Colin Beavan is going without many things this year, including toilet paper. You can find previous Newsbusters and Business & Media Institute stories about Beavan here and here. His "No Impact" experiment includes going without any carbon-emitting transportation, electricity, paper products, packaging, new clothes, refrigeration ... you get the idea.
But on May 10 ABC "Nightline" host Cynthia McFadden said Beavan is doing it all "to avoid harming the earth." Too bad that's not entirely true. Beavan is conducting the "radical" year-long experiment because he is a writer of historical nonfiction and it was "the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell," according to The New York Times.
So his environmental project is actually a capitalistic endeavor, but nowhere did McFadden or Sam Champion say that Beavan is writing a book. And they had more than nine minutes to mention it.
Beavan may be sparing trees this year, by going without the toilet paper. But it is only a matter of time before his book is printed, bound, published and shipped all over the world. Talk about eco-hypocrisy.