 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.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
