Living the Good Life on $5,000 a Year

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

Merkel may sound pay-as-you-go old-fashioned, but he plugs into modern conveniences like the Internet.

"I have bills like everyone else. I'm just very conservative with things."

His monthly electric bill, for example, is "$9 and change" because he limits his use of lights and appliances. He fuels his 1992 Honda Civic (averaging 45 miles per gallon) only when he can't bike. He can't control his property taxes, but he can plant an eighth of an acre with summer fruit and salad fixings and winter root-cellar and canning staples including beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, potatoes and squash.

And, if necessary, he's willing to throw in the kitchen sink.

"You might wash dishes with wood ash as I did at Gandhi's ashram in India."

Seems like work? It doesn't have to.

"It's not a hardship -- it's the frame of consciousness I put myself into." One example: "Say you are growing tired of weeding the garden. Many of the common garden weeds are edible and nutritious."

Coffee with that?

Most of Merkel's choices are calculated. Consider whether he should eat meat. He tapped a mathematical formula to determine that, because gardening consumes less land and resources than raising animals, a soybean-based tofu burger impacts the environment four times less than a chicken burger and 14 times less than a beef burger.

Merkel has enjoyed boiling maple sap into sugar. Then he discovered he had to burn nearly three cords of wood to make 16 gallons of syrup, "so I got a beehive."

Sending an e-mail requires a few seconds of electricity, while mailing a letter consumes a tree and truck fuel. But when the engineer weighed all the metal and plastic in his computer, he discovered an electronic message is three times as ecologically damaging as a letter.

That said, simplicity doesn't have to be complicated. Merkel has a shortlist of synonyms for "Earth-efficient": simple, safe, local, low cost, readily available, recycled. He has followed them for almost two decades, even as most Americans sought shelter in mortgages and credit cards.

Then the world's economy tanked this fall on a reef of bad debt.

"Every year this gets more pertinent," he says, "especially with this current economic adjustment."

Virginia's Longwood University has begun to assign Merkel's book annually to its more than 1,000 incoming freshmen. The author, speaking there recently, brought his own coffee mug to save a disposable cup. Then a student asked how the man who wrote about the dangers of coffee-plantation deforestation and "all the fuels needed to harvest, process, ship, roast, deliver, grind and brew the beans" could swallow the end product?

"My take is not to micromanage everyone, to say 'good' or 'bad,'" Merkel says.

Instead, he hopes people will think about each individual choice that, in combination with others, best balance what one wants with what one needs.

"For one person, the motivation may be saved money; for another, saved Earth; for another, more free time; for still another, creating conditions for world peace."

And for all, Merkel hopes simplicity will bring the same payoff: peace of mind.

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