give it up for (the other) michelle

At the start of No Impact Man's blog (which I first wrote about in summer 2007), there was a winning sense that Colin Beavan's guilty Liberal idealism was on a collision course with his wife Michelle's 'Prada-wearing, Four Seasons-loving' lifestyle.

In the early months of NIM, Beavan was foisting his eco-fundamentalism onto his Manhattan wife and their young child, and hastily blogging his anxieties about doing so on his solar-powered computer - before the light went.

Nowadays the NIM blog is more like a support network for well-intentioned green people. But it's encouraging to learn that the movie-of-the-blog (what a new genre that is) keeps those early competing voices in the foreground. The LA Times says the movie could have been preachy and self-righteous, but turns out to be funny and informative.

'In large part, that's thanks to Michelle, who becomes our voice in the production -- from her admitted addiction to everything from shopping to coffee (no beans are grown within the roughly 250 mile radius they set for any of the food products they bought), to her discomfort with the composting bin in the house, complete with earthworms and, in the summer, flies.'