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Vt. engineer designs a good life for $5,000 a year
Kevin O’Connor, Times Argus
Today’s global financial cloud got you feeling gray? Vermonter Jim Merkel sees a silver lining.
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…
… 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.”
(23 November 2008)
Long article. Also at Common Dreams.
Bishop of Birmingham David Urquhart spreads the ‘green gospel’
Patrice John, Birmingham Post
There’s been a change in the tone of the messages delivered from Bishop David Urquhart’s lectern.
Bishop of Birmingham David Urquhart helps St Peter’s CE Junior School recycle their paper.
For the first time in history, city Christians are willing to think about everything from the coffee they drink to the gifts they consume – all in the name of the planet.
And the leader of Birmingham’s Anglican community thinks this is no bad thing as it’s important for everyone, no matter their faith, to address environmental issues.
“The health of the planet is of great importance to Christians and so is preserving the planet’s resources,” he says. “But the Church has also been a part of flourishing societies which in turn have generated great amounts of wealth in the industrial world.
“Unfortunately, some of the consequences of this success and wealth development are the environment has been damaged and this is something we must address.
“So we are now much more focused on the planet’s long-term sustainability, air quality, fuel resources and the packaging of consumer goods.
“The issues around sustainability are so big that I want us, in Birmingham, to start making a difference and begin to take action now.”
This call to action is something that enthuses Bishop David even when he is supposed to be relaxing in his Harborne home. He has begun to take steps to make sure he recycles, maintains a thriving compost heap in his garden and changes his shopping habits.
(24 November 2008)
We must plan a survival strategy for our species
Fred Pearce, blog, New Scientist
The science of sustainability is a mess. In 16 years it seems to have gone backwards as the world rushes on towards a frankly terrifying future. It is time it got its act together.
I was at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro back in 1992. The whole world seemed to be there, promising to find a way out of our growing environmental predicament: climate change, disappearing species, fouled-up oceans, spreading deserts, thinning ozone layer, frying rainforests and the rest. Scientists were at the fore, promising to find a path to a sustainable future.
What happened? Well we got treaties on biodiversity and climate change. Scientists have played a blinder at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – providing certainty where there was confusion. They even picked up a Nobel prize last year for their efforts.
But what about the rest?
Earlier this month, I attended a week-long blue-chip scientific workshop on measuring sustainability, organised by the Ernst Strungmann Forum in Frankfurt, Germany. Some of the best boffins in the business were there to discuss how sustainably we use, or could use, water, land, energy and materials – what you might call the four horsemen of our environmental apocalypse.
But no-one could agree. Nobody even knew how we could measure whether we are moving backwards or forwards. It sounded at times like a gruesome postscript to Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, on how civilizations fail. Because maybe that is what it was.
(24 November 2008)
