Radical Simplicity Response

1. I would love to be able to embrace a Tao-ist perspective and say “I live day to day and enjoy my life in the present rather than dreaming of the future”, but that would be an outright lie. I love playing the “imagine my life 10 years in the future” game! (For all my ladies out there who played M.A.S.H. all throughout elementary school, you know what I’m talking about, right?) In my imaginary future I am 28 years old, married, perhaps with a family on the horizon, preferably two kids, a boy and a girl, a puppy in the backyard. In my ideal world I would already be a published author with a bestselling series of novels on the shelves of Barnes and Noble’s, so that I can live comfortably on an elementary school teacher salary, and run a Bed and Breakfast during the summer time for travelers to the Washington/Oregon area. My bed and breakfast would emphasize fresh veggies from my garden, eggs in the morning from the hens in coop in the backyard, in season fruits from local growers in the daily meals for the guests. My efforts at sustainability in running my B&B would be written up in countless newspapers and Sunset magazine. Whoa…I got a little bit carried away with this imagining exercise, but this is the ideal of ideals of my future, obviously this is subject to change. After I read Jim Merkel’s Radical Simplicity, I reconsidered my view of my 28 year old self. At second glance my 10 year plan seems very shallow and focused on material possessions as in a large mansion to house my family and bed and breakfast and along with that a LOT of money. When I get down to the basics of what I want, no need, in my life ten years down the road all I need is happiness and love, as cheesy as that sounds. I don’t need a best-selling novel or a disposable income to be happy. What Radical Simplicity made me realize is that you can achieve a fulfilling life with only minimal possessions when you appreciate the earth and the people around you. Merkel references in the chapter about Your Money or Your Life the idea of getting off the treadmill of this capitalistic society before you are past the point of no return and all you value is material. I am getting off this treadmill before my material possessions come to define my life. Radical Simplicity has made me refocus my life goals into a less materialistic realm; I want to incorporate sustainable practices, recognition of the immaterial happiness of life and appreciation of nature into my lifestyle no matter where my future will lead me.

2. When I first picked up Jim Merkel’s book, I’m not going to lie, I was a little bit worried. First of all, I hate feeling guilty, and I knew that with all this talk of sustainability I was inevitably going to feel some (more like a lot of) guilt over my unsustainable lifestyle. Secondly, the term radical always sounds intimidating. When I first purchased the book, I flipped it open to get a sense of what Radical Simplicity is all about, and what page do I casually flip to? None other than the chapter on communing with nature through nature walks and vision quests. I’m down with composting and recycling and saving woodland creatures and all that jazz, but vision quests? Fasting to the point where you hallucinate? Sweat lodges? (Didn’t part of a cult just die in a sweat lodge?) Not really my style. I couldn’t help but think, “Don’t drink the Kool-aid, Katie!” All this sounded cultish and all too radical to me­. Was this book going to be just the preaching of what I like to call “The Cult of REI”? I don’t have anything against REI, I know some fantastic people that are members of “The Cult of REI” but every time I go into that store, I feel like I’m intruding on a secret meeting of backpackers, climbers, hikers all donning their expensive eco-friendly gear, and I am an infidel, wearing my cheap Philippine made shirt. It is probably just my extremely guilty conscience kicking in that I have such a reaction to REI-ers and Jim Merkel alike. Needless to say, my first impression of Merkel’s Radical Simplicity was not so good, but thankfully my first impression was, as usual, completely off base. After reading the entirety of Radical Simplicity, I realized Merkel wasn’t a member of some wacky cult; he was just an average guy who took charge of his guilty conscience and drastically altered his lifestyle. And by drastically, I mean DRASTICALLY. This was no half-assed sustainability project; Merkel's change was a radical life choice. The extent to which he reduced his ecological footprint is extreme, first to 3 acres and then 2 acres, is in all meanings of the word radical. But does he go too far? I would say no. Sure his changes are extreme, but he was still able to lead a happy, healthy life. For me to change my lifestyle that drastically at this point in my life, I would personally not be happy, and it would be too extreme. But Merkel does not preach an exact replica of his path to radical simplicity for everyone; it can be altered to the extent to which you are willing to change. The three Wiseacre scenarios provide alternative visions of a sustainable lifestyle that are not quite as radical as Merkel and thus disproved my initial expectation of a preachy environmental extremist cult member.

Ecological Footprint Response

The first of three tools in Jim Merkel’s proposed path toward global living in Radical Simplicity is ecological foot printing. Ecological foot printing is an important process because it is a primary measure of the degree to which your life is sustainable, a marker in your path toward global living. The first of the four stages of sustainable living is unconscious unsustainability; ecological foot printing has the power to bring people out of this first stage and on to the next, conscious unsustainability. Awareness is the first step toward change, and this exercise has certainly made me more aware of my massive impact on the environment and has motivated me to make changes to my unsustainable lifestyle.

After a lot of digging for information, a few calls to my personal financial managers (aka my parents) I was able to fill out the majority of the details of the charts and grids to calculate my ecological footprint. My monthly footprint was surprisingly more than I thought it would be, I like to consider myself less consumptive and better eating habits than the average American, I gave up beef 8 years ago, I tend not to eat a lot of meat, primarily poultry, and I’m all about fruits and veggies, but my footprint was still 20,005.5 sq. feet. That amount of land is just short of the 4.7 acres Merkel suggest that the global population can maintain if consuming 50% of the lands bioproductivity. I severely underestimated my eating habits and the amount of land needed to supply for them. I am so far removed from what I consume on a day to day basis. Plates of food get set out on the hot plates and I eat them, I do not have control of whether my food is organic or locally grown, unless I were to move out to an apartment with a kitchen and prepare my own meals, but as a first year college student that is improbable.

Another major contribution to the massive size of my ecological footprint is my Monthly Goods total. The large amount of money I spend on my university education is a significant impact of 38,320 sq. feet. I was extremely surprised by this, how does my learning take up 7.9 acres? I did not consider my education to be a significant negative impact on the environment; I would like to think that my parents (and I) are spending 30,000 dollars a year so I can make the world better place, not the contrary. This proves that every single one of our practices, even education, a practice that is generally considered in a positive light, has a ecological footprint. Another significant footprint within my monthly goods is the amount of money I spend on health insurance.. Health insurance is something that I would be wary of giving up, although I am in good health as of now, it is nice to know that I am protected in case of the odd medical visit. As a college student, I live in an 11 by 13 foot dorm room with three roommates, thus my housing footprint is relatively minimal, just under an acre, 4320 square feet. However as happy as I am that I have a minimal housing footprint, I could not foresee myself living in what is essentially a cube with a bed and a desk for the rest of my life, but I also do not want to perpetuate my large ecological footprint. Another consequence of living in a dorm is that my transportation is limited to the odd bus trip to Santa Monica or the rare trip back home to San Diego, altogether not too much (relatively speaking, though still room for improvement) 2,340 square feet.

I was alarmed at how large my ecological footprint was, although I have a smaller impact than the average American, my 17.8 acre footprint as opposed to the average American’s 24.2 acre print. I do not feel extremely wasteful or consumptive, proving that much of my impact is unconscious. As a student I am removed from the food I eat, I do not pay an electricity or water bill for my dorm, my parents pay for my education as well as my monthly spending. Once I consume something I don’t see it ever again. I don’t pay my bills, fiscally, as well as environmentally speaking. I would have to radically cut down on every aspect of my life to achieve the goal of 4.7 acre footprint. I cannot make that drastic change at this point in my life, but I am fully prepared to make many smaller changes to decrease my impact immediately, including following vegetarian diet and altogether decreasing my food intake and waste, decreasing my car travel from San Diego to LA either by taking trains or carpooling, and spending less on things like entertainment , there is so many opportunities for entertainment that are free and I should focus on enjoying them, nature specifically. Long term I would like to change my lifestyle to more sustainable and ecologically conscious practices, possibly incorporating the more drastic changes Merkel advocates, like relying on my own garden produce and on biking for transportation. It is overwhelming to think that I could make enough changes to lower my footprint by 13 acres, but I will lower my footprint one step at a time and gradually be able to lead a simple life.

Personal Trash Inventory

Before beginning my personal trash inventory I knew that as a member of an extraordinarily wasteful society, I would also be subject to the influence of a wasteful culture. I knew my lifestyle had its associated trash output, but it wasn’t an area of concern or even awareness prior to my week long trash inventory. I was as happy as a clam putting the blame on everyone else for the filling of landfills, despite my inner knowledge of my personal wastefulness. I assuaged any nagging fears about my negative impact on the environment by telling myself, that there are people that waste way more than I do, my contribution pales in comparison to this other unidentifiable group of horribly indulgent wasteful people I imagined to make me look like mother nature herself, I mean I have a composter for Pete’s sake, how wasteful can I be? (granted it is an empty composter).
My relative ignorance of my personal wastefulness is due to the fact that trash has become an almost unconscious aspect of my life, I don’t even have to walk five feet and I encounter a trash can on campus beckoning for my water bottle. In my dorm, I simply drop my trash down a chute and it magically disappears forever. My view of trash is so skewed, once an item is in the trash, that item almost doesn’t exist anymore. We throw things away, and consider them gone for good, but there is no real “away” for that trash to disappear to. My ignorance to my wasteful behavior can come down to the saying “out of sight out of mind”, my trash doesn’t stay in my tiny dorm room; it just disappears down the chute and out of my thoughts forever. At home the only time our trash is even really considered is Wednesday morning, abruptly awoken by the din of the trash collector, when someone sprints out to put the trash bins on our curb. God forbid if we were to forget and we would be stuck with our trash for another WEEK!? When in reality that week of trash in our side yard is a whole lot shorter than how long that trash will be on this earth sitting in a landfill. To say the least, my perspective has changed after seeing the sheer volume of my trash output during the completion of my trash inventory.
As to the content of my trash, I was blown away by how much paper products I use on a day to day basis. Paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, tissues, and papers for printing and assignments accounts for an extremely large percentage of my trash. I was also struck by how much of my waste from organic food waste, napkins, utensils, packaging, take out boxes and cups, was in some way related to food. The week in which I inventoried my trash was an extraordinarily busy one, so busy that I didn’t eat regular meals in the dining halls. I relied mainly upon take out from the quick services restaurants at UCLA, like Bruin Café, in comparison to eating at the dining hall where all I would throw away would be napkins and the odd uneaten piece of food, whereas at Bruin Cafe, I throw away a paper cup, lid, straw, takeout box, plastic bag, fork, and napkins. All in all, A LOT more trash than if I were to eat at the dining hall or prepare my own food. To reduce my waste of food related items, I am focusing on planning my meals so I don’t have to rely on Bruin Café and packaging heavy food items. I can also easily reduce my use of paper products, by using my cloth towel to dry my hands instead of the mass amounts of paper towels I used to use, and limit myself to only two napkins per meal, so as to prevent the mountain of crumpled up napkins that always somehow end up on my plate after dinner. I can also use my refillable water container instead of taking the wasteful route and relying on plastic bottles. These changes along with others are relatively simple and can greatly reduce my trash output.