Radical Simplicity
Jim Merkel used to have a Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man)-like existence developing top-secret weapons and devices that he sold to European militaries and arms dealers. That was before the Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989, giving him a "Road to Damascus" conversion. He founded the Global Living Project (GLP) to help people, campuses, nonprofit organizations and municipalities learn about sustainability. He initiated the GLP Summer Institute, where researchers measured and tried to reduce their ecological footprint by calculating how much of the earth it takes to produce what they consume and absorb their waste. Merkel then wrote Radical Simplicity. The book's topic is also the subject of his upcoming lecture at the Natural Resources Defense Council as part of its Visionary Speaker Series. He spoke to journalist Michael O. Allen.
I read that you live on $5,000 a year. How long have you done this?
For 17 years, it was pretty strict. It became a little more difficult at Dartmouth, where I was the sustainability coordinator for two years. We were able to move the entire campus community toward a sustainable culture, but I was in a very expensive town, so my cost of living probably doubled for some years. I'm now in Belfast, Maine, which is more rural, and I'm slowly bringing that cost back down.
Does living on less money mean not wasting as much?
Yeah. There's a strong correlation between our footprint and our income. It's correlated strongly because most of us spend whatever we earn. And everything we spend money on has an impact on the earth. If you have more money, you take a much more expensive vacation, you drive bigger, faster cars, you own a bigger house with more appliances, more TVs, more computers, more things for the kids. It just goes on and on. The total impact of our consumption and our waste is our ecological footprint. How much area did it take to produce all this and to absorb all the pollutants?
Simplicity is not that simple to do, though, right? Learning to live sustainably can complicate a person's life.
It could be someone who's just careful and frugal and not wasteful. Someone living in New York City could live a life without an automobile, find a market that sells organic produce, find thrift stores to buy their clothing. And they could have a very beautiful, simple, elegant life with furniture that is already used. Make your car last 20 or 30 years, your computer last six, eight, or 10 years. You could live in a smaller, more efficient house; drive a smaller, more efficient car and use it less by taking public transit, or by walking, which is healthier. Eat healthier, local, in-season food and you could live quite well, even in America. It's all really positive.
On a personal level, I am 52 years old, a new father of a six-month-old boy. For me, with a family, I have to keep a lightness around it, knowing I can't force anyone to do anything. But my partner, Susan Cutting, has worked in sustainability and the environment her whole life. I keep out of the car as much as possible but, but when I drive my 1992 Honda Civic, which I got for $950 two and half years ago, it gets 45 miles to the gallon. Because it's an old car, the insurance is pretty cheap, about $200 a year, and I am my own mechanic.
What do you do for a living?
Susan and I are sharing the executive director job at the Newforest Institute, which is a permaculture education center. We work on advanced organic gardening by including fruit trees and berries and all the vegetables that you can imagine into a landscape which can be sustained indefinitely. We are doing the job as volunteers, and we barter our labor for a place to live and food from the organic farm here. It allows us to live pretty simply.
I might choose to bike a lot more than she does -- I ride through the winter, for instance -- but she still loves biking. Before we moved in together, she had her own garden and I had mine. She drives a Prius that gets 50 miles to the gallon.
How did the Exxon Valdez catastrophe change the way you live and work?
I was at a bar in Stockholm, Sweden, when I saw the spill on TV. I started to cry because this is a place of such wildness, Alaska, that I've always dreamed of as a boy. To see it destroyed like this . . . then I realized that I had done seven intercontinental flights in one year. Each day I drove three miles to work just because I was too lazy to get on my bicycle. I looked in the mirror and said, "It's me that's causing this spill."
It motivated me to go without a car for 14 years and, after that, still use a car extremely lightly, fly very infrequently. This latest catastrophe at Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf is, hopefully, another wake-up call for people to really simplify their lives.
How would you characterize the response to this disaster?
I've been an offshore oil opponent actively since the early 1990s. We thought we had some victories, but then President Obama came in and started warming up to all these horrible things. Right after he warmed up to coal, we had the coal-mining disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia. Then he warmed up to offshore oil drilling, and then we have this disaster. I hope he learns. The activists who've been fighting nuclear power for years and years and years have almost stopped them in America, and now he's opening the door again.
How can an urban or suburban dweller live sustainably?
The biggest impact item is our car. If we share the car with one other person everyday going to work, we just halved the impact. Then if we drive, say, half as much because we don't just go for a joyride, or we make a good list so we don't forget the milk and have to drive back to the store to get the milk, and you have a friend that's 30 miles away and a friend that lives around the corner, and they're equally nice, we just chose to see the one that's close. And then we halve the travel, then we get a car that gets double the miles per gallon. So now, putting two in the car, made our footprint only half, using the car half as much made the footprint one quarter, then getting double the mileage makes our footprint with the car only one-eighth. And we haven't done anything heroic.
We can do the same with our housing. Maybe we could rent that empty bedroom in our house to a college student. Instead of living in the house alone, now there's two in the house. We share the refrigerator, we share the stove, we share the dishwasher, the clothes washer, everything we share so we halve the impact of everything just by having more users of our things. And then we can insulate the house so it uses less energy. With food, we could buy local food, organic food, in-season food, lowering the footprint by eating more vegetarian rather that meat-base food. These things have a huge impact.
It's just different habits. In the beginning it'll be hard because you're not even aware that you're not sustainable. You have to think about every little thing when you become consciously sustainable. You bring your own bag when you want to go shopping, and you bring your own coffee mug. You might forget some days but, if you keep at it, all of a sudden one day you realize that for the last year, you didn't forget your bags once. Your coffee mug is always with you, and you haven't taken a single paper cup for a year, and it's just natural. There's nothing hard anymore. You're just unconsciously sustainable. All of us can get to that point.
