as the actions continue in 2008.   So congratulations Colin, and good luck with the new phase!