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Midway up a forested mountainside in the valley
adjacent to the one in which I live, there is a place called
the Global Living Project. During the summer months it is
possible to drive a vehicle up the long, narrow, dirt road;
however, in winter one must hike up the 2.5 kilometres to
get there. I was fortunate enough to visit in the middle of
winter, and therefore was able to get a reasonably accurate
picture of what daily life is like for those who make this
place their home.
For many months, the only way in and out is to hike, and yet
the people who live there are amazingly non-isolated. Some work
day jobs in surrounding towns, some live self-sustainable lives
by growing or trading for anything they might need, some a mixture
of both. They make their home in the middle of a maturing climax
Interior
Cedar-Hemlock forest in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia,
which is arguably one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems
on the planet, second only to the Coastal Rainforest of B.C.
and possibly the rain forests of the tropics. It is an incredible
place, charged with an intense energy that stems from the task
they have set themselves—to live and teach a globally equitable
lifestyle.
The Global Living Project is the brainchild of Jim Merkel, who
founded the non-profit organization in 1996 after completing
a study of resource use efficiency in Kerala, India. Jim is
a self-titled 'recovering engineer' who worked for 12 years
designing and marketing electrical systems to the U.S. military.
As the story goes, he was so affected by the Exxon Valdez disaster
that he decided to devote the remainder of his life to environmental
service. Jim and his partner Erica Sherwood were recently featured
in The New Internationalist
(November 2000) in an article called "Little feats" which focused
on their use of the concept of 'ecological footprinting.'
The general purpose of the Global Living Project is to create
a place and an educational program where sustainable and simple
living techniques can be lived and taught, and to spread that
message to all who will listen. The reason for it is that Jim
and Erica believe current levels of resource extraction and
consumption in the world are completely unsustainable, and that
the citizens of North America have no right to be using up the
majority of the world's resources.
The basic metaphor is that of the earth as a barrel full of
water. There is a constant inflow of water into the top of the
barrel, symbolizing the constant inflow of energy to the earth
from the sun. At the bottom of the barrel is an outflow tap,
which symbolizes the use of the earth's resources by those who
live on it. For the last many billions of years, the inflow
and outflow rates of water into the barrel have been much the
same, such that resource use has been sustainable and has not
led to a net loss of water from the barrel. The barrel was always
full. At current rates of extraction and consumption, however,
the outflow is much greater than the inflow, and for the past
few hundred years humans have been draining the water from the
barrel faster than it is being replaced. If the pattern continues
for too long, the barrel will eventually be emptied, resulting
in complete collapse of all living systems. On a smaller scale,
one need only look at the Aral
Sea ecological disaster in Central Asia to see an example
of what a disparity between outflow and inflow can do to a landscape
and all who live upon it.
The Global Living Project emphasizes the use of two primary
tools in order to fulfill their vision of a sustainable and
equitable future for the planet. One is the Ecological Footprinting
technique. This is a model developed by Mathis Wackernagel and
Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia to assess quantitatively
the ecological impacts of human activities. Their book, Our
Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth
(1996), outlines a method by which a person can mathematically
break down all the components of their lifestyle in order to
arrive at a personal 'Ecological Footprint,' which is a measure
of their individual impact on the earth. The Ecological Footprint
is a symbolic amount of land and sea area required to be in
continuous production in order to supply all the resources and
absorb all the wastes associated with their lifestyle. It is
a very detailed method, taking into account not just the raw
resources and land base used, but also the proportion of fossil
fuel energy, machinery, and other factors necessary for the
extraction, processing, packaging, transportation, and eventual
disposal of a product. Because it is impossible to take into
account every single factor involved, the Ecological Footprint
is always assumed to be an underestimate of the actual impact
to the earth.
According to The Global Living Project, if each of the roughly
six billion people on the planet were to receive a fair share
of the earth's productive land, we would each get only one acre.
This one-acre is based on certain ethical assumptions for a
globalized population. For instance, it is an assumption that
each person on earth deserves an equal share of its resources.
This is an ethical assumption that most North Americans do not
share. Another assumption is that a portion of the earth's resources
should be shared with the roughly 25 million other species of
beings that inhabit the planet. This also is an ethical assumption
that most North Americans do not share. Regardless, they have
arrived at an amount of one-acre per person on the planet. In
reality, the global average is a seven-acre Ecological Footprint
per person, leaving a disparity of six acres being drained from
the earth's resource capital. In contrast to the global average,
Canadians have an Ecological Footprint of around 18 acres each,
with Americans being the highest consumers at 24 acres each.
People like Jim and Erica, who live in a small straw-bale cabin,
grow, trade, or buy most of their food from local producers,
live off of $5,000 each annually, and use bicycles as their
only means of transportation, weigh in at around four acres
each. Their eventual goal is to live at the one-acre level,
which they call the 'wise-acre.'
The other tool the GLP uses is the book Your
Money or Your Life by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin,
in which they teach people how to consume less and save more
in order to escape from the 'nine to five till you're sixty-five'
treadmill. It focuses on exposing the fallacy behind the perception
that we all need to work conventional full-time jobs just in
order to make money to live, and offers alternative measures
for evaluating quality of life.
The Global Living Project runs a summer program to teach people
these techniques for evaluating their lives, their impact, and
their basic values. They also go on a cycling tour each spring
called "Cycling for a Sustainable Future", which consists of
putting on workshops and seminars across Canada and the U.S.
Their goal is nothing less than creating a world in which people
live according to their personal ecological and spiritual values
rather than those perpetuated in a non-sustainable consumer
society. They desire to stop the drain on the earth's capital,
and even to see the barrel filled back to the top. It is a worthy
and admirable goal, but also one that had been criticized as
being naïve.
The most impressive aspects of the Global Living Project, however,
are the personalities of Jim Merkel and Erica Sherwood, who
did not spend the time I was with them spouting doom, gloom
and bitterness about the state of the world. They are incredibly
positive people who are convinced others will voluntarily reduce
consumption when faced with the knowledge of their own personal
impact on the earth. (It is indeed a sobering moment.) And they
are adamant that not everyone needs to follow them and move
to a homestead in the country in order to live a simple and
sustainable life. They believe simple living should be fun and
bring joy to people; otherwise, it is not worth it. They also
believe in diversity. "I am not concerned where people live
or what their life looks like, be it high-tech, low-tech, or
no-tech," says Jim, "I just want to see their footprinting numbers.
Diversity, creativity and having fun are key. If 100 people
took on footprinting, you would see 100 different lifestyles."
This positive nature and commitment to making simple living
fun are key to the eventual achievement of the goals of the
Global Living Project, and the goals of myriad other people
and organizations who advocate similar values around the world.
It was certainly the most memorable aspect of my introduction
to the GLP, and has generated some amount of infectious energy
as I continue to share my experiences there with others. More
information on GLP can be obtained from their website.
Copyright © 2001 Darren C. Anderson. All
Rights Reserved.
Darren C. Anderson lives in Nelson, B.C.,
which is near the location of the Global Living Project. He
is studying Integrated Environmental Planning and stands at
the very beginning of the path to reducing impact and taking
seriously the issues of global equity and personal responsibility.
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