Taking the Urban Homestead to the Edge

I've written here before about how inspirational I have found the Dervaes family of Pasadena, CA, which homesteads on a large city lot. Well, meet a new inspiration, No Impact Man, who is trying to live in extreme simplicity in New York City:

My wife Michelle and I decided, before jumping in at the deep end of this year-long project, to try no impact living as an experiment for a week. No garbage. No greenhouse gasses. No toxins. No water pollution. No air pollution. No electricity. No produce shipped from distant lands. No impact. Or so we naively hoped. ...

The fact is that if city dwellers can’t learn to live without reducing their ecological footprint then we’re in deep trouble because most of the world’s population now lives in cities. Saving the world can’t be left to the country bumpkins. It’s an urban problem. ...

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

A brave experiment and engagingly written. I'll be watching them to see how they do.