After reaching the limits of the green possibilities in a borrowed beach house, Ethan and Maryhope relocate for a weekend to a one-room cabin without electricity or running water. There, while paging through Sustainable Living for Dummies, they reflect on what low-impact living in the extreme might mean.

So we finally got what we were asking for. As I type this, Maryhope and I are staying in a one-room cabin with no running water, no electricity, and no bathroom. There's a wood-burning stove we could fire up to keep warm, but keeping warm isn't a problem when it's 95 degrees in the shade. We've got the door and windows open just in case a cross breeze feels like forming, and the sound of some bug-or, more accurately, the collective sound of thousands of bugs-has become the soundtrack of our lives up here.

Crickets, Maryhope has just decided. Tons of crickets, singing the cricket song. It's deafening. It's hard to hear this many crickets and not feel like you've just said something unimaginably inappropriate and are being punished for it in a Stephen King kind of way. And we can't help but wonder: Is this the natural conclusion of our little experiment? Stuck in the wilderness with crickets for company, no-impact at last, feeling like the perpetual butt of some bad cosmic joke?

Eh. If so, fine; we're having a great time. All our quibbles over water use have stopped, because there are no faucets to abuse. There's not even a toilet to flush (just an outhouse). There's a pond not far away, and we've got biodegradable soap for washing. It's like fancy camping. Maryhope is on the bed cracking herself up reading The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown, and I don't even miss the Internet. Last night, we fell asleep to the drum march of a rainstorm. If this is no-impact living, sign me up.

Of course, this isn't really no-impact. My aunt and uncle are a half-mile down the road, and we'll eat with them (for sanity's sake, we'll probably shower there as well). We drove 321 miles to get here-six straight hours of pollution, waving along the way to the other cars, most of which were single-passenger vehicles. But now that we're here, we're going to do our best to be as low-impact as possible.

Part of the reason we decided to try this was the feeling that we'd hit a wall in our experiment. In the house we were borrowing, we felt we were already becoming too familiar with the limits of what we could and couldn't do eco-wise. We'd plateaued at unplugging appliances, line-drying clothes, replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents, biking instead of driving, shopping local to the extent possible, and using our own bags (or, the more likely scenario: forgetting the bag and carrying the groceries by hand). We were getting complacent, we were running out of ideas, and, even worse, we were (or, rather, I was) starting to slip. I got caught mindlessly throwing a lot of recyclable plastic into the trash because I was in a rush and didn't want to wash and sort it.

So we were at the point where we needed a little extra push to challenge ourselves. Two of the books Maryhope brought were Sustainable Living for Dummies and It's Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask, who has a website called green matters. The first problem: Sustainable Living for Dummies was written specifically for Australians, with municipal hotlines, Web resources, etc. that were of no use to us. Did this amuse me? Yes, very much. Did it amuse Maryhope that I was so amused by her mistake? Not so much. (And now we've got to figure out how to compost a book.)

In addition to smartly evoking the spirit of Kermit the Frog, It's Easy Being Green-printed on recycled paper-is a great book, and exactly what we were looking for.

The chapters focus on practical themes: Green Living Myths; Making a Difference; Eco-tips for Living Greener; Buying Green; Green Shopping Online; Getting Involved; Resources to Help the Earth. And Trask is remarkably effective at getting the reader to think about the link between actions and their environmental impact through the use of checklists and easily digestible facts and tips.

The entire, complex matrix of green purchasing is summed up, quite helpfully for someone like me, as: "Buy not, buy less, buy green." Trask is also admirably conscious of the potential cost of living green. So for every "use solar power when possible" sort of tip, there's something like: If you're renting an apartment and cannot afford to retrofit a non-conserving toilet, simply fill up a few plastic jugs and drop them in the tank to displace the water. Also, you know what takes care of mosquitoes? Bats. One bat can eat up to 1,000 mosquitoes a night. And the only think I can think of that's cooler than a bug zapper (which uses gross amounts of electricity) is having your own bat-house-which, I am not kidding, I will build as soon as we get back to Minneapolis.

Check out Trask's book if you can. I plan on giving it as a present to a number of wasteful people I know who shall remain nameless. It makes this whole eco-living thing seem more attainable, and less of a sacrifice than I'd previously thought. And now, out to the mucky pond to enjoy the stifling heat.

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