Throughout his adult life, Karl Meyer has been militant. He has fought the atomic bomb and urban poverty. He’s done time in a federal prison in Minnesota and on New York’s Riker’s Island. He has refused to pay federal income taxes, and he was kicked out of Vietnam during the war for marching on the American embassy in Saigon. But all that was merely a prelude.
At 62 years old, the well-traveled radical has set up camp in Nashville to confront what may be his toughest challenge yet. Founder of the 3-year-old Nashville Greenlands, a loosely run commune nestled a half-mile between Fisk University and Tennessee State University, Meyer preaches a back-to-basics way of life in this frenzied age of day trading, rumbling SUVs, and global custody battles.
”In the 21st century, we have to live more simply, we need to use less gasoline, we need to preserve the quality of air and biological diversity,“ he says. ”The whole answer is to consume less. Recycling newspapers and bottles is good, but it’s not the answer. The answer is to consume less.“
Right now, Nashville Greenlands is home to only six people, who live in two homes in a poor, forgotten neighborhood a few blocks north of Jefferson Street. True to their message, they live a simple, if not grungy, life. They dive into local dumpsters for day-old loaves of bread and discarded clothes. They use their own tiny lots to grow an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables. They don’t sit around the television, and they bicycle or walk whenever they can.
”For me, I like the community aspects of it,“ commune member Pam Beziat says. ”I like the gardening projects, and I like living with like-minded people who share a dedication to social activism.“
Meyer himself lives off an income of less than $7,000 a year, most of which he earns through seasonal carpentry work. For our interview, the bearded radical wore a wrinkled button-down shirt over a red T-shirt with holes in the collar. His tattered green pants were loosely held up by a rusty belt handed down to him by a 1930s-era union activist. In short, he’s not the kind of guy you’re likely to run into at Boscos.
Although he calls his project a commune, Meyer’s homes have only a few rules, and loose ones at that. Members are encouraged to work around five hours a week in the yard or around the house. They pay around $100 a month in housing expenses. And they don’t have to pool their money or adhere to any religious beliefs.
”We’re kind of anarchistic around here,“ Meyer says. ”The one rule I have is that everyone has to clean their cups and dishes after every meal. It drives me crazy when there are dishes lying around.“
The son of a liberal Vermont congressman, Meyer became initiated with civil disobedience in 1957, when he refused to take part in a compulsory nuclear air-raid drill in New York City. It was there he became friends with Dorothy Day, the late Catholic activist who, despite her controversial anti-war and pro-labor stands, is now being considered for sainthood. For refusing to pay federal income taxes, Meyer spent two years in prison and did shorter stints in 20 different jails. He spent nearly 10 years protesting the Vietnam War and was again jailed at least seven times for organizing draft resistance.
A father of three grown children, Meyer does have a less militant side. Thanks, ironically, to a scholarship from the well-heeled Ford Foundation, Meyer graduated from the University of Chicago. From 1958-1971 he ran a Catholic shelter for the homeless near Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green neighborhood. More recently, Meyer drove around the country—in a gas-guzzling truck, he laments—delivering lectures on nonviolence to schoolchildren.
Last week, Meyer was arrested along with housemate Jarad Bingham for blocking the gates of the governor’s mansion to protest the execution of Robert Glen Coe. Interestingly, Meyer thinks that in the grand scheme of things, the issue of whether a state should sanction capital punishment is relatively trivial.
”For me, the death penalty is one of the mildest assaults on human life,“ he says. ”What disturbs me is what the state does to innocent children.“
What is he talking about, you ask? ”Our country has bombed four other countries without U.N. authorization recently: Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Talk about a rogue state? Our government is one of them.“
At first, Meyer’s sustainable-living project seems like small potatoes in comparison to the aging radical’s other, more global views. After all, who cares if you can subsist on a diet of turnips and tomatoes? Karl Meyer seems to have other wars to wage. But to the soft-spoken Meyer, his entire career of activism can be reduced intellectually to the value of living an independent, simple life. Doing just that, he says, protects our natural resources, rejuvenates neighborhoods, and reduces the need for not just foreign oil but the massive military force needed to protect it.
”If we don’t get back to a simple way of life, we’ll have a social breakdown forcing everyone to live like this,“ he says. ”This is the earth we were born into, and instead of cultivating it and learning to live with it, we devastated it.“
Meyer’s housemates share his dedication to living simply. ”I think the folks caught up in the rat race driving down West End in their SUVs with their cell phones, that’s an uncritical, unethical lifestyle,“ says Jarad Bingham, a 24-year-old Vanderbilt divinity student and son of a doctor. ”I think the biggest problem with our culture is that we consume and think that’s redemptive. Here we treat the air and land like it’s sacred.
”Here we have a beautiful lifestyle. We have time for activism, time for reflection, and we don’t come home from work stressed.“
That’s not to say they don’t have their share of hassles. A few years ago, the Metro Beautification and Environment Commission notified Meyer that the overgrown brush on his lot endangered public health and safety. That angered Meyer, who wrote the commission, ”Your policy on vegetation control effectively requires thousands of gas-guzzling mowers and weed-eaters. They poison the air daily with toxic fumes as they mow down oxygen-producing vegetation.... To believe that this contributes to the health and safety of Nashville’s people is absurd and tragic.“ Meyer won his appeal and his garden grows on.
And what a garden it is. Walking through it, you would never know that you’re a mere 2 miles from the state Capitol. In just one-third acre, Meyer grows nearly 40 different varieties of berries, 2,000 tomatoes, 30 varieties of grapes, along with turnips, onions, cantaloupes, and watermelons. In addition to keeping his housemates well-fed, this relatively tiny garden, Meyer notes, also serves as a habitat for all different sorts of birds and insects.
Meyer is a vocal proponent of what he calls urban gardening in part because it provides for a good source of calories without taxing the environment. Rather than drive 5 miles to Kroger, he can just hop into his backyard and pluck whatever he needs.
Another aspect of Meyer’s project has to do with the issue of race. Not lost upon Meyer is the fact that he lives in a predominantly African American neighborhood. This was by design. ”Our being here is a witness against racism. We’re the minority here, but we’re not here to gentrify this neighborhood. We don’t want to kick anyone out. We’re here to live poor and simply and get along with our neighbors.“
In fact, it is worth pointing out that Meyer’s home, which he bought for $18,000, had been abandoned for at least a year. There were other, nicer homes that Meyer had eyed but turned down since people were already renting them. Armed, or some would say burdened, by a sharp, vigilant conscience, Meyer didn’t want the birth of his sustainable-living project to prompt the eviction of any residents. As a result, Meyer wound up with a vandalized home with graffiti-covered walls. But after five months of work, Meyer and his friends had the home in livable shape.
Today, Meyer says that his goal is not necessarily to expand his project. ”There’s no need for me to build an empire,“ he says. ”The first objective is to live the right way ourselves. The second objective is to have others live this way.“
