W. Could you start by retelling the story Henry Hikes to Fitchburg ?

J. Henry Hikes to Fitchburg: It’s a great children’s book and the story has such a parallel for a lot of us. Henry [Thoreau] and his buddy think they want to go to Fitchburg, so they discuss it and Henry advocates walking there and hiking through the forest, but his friend says, “No, I don’t want to do that I want to take the train.” So they agree to meet there. As the story goes, as you turn the pages, you see Henry is off exploring nature, winding his way through the hills and dales while his friend is painting Mrs. Fisher’s fence and raking leaves, helping to unload some carts for someone else. Page by page you see Henry having a beautiful experience walking in nature while his friend is working. Finally his friend gets on the train, rolls along and then arrives in Fitchburg just a little bit before Henry. But Henry has a basket of blueberries to offer him.

W. You spent twelve years designing industrial and military systems. Could you tell us a little about this job, what you are doing there and why you left?

J. As a young person I was hoping for a job that would pay decent money and would be challenging and exciting, I wanted a challenging career and the job I found was to work in with a ‘offence’ contractor. (They are called ‘defense contractors’ but now I know it’s ‘offense’) I was designing pictographic computer systems. I had top secret security clearance. At one point I was to design a little hand held computer; it had a full keyboard, it could work under water, it could work on the deck of a battleship with a powerful radar, it could be kicked and still keep working and it had to be able to survive a nuclear blast. At 27 I had 23 people working for me to design and build this thing. Then I was to sell it to arms dealers all over Europe. NATO and non-NATO, Pakistan , Brazil or different arms representatives from governments. We were even selling to the Turkish military. Someone passed me a copy of the Amnesty International report that showed that Turkey had tortured 250,000 people who were against the government. I went to our company and asked how we could deal with a country which had this atrocious human rights record and they said, “It’s not for you to worry about. The state department will tell you who to sell to.” I said, “Wait a minute! I designed this! I have some kind of ethical responsibility to see that it gets in good hands.” In Europe I was meeting with the consulate for the US government, to Iraq (this was the 80s during the Iraq-Iran war) having dinner on the Chuan de Lyses at his flat which had Egyptian statues, and Moroccan servants. He said, “I have customers in Iraq and Iran.” I was a young republican kid and this really fried my brain. I had always thought that a consulate was a dignitary who helps keep relations smooth. “Why was he selling to both sides of the war?’ We talked politics all night while he snapped his fingers for the Moroccans to deliver couscous. He said that the ‘third world’ peoples are so stupid that the US had to go in and manage their affairs. I saw how we would sell weapons covertly to a country to keep a government in power favorable to US business interests. I heard Dick Cheney speak to an audience in the late 80’s about the cold war. He said don’t worry the “cold war” won’t be over and if it is we’ll have more enemies, constantly. That was his message to the group of arms dealers. (There were about 5000 arms dealers at this big military super market). It was kind of like going to Madison Square Garden flower show. This was the equivalent in Europe for arms. Every type of weapon system you can imagine was being shown off. All the offensive military contractors where there. Dick Cheney addressed the crowd and said we’ll always have lots of enemies. And he also openly defined national security as “defending our way of life.” At that time I was starting to realize that our way of life in America is the most recourse consumptive lifestyle ever invented. We dominate the planet. We consume the planet’s annual productivity. We are so consumptive and yet we are openly defining national security as getting the resources we feel we need to keep this way of life (that’s an open definition, not a hidden covert one). When ever you hear people talking about defending our way of life that’s what they’re talking about. Killing other people, dominating their governments so we can get their resources. This was a wake up call for me. Even as a young Republican kid this didn’t jibe with any of my ethical systems. So I had an ethical crisis. I was having a slowly brewing ethical crisis. I stayed in for two years. I felt I wanted to learn all I could about this mentality. I stayed in till I couldn’t tolerate it any more. I just wanted to understand what it was really about.

W. How did you’re departure come about and what did you do after leaving?

J. Finally, I locked myself in the house for the weekend. I said, “I’ve got to figure this out.” I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to peace and the environment but I didn’t know how to do it. I had been running multi-million dollar deals for the company and I’d always ask, “How can we make the highest rate of return?” So now instead of asking, “How can I get more?”, I asked, “How much do I need?” I asked, “What if I took my car off the road?” I had a four bedroom house, so I asked, “What if I rent three of the four bedrooms?” and “What if I plant a vegetable garden?” I would run my expenses. I realized that at thirty years old I had earned enough money to, if I lived simply, live off the interest stream without working for the rest of my life. It’s eighteen years later and I still haven’t touched that capital. I’ve lived off that interest stream, which is about $5,000 a year. I’ve lived in cities, in the wilderness in British Columbia, and in rural Vermont, and I always have found it possible to live on $5,000 a year. It made me a voluntary war tax resister. This Tuesday we have to send in our taxes.

W. Are you paying taxes?

J. I am now. I have this job. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life. To give money for killing.

W. $440 billion a year.

J. UNICEF says $40 billion would eliminate the worst of the worst poverty. That is less than one tenth of the US military budget. Within six months of leaving my job I was participating in a blockade and occupation of the government center in San Luis Obispo. It was the 498th anniversary of Columbus’s invasion of this continent. We occupied the building for 45 days, from Columbus Day to Thanksgiving. We collected food for the Navaho who were resisting forced relocation. That was my first action; from military industrial complex to sleeping in a sleeping bag for 45 nights in the middle of a city. I knew I had to do something and this was the first. It was six months before the beginning of the first Iraq war; the first desert slaughter. We were having protests with 2000 people in the streets six months before the bombing. We were having sit-ins and every time a congressman came to town we were with them for ten minutes. We knew it was coming; once you know the mentality of a war monger... right now some of these people would like to attack Iran. They are trying to provoke it. Once you know the mentality it very easy to identify.

W. One of your themes has been how much people need. Have you come to any conclusions as to how much we do need?

J. I received a fellowship to go to Kerala, India where the people live on $350 a year. Their GNP is $400 per person. It’s a little more than a dollar a day. We live here on $70 a day. They have longevity on par with us of 75 years old. There are 30 million people (that’s on par with Canada) living a high-quality life with very little resource consumption. So I went there to do research with medical doctors to see how healthy these people were. They are living long; they have a low infant mortality rate. They have a very high quality of life, education is free until the second year of college, there are more women enrolled in colleges than men, there are more libraries in Kerala than in all the rest of India, and they do all this on less than $400 a year per person. We were studying this..

W. Their economic scale is also different. Things are much cheaper.

J. Well, I studied this. I am a recovering engineer with an economic background. Sure they can buy more cheaply there but the reason they can is because...Say you go to get a hair cut, it will cost you $.10; the size of the stall is about 10’ x 10’; if you go to the haircutters home he has about 30 times fewer possessions. If you were going to take an inventory of everything you owned in your attic, in your basement, in your garage, and your storage shed, the Indian haircutter would have 30 times less. Think of all the energy not used, not producing all the items that Americans have. Americans put ten calories of energy into food production and get one calorie out; in Kerala they put one calorie into food production and ten calories out.

W. Richard Heinberg mentioned that this ratio for food production in the West cannot be maintained and only exists because we are burning up resources at an incredibly fast rate.

J. They are way more efficient, that’s why it’s cheaper. If the barber wanted $30,000 a year, which here is considered poverty, he would need to charge me $30 for a haircut. He only wants $400 a year, therefore he can charge a $.10 a haircut. I had a shirt sewn for $.75. It was $.75 for the persons labor. The shop was 10 x 10 he had a clothesline hung across one wall where he clipped on the material he was working with, he had a tape measure, three treadle sewing machines and two young guys working for him. He brought me a cup of tea before we started talking business. He was a very dignified person. He measured me, sent me two stalls down, and I bought hand-woven material. I came back and he stitched it. It was $.75 for the material and $.75 for his labor. That shirt would be $30 or $40 here. And handmade it would be $60 or $80. Why? Because he’s willing to live ‘simply’. As soon as you charge the ‘going rate’ in America for your goods or services, you are forcing others to work hard to earn that. W. Doesn’t one have to charge the going rate? Whether you are a teacher or a carpenter it seems that you have to charge the rate you can get because our ‘lifestyle’ and the infrastructure that we all use has it own requirements. Your vehicles, your house, insurance etc. J. We demand so much. Even if you go into the alternativo’s home in America we have the possessions of the average person, more or less. We all have the American lifestyle, more or less. When you want to earn enough, when you want to take enough of the earth, to have that much, you are going to have to charge a lot for your labor. But why are 1/6 th of the world’s people, one billion, living this kind of lifestyle and the poorest 3 billion are living on two dollars a day or less. 60% of the people live on $500 or less a year. Those people have to do everything you and I have to. They have to take their kids to school, they have to have a house, they have to keep warm, they have to have clothes and be entertained.

W. Do you think because of our infrastructure, because of the society we live in we need more to survive? Because it’s seven miles from here to Charlestown, and 16 miles from here to Bellows Falls where we have to shop for things we can’t produce, and we need a vehicle, and the insurance and the finances for the fuel they consume. It all becomes part of a long chain of economic connectedness. These are things that an Indian from Kerala might not need because our infrastructures have evolved in different ways. J. I think you could say that infrastructure contributes to our difficulty in doing it. I also think it’s a lot about choices. We don’t have to live out here where there isn’t a bus route. No one forces me to live in a place where I need a vehicle. No one forces me to live in a big inefficient home. No one forces me to drive a car. I’m choosing a lot of these things. In Kerala one out of 2,000 people have a car. They do all of things we do, they just do them a little differently. The set themselves up a little different, they choose where they live a little differently. There are only 8% of the world’s people with a car. We have a mantra: “Oh I need a car”. In India they say, “Swami you don’t need a cara.” They find ways to do all the things we do without a car.

W. It also seems to be a part of the cultural evolution. For instance in Japan it is around the train stations that everything congregates. The further you go from the train stations the less commercial and more residential it becomes. Villages here are not thriving as they were before the automobile became ubiquitous. I’m wondering if this has to be a gradual process; weaning ourselves from the automobile?

J. There are many ways toward sustainability. Peace Pilgrim in her book advises you that if you have a bad habit like smoking or drinking it’s just a habit. Like eating food that’s not healthy for you or consuming too much. You can wean and wean and wean. She encourages you to try to move quickly. However, everything in between is a possibility for us. I’ve done experiments in rural places. I lived in Canada in the middle of the wilderness so I had to organize my life differently. It took three or four years. You know the feeling you have when you’re 16 years old and you want to go to the party and your mom or your dad says “no.” You want so badly to go that party. You feel that angst inside; you’re just like a caged animal. Even when I was 18 or 20 I still felt like a caged animal if I wanted to go someplace and if my car didn’t work. I just wanted to go somewhere so badly and I couldn’t get there. But then after three or four years of being car less that energy evaporated. It’s a habit, this insistence that I have to get somewhere quickly when I want. I then organized my life around the fact that I didn’t have a car. So if I wanted to get somewhere, like town, which was about an hour by driving, it was 50 miles away, I would have to call all my neighbors three to four days in advance and find a ride going. I had about six names and my phone book and then I would chip in for gas. Finally they put a bus route through this really rural wilderness valley, there were so many people there living alternative lifestyles, farmers and homesteaders that the bus was always full and they added a second one. Here we have so much money we don’t know what to do with it. If we just organize our life differently... I say this not to challenge people, I do want to challenge people in a way, I’m not saying it’s not difficult. I know about the conspiracy. In fact it was a conspiracy. They ripped up the railroads and were convicted in court, the tire companies and oil companies; they deliberately tried to force us into automobiles.

W. Quite successfully. J. Yes. My challenge is: give me 20 of the hottest engineers you have, the smartest graduates from MIT, and I would ask them to design the most inefficient, costly way of getting around you could possibly dream up. With everything available, they would come up with an automobile. You can’t get more inefficient, you can’t get more costly and you can’t get more damaging. Why do we need 3000 pounds to move around 150 pounds of flesh? What we spread around everywhere as roads, if you take it to the dump, that asphalt, they would say, “Wait a minute. That’s toxic! You can’t dispose of it here.” But to roll it out as driveways and it’s no problem. Roll it all across America and call it roadways. That’s additional fossil fuel, petrochemical toxic waste. Cars cause 55,000 deaths a year on highways, and a million accidents a year in America. We have this addiction to automobiles and we sit here and say, “I have no choice.” I think we have a choice. Begin to bicycle. You can carpool. You can make sure there are always three or four people in a vehicle. There are all these things we can do. I would love to have a bus stop right in front of my house, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next year. It’s just not feasible to wait until somebody gives me a bus.

W. Could you explain some of the basic ideas of your book Radical Simplicity ?

J. One piece of it that is fundamental is, “How much do I take from the earth?” What is my real impact? There’s a formula called IPAT which stands for impact = population times affluence times technology.

W. Is this something that you helped to develop? This way of measuring your ecological footprint?

J. It is something I’ve been using since 1994 but it was developed by the University of British Columbia as a tool for monitoring impact and it looks at the ecological impact of each of my choices. It is a very concise way to let individuals figure out how much land is being used to maintain the way they live.

W. So how much acreage does the average American require? What is the average acreage of a world citizen and what do you think is a sustainable amount of land or size of footprint to be using?

J. Americans use about 24 acres, on average; Europeans on average use about 12; Mexico is half again, about six acres. The earth has 4.5 acres per person. We use on average six acres which means we’re using 23% more than the earth generates each year. That means were overshooting the earth’s capacity. China’s footprint is about 4 acres per person and in India the average person uses about two acres. I’m not worried about China or India. I’m worried about the 24 acre footprints of the Americans. We can use more than the earth can handle for short periods of time. The price of overshooting the earth’s carrying capacity is seen in the rising CO2 levels, forest reserves being depleted, fisheries collapsing, various systems are being exhausted to the point where they can’t bounce back.

W. Does the 4.5 acres per person leave any room for wildlife, wilderness and other non-utilized spaces?

J. This assumes that humanity takes the entire annual productivity of the earth. 4.5 acres. We share the planet with an estimated 25 million species. A question I’ve asked to about 1000 audiences is, “How much space do you feel we should leave for the other species?” On average people answer, we should leave about 80% wild. And this is all kinds of groups; business groups, chambers of commerce, electrical engineers, etc. That would mean our 4.5 acre footprint would be factored down to about a one acre footprint. This is the size of a footprint that would equitable and sustainable with all other humans and species. That is about the footprint of a person from Bangladesh.

W. So if you live on $5,000 a year are you still going outside the one acre footprint?

J. Oh yes. $5,000 a year is the world average income. But it’s 10 times higher than 60% of humanity.

W. So what is the size of the environmental footprint of someone making and using $5,000 a year?

J. I have those charts in my book. And the quickest way to figure your ecological footprint, if you want to get an idea in two to three minutes, is to base it on your income/spending. If I’m using $5,000 a year I’ll have about a five to six acre footprint, more or less. If you’re making around $1,000 a year you have somewhere close to a one acre footprint. 10% of the world’s population is living on $1,000 a year. You can do so in abject poverty or you can do it with quite a high quality of life. I described this in my book…what you can have with the one-acre footprint. In this northern clime, it has to be a very small well-insulated solar house, you’ve got to be mostly vegetarian, and if you utilize a car you have to get 50 miles per gallon, and you’d have to share rides.

W. I’ve heard a few proposals for carbon tax, the most radical of which proposes to replace the income tax. With this those who consumed less would pay less and those who were more indulgent would carry more financial responsibility. Do you think a tax system that favored less consumption would help to change habit and structure?

J. Yes; anything we can do. I like the carrot and stick approach; you penalize the unsustainable behavior and reward the sustainable behavior. You might, however, have a hard time getting it through. You hear people say all the time, “If we were to meet the Kyoto Protocols it would be so hard on business.”

W. To go back to your workshops, you said that most people say they would like to leave more room for wild species and give others their fair share. Is this only their speculative fantasy? Do people’s ideas that they want to be in the more generous group have anything to do with pragmatic action?

J. I have been very involved in trying to engage people on their lifestyles. Not just their lifestyles, but how many children we have, and how much we consume and how efficient our technologies are. Those are the three biggest factors; how much affluence, how much do we get to have, and the level of technology. We have control of the over them. My engaging people on this has shown me that group after group of people have beautiful values. They would like to share. That’s their value. If they told me, “I don’t care about the other person,” I would just move to Alaska or something. But what I do hear, over and over again, from groups is, “I want to be fair. I want to share.” I asked people, “Do you want to take 10% more than the average person, or 10% less, 20% more or 20% less than the average person?” They say, “Well, I want to take about the average or little less.” That’s their values speaking. The next step for me is very difficult. What is going to inspire any of us to transform? We do get inspired, have a breakthrough, and then go home and the TV is on. “I dream this but here I am,” and end up feeling trapped. Married 20 years ago, just bought a brand-new car, and you want to buy the kids what they want. It’s hard, to go from that to a very different lifestyle. People don’t know how to do it. People go to less developed countries and can live there for six months with very little and then when they comeback there have severe culture shock.

W. Can we have a major change to a less consuming lifestyle without it causing a major economic collapse?

J. A lot of the things I see around me are part of the solution. Organic farmers are growing 40 acres without using any animal products; using rotation and cover crops. Even in the north with a growing season that is shorter we can fill our root cellars with delicious vegetables, carrots, beets, rutabagas, squashes and kohlrabi. It’s so easy to do; to grow enough delicious food.

W. And do you think this can be done without economic dislocation?

J. The suffering will be less. The suffering will be, “oh I can’t a second car, oh I can’t have five TVs, I can’t have the 2,000, 4,000 square-foot of housing. I can have 200 to 300 square-foot of housing. I’ll take 3 or 4 people into my house to use the three extra bedrooms.

W. And the cities will survive?

J. Look at Cuba and what happened to them to with the embargo. 30,000 new organic farms and even the cities are 70% food self-reliant. They imported millions of old bicycles of China and now their bicycle shops everywhere. They just did it. They learned permaculture like we just don’t know it in this country. They have very good education, have lower infant mortality and live longer than we do here on about $700 per person a year. For most Americans this looks like poverty because we’re used to the people we see on TV. Here in America it’s considered poverty if you have a car older than five years old, if your houses isn’t a trophy home. If you asked someone who makes $20,000 a year how much more you need they would say about 20 to 30% more. If you ask someone who makes $200,000 a year how much more do you need, they would also say about 20% more.

W. You have a new position at Dartmouth College. I’ve always had the feeling that colleges and hospitals felt themselves immune from the environmental concerns and constraints of the outside world because of the ‘special’ work they’re doing. Can you tell us a little about what your position is and how it’s going?

J. I’m the Sustainability Coordinator. The job was formed about two years ago to help move the institution toward sustainable practices. We look at everything from how the buildings are heated, to the method of building, to transportation, to the student body, to office lighting. It is quite a challenge. They are being pushed, but there are also people throughout the institution who really want this to happen. They are educated enough to know we have to change. There are two forces at play there: one is the ethical imperative and the other is, “It’s got to be good for our pocket book,” and these are sometimes at odds. I tell them if that if the budget is their main concern they could hire twelve year olds to work in the cafeterias and they realize that ethics are part of their budget and thinking already. There are people there who care.

W. In the two years you’ve been there how have you been able to influence the institution?

J. One big area is the release of energies. That means working in several areas: One is trying to reach people and change their habits. Secondly, we are trying to get more efficient technologies in place. We now have all the buildings on timed heating. In the morning when you get to work, you’ll probably need a sweater for the first hour as the building gradually comes up to a warmer temperature. And after 4:00, the heat goes off so the buildings start to cool down to the nighttime temperature. Just with this practice we can save 20% on energy used for heating. We recycle more, we put more people in each building, we switch to cleaner fuel, we use more efficient technologies, and we schedule so that the buildings are better utilized. We decrease energy use 10% in each of these areas and reduce it overall by 1/6th. Now you are getting down to where energy use is low enough so you can actually use photovoltaics and solar hot water systems. If you don’t do the conservation first, for instance you would probably need a $40,000 system to run a normal house (to run your dishwasher, your washer/ dryer, your refrigerator/freezer, 3-4 televisions, all the appliances, etc.) But if you used a root cellar and began to reduce usage...

W. How are the cafeterias and the food?

J. We have created a waste free dining hall. The garbage we produce from a meal there is about the size of a basket ball. Students who use this hall have their own dinning kits, and everything else is composted or recycled. We still have some ice-cream wrappers but that’s it. We have also starting to get more local and more organic but it is still a very low percentage. We do have a program “Farmers to Dartmouth” where we buy local produce but it’s still not a very large percent.

W. Have you figured your average student footprint? Where it is now and what you would like it to become?

J. I do a sustainability report for the college which shows how much energy we use and how much garbage we generate; CO2 production, water consumption. We also do a garbage footprint; the average student produces 2 pounds of waste everyday (that includes any construction waste or other waste that’s going on campus). The ecological footprint of that is about 5.3 acres...

W. Just the trash?

J. The energy usage is about 7 acres. What we have done with this waste free dining area is to make ‘take out’ more difficult by putting it out of the line. Before most students wanted ‘to go’ containers because that gave them an extra option. Now almost all of the student use washable dishes, just because we removed this from their paths. We have reduced trash considerably through that one easy operation.

W. That does seem to illustrate how much the infrastructure helps to shape our ‘choices’.

J. Sure. Before you had to be heroic. You would have to bring your own container, your own little mug. You can make systems better for people, but people still have an obligation to be conscious, to have an awareness. Some people would like it if everything was engineered so that we wouldn’t have to think.

W. In Japan they have penalties for not recycling; different colored see-through bags for different groups of recyclables. It is very effective.

J. I would like to implement some recycling regulations at Dartmouth but they are reticent to “tell people what to do.”

W. How are the students? Do you find much interest in “sustainability?

J. Well the students are like other people in the country; ask them what’s on their mind and they will repeat what they heard from the media in the past week...that is what’s freshest on their minds. But if you go deeper, if you engage them on their “ecological footprint,” I find that people are willing to make changes; students are willing to bring there own dishes to the dinning hall. People want to do the right thing but over a period, to make it stick, you have to make it easier, the default option. Many people have the idea that cutting back on energy use is going to be so uncomfortable, that they will be shivering in a hovel somewhere. I’m trying to tell them, if they shared their car ride with one other person, if you were to cut your vehicle travel in half, get a car that get double the miles per gallon, visit your closer friends, you could with out doing anything heroic, cut you automobile’s impact by 1/8th. That is not suffering. That is not freezing in the cold. If you have a house, double the occupancy. Have an empty bedroom, put grad-students in it, find a widow, find someone to put in that space. Insulate your house so it uses less energy.

W. There is a great deal of talk these days about bio-energy; plant based fuels. How does this figure in your thoughts?

J. The bio-mass piece, for me, is a big one. If we want to continue the resource use that we have and shift it on ethanol and plant based fuels...Sorry, we already have a billion hungry people and we already have a species extinction rate 1,000 times the natural rate. What we need is habitat. If your going to continue to keep things in mono-culture (you don’t get great plant based yields without mono-culture) if your thinking of wood chips you are talking of a completely industrializing the forest.

W. But isn’t burning wood considered “carbon neutral” because the decaying tree would release its carbon anyway?

J. Burning wood is not carbon neutral, as some say, because you are quickly releasing the carbon as apposed to the twenty to forty year breakdown cycle it takes for the wood to decompose. Also, the forest, as it grows, will also sequester that carbon. It is different than bringing fossil energy up from below the ground, but is not carbon neutral. Before we make this shift we should prioritize habitat first. There is a huge group lead by the Bush administration and a lot of environmentalists promoting bio-fuels as a safe alternative. I think it’s a dangerous thing. If for instance we live in the country and have a work horse (a horse itself will have a 12 acre footprint); it stands out there in a field metabolizing 24 hours a day whether you are working it or not. On the other hand a little 8 horsepower diesel walking tractor that you can share with your neighbors and turn off would have about 1/16th the impact. The horse is romantic but it’s shifting to bio-mass. New Englanders have had huge ecological footprints, with big animals, and big houses they burned so much bio-mass for energy. Returning to that is a dangerous direction. We have to go forward to highly efficient, small houses and life styles that aren’t centered on fossil fuels. The raising of animals for meat requires twenty to thirty times more land than growing vegetables. We have to get that 20 to 30 times increased efficiency. With one billion people maybe it wouldn’t be such a problem. With 6.5 billion people and growing it’s vital.

 

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