My response to Radical Simplicity

There's an old Johny Cash song called One Piece at a Time about an automobile factory worker who, over many years, steals an entire Cadillac by sneaking out the pieces in his lunch box...one piece at a time. The car he eventually ends up with is a hodgepodge of pieces from different eras, a one of a kind, all his own. This is my life- a patchwork of experiences, events, and dispositions; a history of ideas and goals, some completed, others forgotten; an ever changing taste in food, fashion, work and hobbies; a collage of memories of the things that have most shaped me; a current set of habits and things I do, of people I know, of desires and plans I have. In some ways I think we are all some strange car emerging from the pieces of our past that we pick up along the way, along circuitous paths- through childhood, at school, in relationships, on the job, from adolescence into adulthood... This is why I could never see before where I am now or where I am going with absolute certainty.

If you'd asked me ten years ago what type of lifestyle I thought I would be living now my answer would in many ways reflect my current lifestyle because I still live in the same city, in the same society. But that's not precisely right either, because the city and society have been evolving all along. Environmentalism has begun to hit the mainstream. Ten years ago, in my eyes, organic produce was a novelty item strictly for those who could afford it. I had no notion of why people would go for something so hoaky a label as "organic". I scoffed at the small organic sections one would occasionally see at the supermarket. I refused to shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, even though the food there looked delicious, because I thought it was too expensive- a ripoff. I had heard of global warming but didn't know anything about it. I knew the rainforests and rest of the environment were in peril, that exotic and wonderful animals were going extinct around the globe, and I cared immensely.

Yet I also took for granted that unless I completely shifted course in life, there was nothing I could do about any of the problems our earth was facing. I accepted most of the things I'd grown up used to as obvious truths about the reality of modern life. My main focus in life at the time was graduating from college and going on to graduate school in Anthropology where I would go on intellectual odysseys. My free time was consumed by my first serious but ill-fated relationship and my love to travel, hike, and occasionally backpack took up leisure time. I just didn't give sustainable living much thought except perhaps in certain situations where it was an abstraction to discuss, an ideological topic and not a very pressing one. I don't think I'd even heard of the term 'sustainable' yet. I seem to recall that in very stressful, frustrating moments, I entertained casual thoughts about ditching my plans for grad school and running of with Green Peace, but I can't remember and now its doubtful.

I wasn't then nor am I now a green saint. But I was no Merkel either. The thought of working for the military industrial complex or worse, actually being in the military was unsettling because I'd always been a pacifist, more or less. Merkel recalls the pivotal moment of change towards radical simplicity as one in which he was faced with the brutal reality of his lifestyle and his work on computers in the defense industry. The catalyst and what startled him into consciousness was the Exxon Valdez catastrophe. For myself, I can claim no such moment of clarity. My interests in and transitioning towards a more sustainable and simpler way of life has been gradual and motivated by many ongoing situations and events in the world. The longer Bush was president, the more his anti-environmental stupidity got to me. I started rock climbing and spending several weeks a year out doors, in the woods, mountains, and desserts of California and the Southwest. I continued my studies but as I fed my love of the outdoors that love grew. I'd be a liar if I said this love for the natural world didn't outgrow my love of spending hours writing drudgery at my computer in the university research library. In retrospect it is a slow, steady shifting and maturing of beliefs and values that appears to have led me to the stage I am in now, a stage Merkel calls conscious unsustainability. To be fair, this stage is really about transitioning out of unsustainability, not just being aware of how you live unsustainably. I just received my Wonder Wash and Vortex Blender in the mail (both hand powered gadgets for the aspiring sustainability guru) but I have a long, LONG way to go still. My footprint? Well below the American average but far from the 4.5 acres Merkel advocates. So where to next? Where do I see myself in ten years?

Ten years from now I envision myself owning and living in an Earthship or something just as green and sustainable, perhaps with a child or two at most to raise and mostly free time to do the things that matter most- being sustainable, helping others to be sustainable, and spending plenty of time exploring mother nature. Part of this will of course be growing all my own fruits and vegetables and preparing and preserving all my own food. I will have chickens for eggs and maybe goats for milk and cheese or just for watching them do silly goat things. Rabbits? Oh yes several rabbits and a compost bin as well. I definitely do not see myself having a traditional type job- unless of course it is teaching. But before I settle on teaching as a career, I have a few other ideas up my sleeve. Before I read Radical Simplicity I assumed that in order to survive and have any of the things that I wanted, I would have to put up with the drudgery of a typical full time job, academic or otherwise. Now I realize how creative you can be with your own lifestyle, which means being creative with how you make money and how you spend it. Yet I don't want to promise or refuse to live as radically as Merkel or in precisely the same manner. I can't predict what problems or solutions I may discover on this path towards sustainability. Afterall, I am a strange car, building myself one piece at a time. Merkel evinces an entrepreneurial spirit in the way he has gone about making sustainable living his fulltime love, hobby, and job. And he has been very successful at it. That gives tremendous hope to anyone who feels trapped between their beliefs and values about the environment and social justice on the one hand and on the other hand, living in the most unsustainable society in the history of the planet. It provides hope and a model, not for a way out, but a way onward towards a better, more just, more fulfilling way of life.

Over the midterm, I have my work cut out for me. Next year, if progress towards my long term goals means taking my life in a new direction, you won't find me in grad school. In the mean time, I'm teaching this seminar and learning a tremendous amount about sustainable lifestyles. Progress towards sustainability comes in spurts. Learning to cook, learning what alternative technologies are out there and taking the time to make use of them (like the Wonder Wash), developing a disposition in life towards life that is most consistent with what I value and believe to be humankind's priorities- saving the planet and ourselves for future generations- these processes have a learning curve. They take time. We evolve gradually towards a better self, a stronger community, and a greener world, one piece at a time.

Epilogue, addendum, my response to others responses

One reason I like teaching this course is that my students think of things that I hadn't and that sheds some light on their perspectives and gives me ideas I hadn't thought of. The follow are some comments in response to several sentiments that my students had in response to Radical SImplicity that I may not have shared or may not have felt as strongly. I will summarize those sentiments as I understood them and then present my responses to those sentiments.

- One sentiment is that Merkel expects us all to be just like him.
- Another is that he is unusual, wacky, a dreamer, out of touch with the mainstream, truly a radical.
- A third is that b/c Merkel's situation (when he decided to go radically simpler) was quite different from my students' current situations that this draws into doubt whether any of us can ever realistically hope to be wholly sustainable individuals.
- A fourth is that parts of the book where Merkel shares his beliefs about spirituality and nature make the reader feel uncomfortable (unless you already agree with him; and BTW I didn't, not exactly).
- A fifth is that if you want to raise a family, you can't live the simple, sustainable life like Merkel and a few others have tried to live.

Here are my unedited responses that mostly address these sentiments:

Just to be clear, Merkel is radical, not "a radical" (and not that you called him one). I don't think what he is doing is unrealistic b/c he's a culture creator. He along with others like him are part of a movement lead by cultural innovators, and he's one of the movement's many drivers. The work he is doing now, of trying to drive a society and its cultures away from one way of life and in the direction of another kind of lifestyle will have unpredictable results. I don't look at his model as an either/or option. We don't have to commit to living exactly like Merkel or dismiss any of his ideas because we can't predict when and if they will work for us. As more people adopt more sustainable practices, new solutions will be found that Merkel did not think of. Still others will be absent in which case a bit of radical simplicity will be necessary. Not everyone will be living in the woods off $5000 dollars. But most people will find that they don't need 5 cars, a ginormous house, 10 TVs and Playstations, an RV towing a Hummer stacked with motorbikes and kids toys. They will find instead that they get fulfillment out of doing things like growing all their own fruits and vegetables, biking to work, camping in a tent instead of purchasing an RV. If Merkel had only subscribed to a few of these alternatives, he wouldn't make a very good hero. In order to demonstrate that simpler living is doable and fulfilling, you need an extreme version as an example before you can get society to work the rest out for itself. If you have a family with children then you will have to do more than just read Radical Simplicity to get ideas on how to subsist greenly. The Dervaes family in Pasadena, AKA the Urban Homesteaders, make a fine model of how a family of 5 I believe can live entirely off of just $30,000/yr and not be poor and not be wanting. Initial investments may require making more money to get started, especially in a big city, so its up to people like you guys to figure out innovative solutions to the sorts of problems that Merkel doesn't deal with. Imagine a society that lies somewhere between LA and Kerala, but veering more towards Kerala, where people are educated and healthy, women have lots of rights, people grow a lot of their own food, and I think you'll be imagining a pretty interesting and exciting place to live. Another point I want to make is that we don't have to make all these changes to our lifestyle all at once, mostly because we can't. We don't have the knowledge or resources that someone like Merkel had when he wrote his book. As we gradually make the changes that we can, we will find that the things we value and the things we want out of life will evolve alongside our evolving lifestyle. You may be surprised to find yourself being more radically simple and sustainable 10 years from now than you thought was possible, without even realizing it, simply because your tastes, preferences, assumptions, your world view changed too as you evolved different ways of living.

As for Merkel's wackiness, spiritual or otherwise, I agree that he does seem a bit different by the end. But that is primarily a reflection of the fact that he has chosen a radically different path than most, has done so largely on his own or with just a few others, and so has developed a different sort of spirituality and a different way of articulating that spirituality than mainstream society. Any time someone truly lives radically (e.g. maybe becomes a nun or monk; joins guerrilla fighters; or becomes an academic- yes if you stay here at UCLA long enough you will in many respects stop being mainstream) you can expect to develop different world views than the masses. If you could see the sequence of events in his life leading to the development of those views as they were unfolding, it wouldn't seem as unjustifiable. Yet the unfamiliar always strikes one as odd or questionable at first, no matter if it really is or isn't rational and justifiable. I wasn't too concerned with his version of spirituality, nor am I very concerned with anyone else's for that matter. I didn't agree with everything he wrote either. But that's ok because he has a lot of useful tools for reshaping your own views to suit your own codes and values in such a way that while you probably will not, nor would you want to, become a carbon copy of Merkel, you will discover sustainable ways to live your own life.