The film follows Jim Merkel, who raises his son, Walden, on an off-grid homestead in Belfast, Maine, in a home he built with oaks and pines from their land. Merkel spent twelve years as an electrical engineer designing industrial and military systems before the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 convinced him he had to stop. On Monday, Oct. 26, at 5 p.m., Pease Public Library in Plymouth will show the documentary that came out of that homestead, "Saving Walden's World," with Merkel present afterward for a question-and-answer session. The screening is free and open to the public.
The film arrives in Plymouth at a notable moment. It has just been accepted for national distribution on PBS through NETA, the National Educational Telecommunications Association, a step that takes an independent documentary made largely by one family in Maine onto public television stations across the country. Before that, it traveled a more familiar independent route: 23 international film festivals and 14 awards, including a stop at the Maumee Film Festival in Ohio directly on the heels of a New York City screening.
The origins of the project are unusually literal. Merkel had already written "Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth," published in 2003, and had spent years living on roughly $5,000 a year, close to the global median income, to demonstrate that a comfortable life need not cost the earth. He founded the Global Living Project in 1995 and has run workshops on sustainable living across the United States, Canada and Spain. But it was fatherhood that turned him into a filmmaker. By 2015, with Walden six years old, Merkel described the feeling that drove him to pick up a camera: "I could feel a tsunami barreling towards my son's future." What began as an attempt to film his son's world became an eight-year project that carried him across the globe.
The result is not a film about deprivation. Merkel, who once worked inside the military-industrial apparatus, went looking for places that had sidestepped what the film calls the growth trap of the West, and found them in societies usually discussed in other terms entirely. In Kerala, in southern India, he documented the Kudumbashree network, a women-led system of neighborhood groups and microfinance circles. In Cuba and Slovenia he found comparable arrangements: universal access to education and healthcare, and reproductive freedom, producing stability and equity without the consumption-heavy trajectory the West treats as inevitable. The film argues that these societies are meeting and exceeding the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals well ahead of the 2030 target date, and that they did so largely through the work of women.
The personal frame holds the argument together. Merkel's own history runs through the story: the engineer who helped build the systems he now warns about, raising a child on a homestead designed to tread lightly, traveling to the very parts of the world his former work was aimed at, and coming back with the proposition that the people he once helped target may hold the keys to a livable planet. The film's own logline puts it as a former arms dealer returning from "enemy" territory with women-led solutions that could save the world for his son.
For Plymouth, the screening is something of a homecoming. Merkel served as Dartmouth College's sustainability coordinator and sat on the board of D-Acres, the permaculture farm and educational center in Dorchester that is now called Streeter Mountain Farm. "New Hampshire is where some of my most important work took root," Merkel said of the visit. "Plymouth is a community that already understands the connection between local land stewardship, education, and a sustainable future. I am looking forward to this conversation."
The Plymouth event is organized with the support of Central NH Indivisible and the Plymouth Area Sanctuary Community, and it is part of the film's "100 Rooms. 1 Story" campaign, a screening tour designed to bring the documentary into small rooms in local communities across North America rather than confine it to festivals and big-city theaters. The conceit is that a hundred living rooms, library meeting rooms and grange halls telling one story can do what a single theatrical run cannot.
That model suits a film with this kind of production history. "Saving Walden's World" was made by a crew of seasoned professionals working alongside Merkel himself, but its subject is a household that built its house from its own trees and its argument is that scale matters, that the solutions worth having are human-sized and locally rooted. A Monday evening at a public library in a New Hampshire town, with the director in the room to take questions, is close to the format the filmmakers seem to have had in mind all along.
The screening begins at 5 p.m. at Pease Public Library in Plymouth. There is no ticketing and no capacity barrier beyond the room itself. More information is available at savingwaldensworld.org.