Saving Walden's World screens at the Awareness Film Festival, Santa Monica

Jim Merkel was twenty-nine years old, sitting in a Paris apartment, eating couscous that had been cooked by Moroccan servants who were not allowed to leave the flat, when something shifted.

He was there to sell weapons, the lead designer of top-secret cryptographic communications equipment for the US military, in a meeting with an arms dealer who also served as a consulate for Iraq. The arms dealer explained, between courses, that the developing world was simply not capable of managing its own resources. That the right people, meaning American corporations, needed to go in, extract the oil, the minerals, the land.

Jim looked at the servants. He thought about where the weapons he was selling were going and what they were doing there. He took the paycheck for another year, and then he stopped.

The documentary has screened at 23 international film festivals across four continents, earning 14 awards to date. In 2027 it rolls out on national public television.

The film's inciting incident takes place in California, capturing the director, Jim Merkel’s, ethical crisis in the late 1980s while working as a military arms dealer for TRW. That awakening sparked a decades-long journey of redemption. He shifted his life to peace, indigenous rights and bike activism in San Luis Obispo volunteering with ECOSLO, the Sierra Club and Passion for Peace.

Crafted by an acclaimed creative team, including Academy Award-winner Deborah Shaffer (Cuba direction), four-time Emmy winner Bob Maraist (cinematography/co-production), BAFTA winner David Wright (Kerala cinematography), and lead editors Nyneve Minnear (Little Richard: I Am Everything) and Mickey Green (five-time Emmy winner), the film follows former military engineer Jim Merkel as he raises his son on an off-grid homestead in Maine and travels to Kerala, Cuba, and Slovenia to study women-led sustainable communities.

“We document societies that made college free for all, including the poorest women, over 60 years ago,” says director Jim Merkel. “When a young woman knows her dreams to be an engineer, doctor, or community manager won’t financially burden her family, her entire community transforms in beautiful ways.”

• TRAILER: https://youtu.be/an4LqG9mLlM

• MEDIA CONTACT: Jim Merkel | jimimerkel@gmail.com | (207) 323-1474

• WEBSITE: savingwaldensworld.org 

• TRAILER: https://youtu.be/an4LqG9mLlM 

“I know exactly what the war economy costs,” he says now, from a $7,000 sailboat in Penobscot Bay, Maine. “Not in dollars. In the communities that never get the schools, the clinics, the food systems they need because the money went somewhere else.”

The Arithmetic of the War Economy

The connection Jim is describing is not a rhetorical flourish. It is arithmetic.

Global military spending reached $2.443 trillion in 2024, the highest level ever recorded, and the tenth consecutive year of increase. The United States alone spent $997 billion, more than the next ten countries combined. In the same year, the global humanitarian system received $20.5 billion, roughly two percent of what the world spent on weapons.

The communities that most need the schools, the clinics, and the food systems are the same communities most likely to be on the receiving end of the weapons. And the communities that have achieved the best combination of human development and ecological sustainability, Kerala, Cuba, Slovenia, are consistently the ones that invested in people rather than in military infrastructure.

Kerala spent on education. Cuba spent on healthcare and food sovereignty. Slovenia built cooperative economic institutions. None of them are military powers. All of them have produced quality-of-life outcomes that the world’s largest military spenders have not replicated for their own populations.

Peace Is Not the Absence of Conflict

The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 to strengthen the ideals of peace among nations. The definition has expanded since, peace not just as the absence of war between states, but as the presence of the conditions that make conflict unnecessary: food security, healthcare access, economic equity, functioning governance, ecological stability.

By this definition, peace is what Kerala has been building since the 1950s through land reform and literacy campaigns. It is what Cuba built through community health infrastructure that has survived sixty years of economic siege. It is what the cooperative economies of Slovenia sustain through shared ownership structures that give communities a genuine stake in their collective future.

Jim’s film is not a peace documentary in the conventional sense, there are no peace talks, no diplomatic negotiations, no international summits. It is something more practical: a documentation of what communities built when they chose the conditions of peace over the machinery of conflict.

“How do we ensure this world works for everyone?” he asks. “That includes our earth, the poor, women, those who’ve been historically underrepresented and underserved. Instead of spending trillions on war we can divert all that brilliance and kindness into making the world work for others.”