SEATTLE – When Alan Durning’s son, Gary, totaled their ancient Volvo last February and the insurance company sent a munificent replacement check for $594, his family made a decision that would land them on national TV: They would go for a year without a car.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper featured it partly as a protest against gas prices (it really wasn’t), and the camera crew followed Alan and his wife in a mammoth van, creeping at 3 miles an hour as they walked – walked! – the eight blocks from their Ballard, Wash., bungalow to the neighborhood’s business district.

Their decision sounded so outlandish that Fox Network’s “Trading Spouses” offered them $50,000 if Durning would wife-swap for a few days on TV, presumably with a materialistic Hummer-hugger. The family turned them down after concluding the other spouse would be so nutty it would likely amount to “televised child abuse.”

The Seattle Weekly’s Knute Berger praised the experiment but charged that the Durnings were “mooching” by accepting rides from friends. Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat noted that Durning was being portrayed by the media as a “carless freak.” The environmentalist’s blog on his experiment, at www.sightline.org/carless, has drawn a steady stream of comment and debate.

It couldn’t happen to a more boring guy.

Which makes Durning, his wife, Amy, and their three children – Gary, 19, Kathryn, 13, and Peter, 12 – so interesting. They’re a typical middle-class Seattle family trying to live the values their dad promotes as founder and director of a downtown environmental think tank called Sightline, but in a way we other boring people could emulate.

They don’t live in a yurt, march in Birkenstocks or subsist on tofu. Alan has a respectable professional salary. Kathryn’s father makes a living as an environmental thinker, and her grandparents were prominent environmentalists, but she, for one, doesn’t like camping. “It’s dirty.”

They go to soccer practice (and buy players Slurpees), rent DVDs, bribed Kathryn and Peter with cell phones to go along with the carless experiment, and give each other presents at Christmas.

Just not so many. Amy recalled that it was a little awkward when, after agreeing with relatives to “try to de-escalate the arms race of holiday gift-giving,” they gave candied nuts – and got back a breadmaker. Who knew to take their pledge seriously?

In his writing and speaking, Durning has been humorously candid about the pros and cons of using mass transit, Flexcar (membership car sharing, see www.flexcar.com) and his feet. There was that time a ride didn’t materialize, and the soggy family took shelter from the rain in a closed post office, sitting on stacks of newspapers while a neighborhood woman kept inquiring if they were all right.

It’s timely to discuss the Durnings because Christmas, after all, celebrates the birth of the ultimate anti-materialist, a man who chased money-changers out of the temple and urged his followers to give to the poor and stop being a slave to wealth.

We all know what happened to him.

So Durning, who’s 42 and a Seattle native, prefers to persuade rather than preach. Gentle, self-effacing, wry and dressed like the downtown-office-dad that he is, he proposes realistic social and governmental reforms that could make experiments like his common some day. What keeps him down-to-earth (pun intended) are his three kids.

Gary, who is working before college and living with friends, wants his own car. What 19-year-old wouldn’t? Kathryn and Peter have more mixed feelings, given the celebrity that carlessness has granted. “They say, ‘You don’t have a car? Poor baby,”‘ Kathryn mimicked.

Amy, a substitute teacher who also teaches self-defense to women and children, good-humoredly figures these experiments are part of the package of marrying Alan.

Unlike some busy American clans, their family regularly dines together, plays games together, bicycles together. Each parent has lost 10 pounds since giving up a car, and the family saves $200 to $300 a month.

One of the biggest issues has been the social stigma of not participating in the endless carpooling to kid activities, a problem solved with Flexcar.

Their modest but pleasant 1920s Ballard home, with a total of 1,800 square feet including finished attic and basement, was remodeled to high-energy standards. Recycled wood and doors were used. The Durnings chose to buy in Ballard because the neighborhood was walkable.

“I like the size of this house because it’s cozy but still spacious enough,” judged Peter.

But his father is the first to point out the experiment would be far more difficult in a less urbanized neighborhood. “Developers have to put in roads but don’t always have to put in sidewalks,” Durning said. “It ought to be the other way around.”