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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Vt. Engineer Designs A Good Life for $5, 000 a Year
  • Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2008 07:51:20 -0700



Published on Monday, November 24, 2008 by The Rutland Herald (Vermont)
Vt. Engineer Designs A Good Life for $5,000 a Year
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20081123/NEWS01/811210293/1002/NEWS01
by Kevin O'Connor

Today's global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel
sees a silver lining.

[Jim Merkel, a former military engineer living in Norwich, now uses his
skills to help people live with less. (Vyto Starinskas/Rutland Herald)]Jim
Merkel, a former military engineer living in Norwich, now uses his skills to
help people live with less. (Vyto Starinskas/Rutland Herald)
Back in 1989, the Long Island native was a weapons engineer who helped design
a cutting-edge computer that could transmit military secrets, survive a
nuclear blast and, a decade before the dawn of the BlackBerry, fit in the
palm of his hand. Sitting at a hotel bar in Stockholm, Sweden, he was
drinking in his accomplishment when a bulletin flashed on television.

An oil tanker had hit a reef half a world away in Alaska, spilling 11 million
gallons of crude oil, contaminating 1,300 miles of coastline and killing more
than 250,000 seabirds, otters, seals, bald eagles and whales. Video showed
the culprit to be the Exxon Valdez. But peering into a mirror behind the bar,
Merkel saw only himself.

He drove. He flew. He consumed goods produced with or propelled by fossil
fuels.

"Of course, the entire industrialized world stood indicted beside me," he
recalls. "Our ‘need' for ever-more mobility, ever-more progress, ever-more
growth had led us straight to this disaster. But in that moment, all I knew
was that I, personally, needed to step forward and own up to the damage."

Returning home to the states, Merkel decided to simplify. He not only cleared
away stuff (enough for 13 yard sales) but also tapped his engineering degree
from New York's Stony Brook University to calculate the economic and
environmental savings. By doing so, he figured out how to live comfortably -
and income-tax-free - on $5,000 a year.

To share his findings, Merkel penned a 2003 book, "Radical Simplicity: Small
Footprints on a Finite Earth." That begat his Web site,
www.radicalsimplicity.org. And those begat his continuing string of more than
1,000 speeches, workshops and classes, including this fall's "Moving Toward
Sustainability" course at the Wilder campus of Community College of Vermont.

Most people monitoring the current fiscal crisis are fixated on what they
could lose. Merkel is focused on what everyone could gain.

"This belt-tightening is good for us," he says. "We're swimming in a society
that's super consumptive. Right now is such a beautiful opportunity for us to
become sustainable."

He's ready to show people how.

Oil and water

Growing up, Merkel was the sixth of nine children of a politically
conservative, meat-and-potatoes trucker. Now 50, he lives by himself in a
14-by-16-foot cabin on a dirt road in Norwich, where he grows much of his
mostly organic vegan diet.

Merkel didn't make that leap in a day. Instead, he started with small steps.

Settling in California after the 1989 oil spill, he began by biking to work.
Cutting his fuel consumption, he then joined the Sierra Club and gave money
to other environmental nonprofits. But his biggest move came after he read an
Amnesty International report about human-rights abuses in countries where he
was marketing his military computer.

"There I was," Merkel recalls in his book, "a jet-set military salesman who
voted for Reagan by day, and a bleeding-heart pacifist,
eco-veggie-head-hooligan by night."

His two selves felt as separate as oil and water. One, seeking frugality and
freedom, asked, "How much do I need?" The other, seeking long-term financial
security, asked, "How much can I get?"

Merkel decided not only to quit the business of war but also to stop paying
federal tax dollars that could fund government weapons. To do so, he aimed to
live on an annual income less than the U.S. taxable level of $5,000.

For most Americans, that figure seems miniscule. But back when Merkel made
his decision, it topped the worldwide average income of $4,500. (Today that
sum has risen to almost $8,000, according to the United Nations. Even so, 3.6
billion people, or 60 percent of humanity, live on less than $520 a year.)

Seeking ways to cut costs, Merkel turned to the best-selling book "Your Money
or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving
Financial Independence" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. It asks readers to
add up their cash assets, estimate the value of their possessions and then
keep track of every penny they spend to see whether their purchases equate
with their personal ideals.

"I knew how to run numbers on big business deals," Merkel says. "I started to
run the numbers on my life."

‘I had a lot of toys'

Two decades ago, Merkel was living in a four-bedroom house spilling with
stuff. To simplify, he sold almost everything. Out went his motorcycle, his
pickup truck, his antique car, his speedboat.

"I had a lot of toys. And other things - you need a leather jacket to ride
the motorcycle. And tools - when I felt empty, I would buy more tools."

Merkel cleared enough space to rent out three spare rooms, helping him cut
his monthly bills from more than $1,000 to about $200. Four years later, he
sold the house, banked the money and toured North America, Europe and Asia -
he has traveled more than 17,000 miles by bike - to study how different
communities and cultures are working toward economic and environmental
sustainability.

In 1990, for example, Merkel visited Arizona to help distribute humanitarian
aid to 300 Navajo families. He listened as an elder woman told how the
government wanted to relocate her tribe so it could mine for an estimated
$100 billion in coal.

"What can I do to help?" he asked.

"Go back to your people and tell them to live simply," he recalls her saying.
"Then they wouldn't be out here digging up Mother Earth for coal and uranium."

Three years later, Merkel went to Kerala, India, a state of 30 million people
who are educated and healthy though they earn 60 times less than the average
American income. He saw how citizens harvested coconuts for meat and milk,
used husks to fuel fires and wove fronds into hut walls, roofs and twine.

"There are no clear-cuts, no factories, no fossil fuels, no insurance and no
marketing," he recalls. "Fuel, food, shelter, fishing nets, ropes - and they
never killed the tree!"

In comparison, Merkel read the book "Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human
Impact on the Earth" by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees and discovered
that the average American's material consumption, calculated by the amount of
land required for harvesting and waste disposal, equals 24 acres.

Can this change? Merkel founded the nonprofit Global Living Project in 1995
and figured out ways to reduce his ecological footprint to as low as 3 acres
(below a person from China and above a person from India). He then shared his
solutions in "Radical Simplicity," a 288-page book from New Society
Publishers now in its third printing.

Merkel considers himself a better mathematician than a writer. But his book
has garnered praise (and its foreword) from "Your Money or Your Life"
coauthor Vicki Robin. Progressive historian Howard Zinn, for his part, calls
it "the most persuasive argument I have yet seen for all of us to radically
change the way we live day-to-day."

‘It's not a hardship'

So what's Merkel's solution?

"The easiest is simply to take less."

He also suggests "sharing" housing and transportation ("Share with another
person and halve your impact; with four people, quarter the impact") and
"caring" for what you have, be it properly maintaining household items or
supporting communities by producing and purchasing goods locally.

Farm stands and mom-and-pop stores are close, but aren't supermarket prices
cheaper?

"What you don't pay over the counter you pay in taxes, dirty air, dead
animals, polluted water, clear-cut forests, sweatshops and strip-mined
lands," Merkel writes in his book. "Small-scale bioregional producers,
although their products might use less energy and materials and create less
waste, don't get big tax breaks and bailouts or discounted access to
resources because they wield less political influence."

In 2001, Merkel moved to East Corinth to help maintain 27 acres owned by The
Good Life Center, curators of former Vermont homesteaders Scott and Helen
Nearing's property in Harborside, Maine. Four years later, he became
Dartmouth College's first sustainability director and moved to his
fixer-upper cabin in Norwich so he could bike seven miles to the New
Hampshire campus.

Pedaling aside, Merkel was paid to walk his talk. But the paycheck
unexpectedly tripped him up. Earning more money than he had since leaving the
military, Merkel almost doubled his annual spending to as much as $10,000.
And so after two years on the job, he quit. He's working his way back to
living on $5,000, which he reaps from part-time teaching, speeches and
investment interest.

Merkel may sound pay-as-you-go old-fashioned, but he plugs into modern
conveniences like the Internet.

"I have bills like everyone else. I'm just very conservative with things."

His monthly electric bill, for example, is "$9 and change" because he limits
his use of lights and appliances. He fuels his 1992 Honda Civic (averaging 45
miles per gallon) only when he can't bike. He can't control his property
taxes, but he can plant an eighth of an acre with summer fruit and salad
fixings and winter root-cellar and canning staples including beets, cabbage,
carrots, onions, potatoes and squash.

And, if necessary, he's willing to throw in the kitchen sink.

"You might wash dishes with wood ash as I did at Gandhi's ashram in India."

Seems like work? It doesn't have to.

"It's not a hardship - it's the frame of consciousness I put myself into."
One example: "Say you are growing tired of weeding the garden. Many of the
common garden weeds are edible and nutritious."

Coffee with that?

Most of Merkel's choices are calculated. Consider whether he should eat meat.
He tapped a mathematical formula to determine that, because gardening
consumes less land and resources than raising animals, a soybean-based tofu
burger impacts the environment four times less than a chicken burger and 14
times less than a beef burger.

Merkel has enjoyed boiling maple sap into sugar. Then he discovered he had to
burn nearly three cords of wood to make 16 gallons of syrup, "so I got a
beehive."

Sending an e-mail requires a few seconds of electricity, while mailing a
letter consumes a tree and truck fuel. But when the engineer weighed all the
metal and plastic in his computer, he discovered an electronic message is
three times as ecologically damaging as a letter.

That said, simplicity doesn't have to be complicated. Merkel has a shortlist
of synonyms for "Earth-efficient": simple, safe, local, low cost, readily
available, recycled. He has followed them for almost two decades, even as
most Americans sought shelter in mortgages and credit cards.

Then the world's economy tanked this fall on a reef of bad debt.

"Every year this gets more pertinent," he says, "especially with this current
economic adjustment."

Virginia's Longwood University has begun to assign Merkel's book annually to
its more than 1,000 incoming freshmen. The author, speaking there recently,
brought his own coffee mug to save a disposable cup. Then a student asked how
the man who wrote about the dangers of coffee-plantation deforestation and
"all the fuels needed to harvest, process, ship, roast, deliver, grind and
brew the beans" could swallow the end product?

"My take is not to micromanage everyone, to say ‘good' or ‘bad,'" Merkel says.

Instead, he hopes people will think about each individual choice that, in
combination with others, best balance what one wants with what one needs.

"For one person, the motivation may be saved money; for another, saved Earth;
for another, more free time; for still another, creating conditions for world
peace."

And for all, Merkel hopes simplicity will bring the same payoff: peace of
mind.






  • [Livingontheland] Vt. Engineer Designs A Good Life for $5, 000 a Year, Tradingpost, 11/27/2008

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