Green = Red: Life As a Real 'No Impact Man'

When the second plane flew into the World Trade Center, our family friend, Albert, who was watching the attack on TV in Armenia, had a major heart attack. His sister was working in the second tower. Three hours later, she called him. Her voice was trembling; she had a nervous breakdown but she was uninjured. My friend heard the good news in the emergency room. He died two weeks later at the age of 54.

Albert was the last casualty of 9/11 that I know of. Although, I am sure there are more people who were indirectly impacted by the attack to some serious and even fatal degree.

Albert was also famous for his devastating sense of humor, so when I read about the highly heralded eco-melodramatic documentary “No Impact Man,” I vividly imagined Albert ripping this self-righteous excretion of bored urban utopians a new one.

Here’s the premise from the “No Impact Man” film website:

Colin Beavan decides to completely eliminate his personal impact on the environment for the next year. It means eating vegetarian, buying only local food, and turning off the refrigerator. It also means no elevators, no television, no cars, buses, or airplanes, no toxic cleaning products, no electricity, no material consumption, and no garbage. No problem – at least for Colin – but he and his family live in Manhattan. So when his espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping wife Michelle and their two-year-old daughter are dragged into the fray, the No Impact Project has an unforeseen impact of its own.

This is so cute; I am going to melt now. This kind of eco-experimentation is cute when it is acted out in Manhattan of 2009 and it is tragic when it is experienced in Armenia of 1992 where Albert lived in the center of the capital, Yerevan, in a neo-classically influenced apartment building with massive wooden doors.

Those doors ignited my imagination; as a kid, I even wrote a poem in which I visualized the doors as a portal to a different dimension. Years later, in the cover of a pitch-black winter night of 1992, my friends and I dismantled and stole those century-old doors, chopped them into many pieces and shared them among ourselves for wood to heat our homes. We had to because we had no electricity and it was incredibly cold.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia found itself engaged in full-scale war with Azerbaijan. As a consequence of the deliberately interdependent Soviet infrastructure, Armenian’s economic and energy routes lay through Azerbaijani territory. The Azerbaijani blockade that followed (and is still in place) cast the unprepared and newly formed Republic of Armenia into a horrible economic and energy crisis.

Not only there was a scarcity of supplies in every arena, but there was virtually no gas or electricity to heat our homes. For two years, we would have electricity for a total of two hours a day.

Those winters–which, of course, happened to be some of the coldest in the modern history of Armenia–caused many deaths of unprepared people in their own homes.

The daily two hours of electricity were anticipated with the devotional reverence of a desert tribe welcoming rain. People would try to squeeze in anything from laundry to cooking, watching TV to just enjoying the magic of the electric bulb.

When the hours of electricity expired, like cavemen we would gather around the fireplace, quiet and collectively depressed, with no impact on the world or even on our immediate surroundings. Only in times like that is one capable of understanding the true magic and liberating power that technology gives to man. The ability to be free and proud, strong and happy, are based not on our merging with nature but on our ability to master nature, to control and oppose its powers, to use our reason and skill to elevate ourselves from the dark and wild realm of frightened beasts struggling merely to survive under the whim of capricious surrounding.

Two hours of electricity during the cold winter was not enough to heat our homes and city apartments, so people started chopping trees on the streets and parks for firewood.

Old beautiful trees were rapidly disappearing from city streets, turning the famously green Yerevan into a bare skeleton of itself. People needed heat to survive–between preserving trees and watching babies freeze to death; there was not much of a choice.

The demand for firewood was huge, though, and people became protective of their territories. Tree chopping gangs, armed with axes and machetes, formed to protect their neighborhood trees and distribute the wood among them.

In savagery and ragged outlook, these gangs were not much different from prehistoric territorial tribes. Police would not dare to confront them, especially when their own reservoir of gas was almost non-existent and they could not even promptly respond to many serious emergencies.

Fierce fights would ensue if someone tried to cut a tree in someone else’s yard or park. My friends and I, soft and spoiled city slackers, were now thrown into this anarchic struggle for life, spending hours in bread lines and chopping wood, dismantling wooden doors and benches in the parks to which we used to be taken by our parents in our not-so-distant childhood.

It was through chopping wood that I came to identify with Abraham Lincoln in such a way that years later I would make a very personal film about his legacy.

There was something comforting in knowing that the President of that faraway country that my friends and I idealized so much would also chop wood and go through harsh times before he was able to make an impact… and boy, we wanted to make an impact!

From our shared experience of the ‘dark age’ we carried out a zealous urge to make an impact, to claim our existence in the family of nations, to tell everyone that we are alive, that we are human, that we matter, that we want to achieve something, and that we don’t want to perish in this damn darkness of animal fear.

And then there is, of course, Albert, who was fatally impacted by the acts of 19 evil men whom he’d never met or heard of. Sorry for the doors, my friend. I’ll plant a tree in your memory in this faraway land that you and your sister loved. I’ll plant it for all the trees that I had to cut back home. Those beautiful trees that helped us survive through the nightmares of those ‘unimpactful’ winters of ’92 through ’94.