Imagine you are first in line at a potluck buffet. The spread includes not just food and water, but all the materials needed for shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education. How do you know how much to take? How much is enough to leave for your neighbors behind you—not just the six billion people, but the wildlife, and the as-yet-unborn? In the face of looming ecological disaster, many people feel the need to change their own lifestyles as a tangible way of transforming our unsustainable culture. Radical Simplicity is the first book that guides the reader to a personal sustainability goal, then offers a process to monitor progress to a lifestyle that is equitable amongst all people, species, and generations. It employs three tools to help readers begin their customized journey to simplicity: >It builds on steps from Your Money or Your Life so readers can design their own personal economics to save money, get free of debt, and align their work with their values.
It uses refined tools from Our Ecological Footprint so readers can measure how much nature is needed to supply all they consume and absorb their waste.
Combining lyrical narrative, compassionate advocacy, and absorbing science, Radical Simplicity is a practical, personal answer to twenty-first century challenges that will appeal as much to Cultural Creatives and students as to spiritual seekers, policy makers, and sustainability professionals. Jim Merkel quit his job as a military engineer following the Exxon Valdez disaster and has since worked to develop tools for personal and societal sustainability. He founded the Global Living Project to further this work and conducts workshops around North America on this topic. |
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 Many practical ideas for measuring and reducing personal footprint |
| Review Date: December 24, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Francis M Vanek, Ithaca, NY USA |
I came at this book as an academic teacher and researcher (in the field of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Cornell) who is working in the energy area and wanted to connect the big picture of solving the global energy problem with practical personal steps for improving the sustainability of one's personal lifestyle. (You can learn more about my background from my energy systems book Energy Systems Engineering: Evaluation and Implementation, coauthored with Lou Albright.) I read the book from cover to cover.
As Merkel puts it on p.11, "For societal solutions to succeed, individuals must have first-hand experience in sustainable living", and that is very much the focus of the book. There are numerous suggestions, ranging from dietary choices to travel patterns to money management, many or most of which are tested by Merkel himself. Also, the book provides ways of measuring personal impact and then monitoring one's effort to reduce them, at different levels of detail -- a simpler 'quiz' level for those who want to start at a basic level, and a more advanced, comprehensive system for the more ambitious. You might not choose to do everything suggested exactly to the letter, but there are many practical suggestions, and almost any reader would be able to adopt at least some of them.
My one concern is that the book seems to underestimate the impact that expansion of renewable energy supplies might have on the ability to consume energy without degrading the planet. The basis for calculating the footprint of energy consumption is very restrictive, forcing a person who wants to live within a sustainable footprint (measured in equivalent acres) to consume energy (and other resources as well) very modestly -- for example, at one level of footprint reduction, you are only allowed one airplane flight every ten years! However, the amount of energy that society might someday get from large resources like solar and wind energy is very large, and would potentially change the math on many of the numbers. The book does not seem to recognize this possibility. |
Book of Platitudes
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| Review Date: January 12, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Texas Jim, |
I read the story in my local paper about the awakening of the military engineer and how he now lives comfortably on $5,000 a year. Intrigued, I bought the book eager to find out how he did it, and some color commentary about his trials and tribulations. However, that is not what this book is about!
This book is a top-level commentary about how evil middle class Westerners are, an endorsement of carbon footprinting, a view of the world as a zero-sum game, and, of course, the placement of the "nobel savage" on a lofty pedestal.
I am interested in downsizing, but not because of a guilty conscience.
I read "your money or your life" a few years ago, and found it much more helpful. Oddly, "Radical Simplicity" summarizes the earlier book in one chapter, and uses "your money..." as 1/3 of the book "how-to" content! The author should divulge that a large portion of the book is a summary of a previous work.
On the plus side, I really enjoyed the story about the Kerala area of India, where people are able to sustain a very comfortable society on very little money.
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Radical Simplicity Made Complicated
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| Review Date: July 1, 2008 |
| Reviewer: D. Cwiek, Knoxville, TN USA |
| Way too much read, reminded me of a college textbook. Would have saved paper if it had been more to the point and therefore fewer pages. |
Great info & inspiration to get you started
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| Review Date: May 22, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Jennine L. Wardle, Kenmore, WA United States |
I found this book very interesting and full of great information and inspiration. It is a perfect start if you want to become more aware of your impact on the world and begin doing something about it. I absorbed the material in a day, and am now doing the exercises and spreadsheets to determine exactly where I'm at, where I want to be, and how to get there!
I would have given it 5-stars, but:
1) I felt that the author criticized an entire practice as ecologically unsound rather than the conventional methods being unsound. For example: he practically vilifies livestock ranching and eating animal products, but totally disregards (that for humans) lb-for-lb the bio-availability of nutrients in animal sources is higher than most produce. It's the way we've gone about keeping and using the animals that is ecologically irresponsible, not keeping and eating the animal itself.
2) There is not enough information about the reduction of global footprint when you are using recycled materials (i.e. polar fleece clothing made from recycled plastic bottles). Perhaps this is a flaw/oversight in the EF Calculator, but the calculations all seem to be skewed toward the impacts of using virgin materials. It would seem to me that we are getting an eco-ding for original production/purchase, recycling, and purchasing recycled products which doesn't make complete sense to me to be as high as calculated because this is a full-circle cycle... there has to be a benefit in there somewhere.
3) I didn't find any mention about the EF impact of "hard" building materials such as concrete, ceramics and stone... building a strawbale house is not feasible where I will be living, but I won't be using 100% conventional building materials and techniques either. There is no information in this book to help me calculate the offset of taking the "middle ground" or using recycled or previous wasted products (SIP, ICF, etc).
4) The author makes a basic assumption that all acres of bio-productive land are equal. While this might be appropriate for rough calculations and theory discussions, the reality is that not all land and climate is created equal. An acre in Alaska or Iceland with a growing season of 3 months and several months of frigid near-total darkness is not going to have the same yield as a temperate acre in sunny California or the Mediterranean, or a near-desert acre in Arizona or Morocco. At some point, the reality that much of the BP land is not within the concentrated population band and it is infeasible (& possibly equally irresponsible) to transport the goods or people to and from those unpopulated BP acres needs to be taken into account.
All-in-all a very good book with lots of useful information and inspiration... just watch out for a few of the more blatant and idealistic agendas ;) |
Very important and thoughtful reading.
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| Review Date: June 3, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Burt Kieffle, |
| It's encouraging to read a book so full of personal integrity and hope. So many people are unwilling to face the facts of the future before us. Very few people will read this book, but for those that do it will be a godsend to know that there are others that feel the same level of empathetic responsiblity. There are not enough books of this type, and fewer authors qualified to write them. The only other work I have recently encountered that is of the same level of accountability as well as offering a real means of living benignly is Jerome Fitzgeralds "Sea-steading." I recommend this as well. |
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