Since the release of the No Impact Man book and film I have been privileged to be in conversation with many groups. And always, someone asks me with great earnestness, “What can I do?” Many times, in other words, people ask me for how-to-save-the-planet directions.

“Just start,” I say.

And then I pause while they wait expectantly for more guidance.

“If you were to just start, without waiting for someone like me to come along, what would you do?” I ask finally.

Because, while I want to help and I want to support, I don’t want to put people back to sleep by giving them connect-the-dot directions that don’t require them to engage their spirits. I trust my listeners and my readers to figure things out for themselves way more than I trust myself to give them ideas that are appropriate to them.

After I ask what people would do if they didn’t wait for someone like me to come along, there is another pause.

Finally, I might say, “Look to yourself for guidance. What would you like to do?”

And then a person might say: “I’d like to start riding my bike to work” or “I’d like to campaign against bottled water” or “I’d like to start a compost pile in my building” or “I’d like to tell people we should love each other more.”

Then I laugh. “So why are you asking me what you can do? Just start.”

Most of us already know.

We know. You know.

Underneath the worry and the despair and the fear of doing the wrong thing, we are all imbued with a wonderful compassion and wisdom.

I love the word “inspire.” It has the same route as to respire, to breathe. To be inspired means to have the breath within in us. The breath of what? Some might say God. Some might say something else. But the breath is within us. The compassion and wisdom is there. We are all inspired, filled with the breath.

This is why I try not to give directions: I do not want to risk replacing someone else’s deep wisdom and compassion with my shallow ideas.

It could be said that, in many ways, the trouble we find ourselves in is actually caused by too many off us following directions. I don’t want to give more directions. There isn’t a shortage of directions.

One day, for example, a teacher raised her hand and said, “I want to teach second graders how to recycle. What should I do?”

But I am not a teacher. “You are the expert here, not me. You have much more of what is necessary to teach second graders about recycling than I do.”

What she needed, what we all need, is the ability to trust ourselves. That second grade teacher simply needed to trust that she was enough, that she had enough to start.

Each of us already has what we need to save the world inside of us. It’s a simply matter of trusting the impulse and putting one foot in front of the other without necessarily seeing where the path will ultimately lead.

A Buddhist might say, “Trust your True Self.” A Christian might say, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” There is no need for directions. We all have a True Self. We all have the Kingdom of Heaven within us.

So many of us have nascent ideas for what we can do to help our communities or our planet, but we don’t start because we are waiting for permission or directions from someone else. But we don’t need permission. We don’t need directions.

We can find our own paths.

We can take charge ourselves.

We can simply start.

Have you heard of Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man? Well, now he’s part of the CSL Blog Posse! Here’s an introduction to his work, written as he and his family were just getting started. Now that their year-long no impact journey has ended, there is a book, a film, and many more exciting  adventures to come.  Make sure to check out the trailer for his documentary film below!

You hear of one study saying that the energy used washing ceramic coffee cups is as damaging to the environment as the use of disposable plastic cups that won’t biodegrade for thousands of years. You hear of another that says destroying trees to make paper towels is no worse than using hot water and toxic detergent to wash cloth rags.

Everything, if you listen to conventional wisdom, is as bad as everything else. The spin merchants have got us believing that to try to make any difference is futile. You might as well give up. Throw away another plastic coffee cup. Don’t bother with the hybrid car. Go on, guzzle.

Meanwhile, I mention to a very liberal friend, a guy who used to be spokesman for a Democratic senator, that I’m trying to figure out how to live no impact here in New York. “Forget it. It’s impossible,” he says. It’s one thing to try it in the countryside, maybe in the woods, like Henry David Thoreau, or on a farm, where you grow your own food. But in New York City? No way.

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.

True, a city like New York does have the environmental advantage of economy of scale—people share transport, buildings and resources—but cities are also responsible for the production and concentration of pollutants in massive amounts. Thanks to car and truck exhaust alone, which makes for 90 percent of Manhattan’s air pollution, the island’s residents face the highest risk in the country of developing cancer from chemicals in the air.

Add to that the annual 9 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from New York’s electricity use, our 8 billion pounds of garbage and half a trillion gallons of sewage and you have a supersized serving of world-killing poisons. Energy efficient city though New York might be, we remain an ecological nightmare, which is why—in addition to the feeling that we just have to do something—my wife Michelle and I began talking about going off the grid for a year, unplugging from the matrix.

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.

But to cause no net impact is impossible to do merely by restricting consumption and waste output. Just participating in society makes us responsible for the negative environmental impacts of society’s functioning, even if our personal lifestyle does no harm. To offset our societal ecological debt, we also plan to take actions that will have positive environmental impact. For example, we’ll volunteer with the Nature Conservancy to clean up garbage off the beach. To help sop up our share of the year’s CO2, we will take part in a reforestation project to help plant trees.

Meanwhile, I’ll research and answer many of the niggling questions that have had us and everyone we know throwing our hands in the air when trying to do less harm to the environment. Do you do more harm by living in the country or the city? Is it better to drive a thousand miles or take an airplane? Is it really true that the tiniest moped, because of its lack of a catalytic converter, causes more pollution than an SUV? Could we all, by video conferencing, virtual collaboration and tele-commuting, cut down our travel enough to cause a worthwhile reduction in carbon emissions? What, exactly, comprises sufficient individual effort that, if taken by each of us, would save the planet?

During the course of the year, Michelle, Isabella and I will traverse the range of lifestyles from making a limited number of concessions to the environment to becoming eco-extremists. This means that when we’re done, we can reenter the world of normal consumerdom equipped to decide which parts of our no impact lifestyle we’re willing to keep and which ones we’re not. In other words, in addition to the no impact year, we’ll have figured out our way forward.