Evaluating Arguments about consumerism - Essay Example

The paper summarizes and analyzes the two essays that present viewpoints on consumer culture in America before evaluating their efficacy. In his essay ‘The Year Without Toilet Paper, Mr. Green analyzes the lives of three members of a family (Mr. Colin, his wife and two-year-old daughter Isabella who wears organic cotton diapers) during their one-year experimental lifestyle the named ‘No Impact. Green explains that the rule of this lifestyle keep changing though the necessary regulations include preparing and taking natural foods grown not more than a two hundred and fifty mile radius of Manhattan city.

Additionally, Mr. Colins family shops for no other household goods apart from the said foods thereby producing no trash in the form of paper. The family has a home composter in which only organic and biodegradable waste is dumped and consumed by worms. The most intriguing part the familys No Impact lifestyle is the fact that no member of the family uses any form of carbon-fueled transportation (Penelope 1). Mr., Colin Beavan, who is a senior writer, decided to embark on the No Impact year after his agent discredited all other possible possibilities that would sell as a book.

This is an implication that Mr. Colin was doing this not only for the hope that people will tread more lightly on the earths resources, but also for the popularity of the book he was about to write. He had to turn his family’s lifestyle upside down in order to conform to the rules and regulations of the No Impact year. As a matter of fact, the family embraced full environmentalism to an extent that a visitor would hesitate to visit the bathroom for fear of failing to get tissue paper in there; hence the title ‘The Year Without Toilet Paper’ (Penelope 1).

Colin’s decision to transform the lifestyle of his family to a No Impact lifestyle was not just inspired by the urge to protect some sort of “pristine