Living the Good Life on $5,000 a Year

By Kevin O'Connor, Rutland Herald. Posted November 25, 2008.

"I knew how to run numbers on big business deals," Merkel says. "I started to run the numbers on my life."

'I had a lot of toys'

Two decades ago, Merkel was living in a four-bedroom house spilling with stuff. To simplify, he sold almost everything. Out went his motorcycle, his pickup truck, his antique car, his speedboat.

"I had a lot of toys. And other things -- you need a leather jacket to ride the motorcycle. And tools -- when I felt empty, I would buy more tools."

Merkel cleared enough space to rent out three spare rooms, helping him cut his monthly bills from more than $1,000 to about $200. Four years later, he sold the house, banked the money and toured North America, Europe and Asia -- he has traveled more than 17,000 miles by bike -- to study how different communities and cultures are working toward economic and environmental sustainability.

In 1990, for example, Merkel visited Arizona to help distribute humanitarian aid to 300 Navajo families. He listened as an elder woman told how the government wanted to relocate her tribe so it could mine for an estimated $100 billion in coal.

"What can I do to help?" he asked.

"Go back to your people and tell them to live simply," he recalls her saying. "Then they wouldn't be out here digging up Mother Earth for coal and uranium."

Three years later, Merkel went to Kerala, India, a state of 30 million people who are educated and healthy though they earn 60 times less than the average American income. He saw how citizens harvested coconuts for meat and milk, used husks to fuel fires and wove fronds into hut walls, roofs and twine.

"There are no clear-cuts, no factories, no fossil fuels, no insurance and no marketing," he recalls. "Fuel, food, shelter, fishing nets, ropes -- and they never killed the tree!"

In comparison, Merkel read the book "Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth" by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees and discovered that the average American's material consumption, calculated by the amount of land required for harvesting and waste disposal, equals 24 acres.

Can this change? Merkel founded the nonprofit Global Living Project in 1995 and figured out ways to reduce his ecological footprint to as low as 3 acres (below a person from China and above a person from India). He then shared his solutions in "Radical Simplicity," a 288-page book from New Society Publishers now in its third printing.

Merkel considers himself a better mathematician than a writer. But his book has garnered praise (and its foreword) from "Your Money or Your Life" coauthor Vicki Robin. Progressive historian Howard Zinn, for his part, calls it "the most persuasive argument I have yet seen for all of us to radically change the way we live day-to-day."

'It's not a hardship'

So what's Merkel's solution?

"The easiest is simply to take less."

He also suggests "sharing" housing and transportation ("Share with another person and halve your impact; with four people, quarter the impact") and "caring" for what you have, be it properly maintaining household items or supporting communities by producing and purchasing goods locally.

Farm stands and mom-and-pop stores are close, but aren't supermarket prices cheaper?

"What you don't pay over the counter you pay in taxes, dirty air, dead animals, polluted water, clear-cut forests, sweatshops and strip-mined lands," Merkel writes in his book. "Small-scale bioregional producers, although their products might use less energy and materials and create less waste, don't get big tax breaks and bailouts or discounted access to resources because they wield less political influence."

In 2001, Merkel moved to East Corinth to help maintain 27 acres owned by The Good Life Center, curators of former Vermont homesteaders Scott and Helen Nearing's property in Harborside, Maine. Four years later, he became Dartmouth College's first sustainability director and moved to his fixer-upper cabin in Norwich so he could bike seven miles to the New Hampshire campus.

Pedaling aside, Merkel was paid to walk his talk. But the paycheck unexpectedly tripped him up. Earning more money than he had since leaving the military, Merkel almost doubled his annual spending to as much as $10,000. And so after two years on the job, he quit. He's working his way back to living on $5,000, which he reaps from part-time teaching, speeches and investment interest.

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