Source: How to Save the World
 Radical Simplicity by Jim Merkel is a personal story followed by a detailed prescription. Merkel was a military engineer with a major defense contractor, but couldn't reconcile his job and lifetyle with his personal convictions. So he quit his job and systematically transformed his life to free himself and his family from the possessions that owned him, and the seductive tyranny of wage slavery. He doesn't preach or pontificate, he just describes what led him to make such a momentous change in his life, and how he did it. He then tells you, step-by-step, how you can do it, too. The result is breathtaking and impossible to put down. This is an immensely important and yet unassuming little book.
The simple principles that Merkel now lives by, and invites others to live by, are (1) not amassing personal wealth, and (2) not over-populating the region -- rules he says tribal cultures have successfully lived by for millions of years. During a two week trek on the Muir Trail, he learned to turn off the noise that has preoccupied his every waking moment, and recognize that all his life he had "lived in fear -- of the wild, of the elements, of not having enough". He then went to study the culture of Kerala, India, a province with a North American level of birth rate, infant mortality rate, lteracy and life expectancy, but whose GNP per capita is only 1.5% of North America's. He attributes such an accomplishment to (a) a culture of cooperation, not competition, (b) earth efficiency (no waste), and (c) bioregionalism (make everything locally from local materials whenever possible, rather than import it).
Since then he has worked with many groups to teach them how they can live equitably and sustainably on Earth with other species and other humans, without hardship or sacrifice, by using three lifestyle transformation tools:
- Ecological footprinting -- to measure how much of Earth's resources you are using, and your progress to painlessly reducing that consumption,
- 'Your money or your life' trade-off assessment -- a sophisticated technique to optimize the time and money available to you and how you use it, and
- Learning from nature -- spending time in a natural environment to learn how to be creative, economical, and live in harmony, and how to realign your whole psyche to a better (in every sense) way of living.
Radical Simplicity is a complete workbook for making the change -- with step-by-step charts and tables for measuring your ecological footprint, evaluating your life's priorities, assessing and honing the effectiveness of your lifestyle (how you use your time and money), and assessing with your loved ones how happy you are, now and as you make changes to the way you live.
Merkel spends a lot of time dealing with those visceral fears that keep us in line as massive, wasteful consumers and wage slaves. He appreciates the power that our current culture wields over us, and carefully dismantles the myths that prevent us from living radically simple lives -- that this entails hardship, risk, heavy physical labour, deprivation, danger, or sacrifice, and that radical simplicity requires some kind of spiritual conversion, reveres or romanticizes primitive or savage lifestyles, requires a lot of money, or cuts you off from the rest of 'civilization' (it does none of these things). It is a thorough, systematic, practical step-by-step process, promising personal liberation and happiness with no investment beyond the modest price of the book.
At first blush after reading this book, I think I'm ready to make such a change. Much will depend, of course, on the views of my wife. And my life is so complex and so full of possessions that the change for me will be particularly momentous. I will of course be blogging my progress, or lack of it.
Merkel has concluded that, even if everyone were to reduce their ecological footprint, the world cannot sustain six billion humans at any tolerable standard of living. He proposes a voluntary average one-child family, the sustained effect of which would reduce human population to about a billion in a century, a number that he believes is sustainable. That's still about three times what I think is the utopian level of human numbers. But he and I are clearly on the same wavelength. And the fact he is looking beyond just 'what can I do' to the macro-level 'what do we all need to do' makes this book all the more remarkable. While this blog has been talking about How to Save the World, Merkel has gone ahead and told us how to do it.
The book is published by New Society Publishers, a wonderful Vancouver-based specialty publisher of socially and environmentally progressive books. You can buy Radical Simplicity and some of their other intriguing and educational titles directly from them, or from many independent booksellers in the US and Canada. If you buy it, and decide to make the journey too, please let me know.
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