“Ten years ago I was the subject of a documentary called ‘No...

“Ten years ago I was the subject of a documentary called ‘No Impact Man.’ It was about my attempt to live for an entire year with as little environmental impact as possible. My family rode bikes everywhere. We used no paper products. And the film got quite a lot of attention. I wasn’t used to the success. I’d written two history books before then. And they were good books, but they didn’t have much of a readership. Now all of the sudden I was being interviewed, and celebrated, and invited on Good Morning America. And then people started attacking me. Gawker wrote several articles calling me self-righteous, and an opportunist, and said I was imposing my values on my family. People said I didn’t care about the environment and only wanted to make money. And all the attention really caused a crisis for me. For the first time, I had a personhood that was completely different than my person. And that was exhausting. When someone called me a hero, I wanted to prove them right. When someone called me a devil, I wanted to prove them wrong. It took a lot of self-examination to realize that I was neither. There is a fullness to a person that is gigantic and nuanced and indefinable. It was equally impossible to be a hero or a devil. I couldn’t be contained by a single word.”