Some people associate environmentalism with Haight-Ashbury hippies with trust funds and time to kill, but the reality is, big money is bad for the environment. The dropout generation was cluing into that, but the rat race has sucked many of its children back in. Our brand of environmentalism is too often boiled down to more conscientious, and more expensive, shopping choices.
According to Jim Merkel, author of Radical Simplicity: Small Footprint on a Finite Earth, and a recent guest speaker at the Tatamagouche Centre, the best shopping choice is to buy as little as possible, and work as little as possible while you’re at it. “I had 13 yard sales when I quit the corporation,” he tells me. Until 1989, Merkel was a military engineer specializing in overseas sales.
He now makes a modest living selling books and travelling by bicycle—he once raced in the US nationals—to deliver workshops on sustainable living. He helps people, mostly youth and corporate drones suffering midlife crises, get in touch with “how it feels to be part of a culture that consumes so much when people starve and nature is being destroyed.”
Without that personal transformation in individuals, the assault on our environment will surely continue unabated. Merkel is well aware that a few people changing their purchasing habits won’t save us, but he is planting the seeds of activism and new ways of living.
“I want to get activists free from the corporation,” he says. “Then we can starve them by not buying their stuff.” He adds that sustainability should cost less, not more. “It means paying workers more, but cutting down on inputs like pesticides and not shipping products across the world.”
A 2008 study by Hugh Mackenzie, Hans Messinger and Rick Smith backs Merkel up. It shows that the richest 10 percent of Canadian households have an environmental impact two-and-a-half times greater than the poorest 10 percent. The largest discrepancy in environmental impact, however, is between the richest 10 percent and the second-richest 10 percent. It’s the uber-rich who are really doing us in.
And of course, even poor Canadians’ environmental impact far exceeds your typical Indian or Chinese person. The average Canadian’s eco-footprint is 14 times the size of that of the average Haitian, according to York University’s Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability.
While no one should suffer abject poverty, Merkel takes inspiration from people who live well on very little money. “When I was in India I saw a guy cutting hair for 10 cents and I wondered how he could live on that. But he did it out of his house, and his house used 30 times less consumer products than what you’d see in North America. He wasn’t living in poverty but his needs were simple.”
By having simple needs we free ourselves of the desire to earn big money for conspicuous consumption. “Consumption is a root issue for so many of our problems, and environmentalists are trying to stop these hideous projects as a result,” he says. “Any activist I know could be working on one of 100 problems.”
By providing people with simple tools like ecological footprinting and financial planning for low-income living—think SNL‘s “Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford” sketch—Merkel hopes a lot more potential activists will be freed up to help with the cause.
After he quit the killing business, Merkel worked for a few years as the sustainability coordinator at Dartmouth College, where he tried to change university frat culture “one beer can at a time” from the inside. He eventually realized that, as much as he respects teachers who teach kids to grow their own food on school properties, changing the system from within wasn’t for him. “Some will put their bodies in front of bulldozers and some will get too beaten down in the political system,” he says, “so the question is, ‘How do we make a new system?’ I regularly work with youth who are on fire and don’t want to live like their parents, with pear-shaped bodies staring at computers parcelling off what’s left of the planet.”
That’s the starting point from which we hop off the hamster wheel and figure out how to live well on this finite planet.
This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2010.
Chris, you’ve done it again. Why don’t we have two of you at The Coast, putting out quality messages like this? Better yet, why don’t we have someone like you writing for the Chronicle Herald?
In western culture, people have become convinced that convenience is a right and even more that it is a key component of freedom and democracy. In reality, there is only the illusion of convenience. For example, as philosopher Ivan Illich pointed out, the average US citizen only travels about 5 miles per hour in their cars:
“The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour (4.68 mph, ed).”
There is a whole website devoted to just this one aspect of western culture:
http://5mph.net/
Cheers Chris!
-Tom
….
well, duh.
In reference to your quote , SNL’s “Don’t buy stuff you cannot afford” sketch , if more people had listened to our comedians a decade ago there may not have been the bank failures of last year and the massive lay-offs we are enduring now. Unfortunately our young people are not taught how to use their credit wisely these days and most will end up in trouble buying stuff they cannot afford. Education is the key.
Wow, just the other day, I was wondering who was the original Captain Obvious. I found him; his name is Jim Merkel. The worst part is, he rides around in the countryside on a bicycle like some apostle of the environment, preaching to the choir, and trying to convert the unconverted.
While I don’t disagree with what Mr. Merkel says, I would need to interject that his study of somebody living in India cutting hair for 10 cents a piece, does not live to the standards we are used to in Canada. Sure, he has less in his home and we could all indeed learn something for that, but depending on where he lives in India, he probably lives in highly unsanitary conditions, rife with poverty and disease. Sure, he may not be “well off”, or “living in poverty”, but when a majority of your county’s living conditions range from bad to worse (and quite cluttered I might add), “living in poverty” could mean that he has running water as opposed to having to travel to 10 kilometers to get clean water.
Not all of western ideology is bad; which Jim Merkel seems to be saying. This only repeated by Mr. Tom MacDonald here. However, this is a shortsighted and narrow view of environmentalism, which is part of the movement’s problem, and this seems to be why people see environmentalists as “Haight-Ashbury hippies with trust funds and time to kill”, and not as they should be.
Interesting and obvious stuff here……but something doesn’t work. When I think of this sort of lifestyle adopted across the board…..I tend to think economic doomsday will follow. If we all lived in such a grand non-consumerism way…..then all the stuff we’re making, moving around, selling, buying and giving ceases. Jobs and activities cease too.
Can people just hang-out and do nothing?
More time for leisure, travel, exploring interests, reading, and so on…..I hear you say. Doesn’t that just start up the need for things again…..which brings back more jobs and activities and just gets us right back where we were….consumerizing again? (if Chris can use ‘uber’ I can say consumerizing)
I can’t quite see it as a universal lifestyle……but I also can’t see universal growth having a future either and our economic model requires…..no…..depends on growth to work.
if people do not spend money where will hospitals get it.schools,paved roads,military,research,police service,fire service,sanitation,clean water,transportation of necessary goods,farming.etc.oh i forgot we are living in imagination land.we can just print more money and with good thoughts we will conitinue to have all our necessity’s met.
the left are either incredibly niave about the world and how it works,or just to stupid to learn about the world around them.
Excellent column Chris. It reminds me of Ivan Illich’s comments many years ago during an appearance in Toronto in which he compared rampant consumerism to a fiery furnace that burns everything up. Illich spoke of Moloch, the ancient god associated with fire and the sacrificial burning of children.
That seems to be the meaning also invoked by Allen Ginsberg in Howl:
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Good article Chris.
What most people (ie. economists) fail to acknowledge is that our growth-centered economic models are fundamentally flawed.
It is an elementary mathematical exercise to demonstrate that growth cannot continue indefinitely utilizing a finite resource base. This means that the conspicuous consumption model that most Westerners have been encouraged to follow will soon run out of steam (oil actually) whether we wish it or no. It will be the inevitable end result of our current pattern of unsustainable resource depletion.
Just because they hadn’t developed the germ theory of disease and had no clue what a virus was didn’t stop people from contracting and dying of small pox for thousands of years prior to these advances. The fact that many folks don’t accept that our consumption patterns are likely going to result in a vastly different and perhaps unlivable climate for the planet as a whole, or that our habit of using the world’s biosphere as our communal garbage dump is already leading to catastrophic declines in species we depend on for food, doesn’t mean that they are going to be immune from the impact of these changes.
Jim Merkel has hit the bulls eye. Our consumption oriented culture will, in the end, kill us and take a good portion of the earth’s biosphere with it.
wrong Urban Farmer Bob.while we are progressing we are finding alternatives.this idea of us running out of resources is bullshit.what resources are we so close to running out of.not oil.not even close to it plus we have alternatives that we are developing to supplement it.not wood,water,soil.etc.that what makes capitalism so great is its flexibility,adaptability to problems.to move money and resources quickly to research(science)which is everything.science is the solution to all problems.what this idiot Jim Merkel proposes will bring our destruction faster then what you think will.the world is not as bad off as you think.your great great great grandchildren will still be harping these alarmist views while we will still be harvesting these resources you claim we are running out of.
nice poem reminds me of mordor.he must of watched it before he wrote it.because it certainly has nothing to do with any valid images of the west.it could also have been communist russia
we could however buy what we need verses buying what we want and being tricked into bulk buying – buy what you need and not more than that….pay a fair market price and forget about the deals bulk purchases will net you(unless you are sharing with a dozen people) the economy will not die but it will change