Author, conservationist and filmmaker Jim Merkel, pictured here sailing. Courtesy of Jim Merkel

After MIFF comes MOFF. With the Maine International Film Festival having just wrapped its 27th annual gift of cinematic wonders, the Maine Outdoor Film Festival (MOFF) opens this week (July 24-28) with a whole new crop of features and shorts from Maine and around the world.

All centered on the great outdoors in some capacity, the outdoor film festival movies run the gamut from travelogues to environmental documentaries to jaw-dropping tales of adventure on the world’s seas, mountains and everywhere in between. For Belfast resident and native Mainer Jim Merkel, this year’s festival sees an eight-year filmmaking journey hit screens at Portland’s SPACE on Sunday, July 28, with the documentary, “Saving Walden’s World.” The feature-length film follows author, conservationist and off-the-grid family man Merkel as he discovers three remarkable examples of sustainable living around the world – a world that he posits desperately needs saving.

Jim Merkel’s life is a movie in itself.

Born to working class parents in Columbia, Maine, Merkel explains how his conservative father’s world view shaped his own early working life. “I wasn’t a skinhead, but I was kind of close to it in a way,” he half-jokes of his decision to work in the defense industry. On his first day at ITT Corporation, which is involved in government arms manufacturing, people were protesting its involvement with the U.S. destruction of the Marshall Islands for bomb testing, and the forced displacement of the islands’ residents. “I was a young Republican,’ Merkel says, “and so I just got to work.”

It was a pair of environmental and political disasters that finally made Merkel, then a rising exec with top secret government clearance, change his life. “I was sitting in a bar in Stockholm in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez spill came on the news. My dad had a run-down lobster boat, and I’d been on the ocean since I was a baby. The thought of being on the water and all that water being despoiled – I started to cry.”

Merkel says his involvement with the U.S. plot to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua alongside Oliver North (Merkel freely calls his young self “an arms dealer”) informed his decision to leave his comfortable life behind.

Merkel walks the talk. Or rather, rides, sails and takes the infrequent electric car. Informing his incredulous colleagues of his decision to drop out and live sustainably, Merkel moved back to Maine, calculating that he could live off the residuals from his former life. (He estimates he mainly lived on $5,000 a year.) “I joked to my colleagues, ‘If you see me under a bridge, throw me a sandwich,’” Merkel says, but it turns out at least one aspect of his father’s philosophy served Merkel well.

Jim Merkel and his son, Walden. Courtesy of Jim Merkel

“Dad didn’t like somebody who was like a hot air balloon,” Merkel explains. “You had to walk the talk.” And so Merkel, through stubbornness and trial-and-error, constructed his off-the-grid homestead in Bethel alongside his partner and his young son, Walden. The family lives there today. His book about his unlikely journey, “Radical Simplicity,” was adopted as a textbook at some 400 college campuses and led Merkel to take various academic jobs. He served as Dartmouth’s director of sustainability, and he taught food sustainability and root cellar construction at Unity College, all while, as his father put it, walking the talk. He’s bicycled thousands of miles to his many speaking engagements, and is taking “Saving Walden’s World” on its screening tour on a sailboat.

“Saving Walden’s World” finds sustainability – and happiness – in unlikely places.

Merkel traveled to the southern Indian state of Kerala and communities in Slovenia and Cuba, where the filmmaker believes people have uncovered the secret to better, more just and sustainable living. Positing that these communities have enacted “the holy grail of sustainability” in the form of small family sizes, small ecological footprints and healthy people, Merkel marvels at the matter-of-fact wisdom they put into practice. “If you have two of these three things, you don’t have a solution. If you can achieve all three, you can truly save the world.”

In the film, Merkel talks to Slovenian women who say that that country’s destigmatization of abortion allows them to manage their lives, take charge of their personal and professional success, and keep the population within sustainable limits. Meanwhile, the fact that the governments of all three communities profiled in “Saving Walden’s World” offer lifelong support for education gives women the resources they need to break the cycle of poverty and exploitation, unlike women in many other countries.

“You see stories about little kids going to school because of some organization trying to help the poor, and your heart warms up,” Merkel says, “But seeing a 16-year-old young woman being told she has free college all the way through – something that all three of these societies have – that’s the real key.” Merkel compares his subject societies with what he observes right here in Maine – and the U.S. doesn’t come off well.

“Fifty percent of Maine women who didn’t go to college are in poverty,” Merkel states, “and these places have broken that cycle. Societies where women have reproductive freedom and access to higher education, where infant mortality – especially among women of color – is low because health and childcare are readily available, that’s the big take-home from me.

“Saving Walden’s World” offers a sobering look at the United States’ role in the world.

“My goal was not to rub people’s noses in it,” chuckles Merkel, “but sort of.” Merkel is unsparing in showing how these communities have thrived in spite of America’s best efforts. “I was on the other side as an arms dealer,” Merkel says. “I saw first-hand how we were the empire who acted because we wanted resources and labor. We were the bully – in Vietnam, in Central and Latin America. We would replace governments that didn’t align with our interests. Now people ask, how can India or Cuba have lower infant mortality rates than we do, can provide free college, free healthcare? Saying we can’t do it is an absolute lie. We have the solution right here in front of our face.”

“Saving Walden’s World” will screen at SPACE as part of this year’s Maine Outdoor Film Festival on Sunday at 4 p.m. For more screenings and to learn more about this provocative and hopeful documentary, check out savingwaldensworld.org.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.