Thursday, Jun. 07, 2007
The Gaia path is a bit overgrown. heading down the educational walk he's laid out on his bushland property in southwestern Sydney, Ted Trainer has to push aside unpruned greenery so a visitor can read the hand-lettered signs: gaia is the earth goddess. gaia sends the rain. "Know who Gaia is?" he says. "We don't treat Gaia very well."
Trainer, a sociologist at the University of New South Wales, believes that if we don't change our ways fast, the planet could be done for. But "people are not grasping the enormous reductions we've got to make." To avert catastrophe, he believes, we'll have to get by on "about 3% of the fossil fuel we now use." So "it's not just households putting in shower heads and light bulbs. We have to face up to big, big system changes": an end to economic growth, sharply curtailed travel and commerce, and a shift to a slower, more communal lifestyle that sounds like the 19th century with the Internet, but which Trainer calls the Simpler Way.
Growing numbers of Australians, worried that their habits are hurting the planet, are evolving their own versions of the low-impact life. "For most people, sustainability means putting out the recycling bin," says Frank Fisher, a professor of environmental science at Monash University. "But there is a small but strong core of people," a couple of hundred thousand in his estimate, "who are really transforming their lives. Some are from the '70s back-to-the-earth movement, but there's also a big influx of new people." Time talked to five, from a suburban housewife to an eco-village veteran, about the steps they've taken on the green path.
At Pigface Point, the 2o-ha property where he's lived all his life, Trainer lives more simply than most Australians. His home's a World War II surplus Nissen hut with verandahs and a regular roof tacked on. There's a small garden—"corn's a really good crop"—beehives, some chickens, and a goat to keep the weeds down. Solar panels power the lights and computer, wood fires provide heat, and water comes from rain tanks.
Trainer would love to simplify even further—fish in the river, cook on a wood stove, "vege garden heavily," and do without the Toyota in the garage. But he's rather busy, giving his course on "The Global Crisis: Transition to a Sustainable Society" and writing a book on the subject. He can picture the Simpler future: a network of self-governing commmunities that would supply most of their own needs, from food to crockery to paper and even, he speculates, computer chips. It's just a matter of nutting out the best way to get there.
Political parties, including the Greens, can't do much, he says: "If Mr Howard said, I realize now we've got to cut the economy down, he would instantly be put in a mental home." To bring about the huge value change that's needed, "the work's got to be done at the grassroots level so people will understand the need for these things and not only support them but find it attractive."
To show how good the Simpler life could be, Trainer is turning the property into an educational site. There are small outbuildings to show what can be done with mud, bush furniture made of unplaned branches; water wheels and pumps fashioned out of old bicycle wheels and bits of dowel and wire; a spinning wheel; and a furnace where "you can melt down aluminium beer cans and cast buckles and hinges."
Some of the contraptions look a little awkward. But Trainer is unimpressed by elegance: "Very often, the simple way is quite sufficient," he says. And if the site appears neglected, "we don't make a big effort because we're so busy on other things." The Simpler Way would provide a lot more leisure. With less need for money or travel, people "could just spend time hovering around the places we've made," Trainer says, pointing out a wishing well, a shaded seat, a statue of Peter Pan. "He's saying, 'You silly lot, you work all day. You could be like me and have fun.'" The new ways "could be very rewarding," he adds, "so we've got to get that across. You won't have a sports car, you won't have your holidays in Bali, but you'll have all these other nice satisfactions."
It was dissatisfaction—with her weight, her family's fast-food intake and their greenhouse-gas output—that made Linda Cockburn decide it was time for a strict diet, not just of calories but of carbon emissions and cash. So in late 2004 she persuaded her partner Trev Wittmer, a forestry technician, and their son Caleb, then 6, "to try and go six months without spending a dollar, and create all our own food, our own power and water, the whole thing." They already had a composting toilet, rainwater tanks and an electric bike. They added solar panels, some chickens and a goat, planted their suburban Brisbane backyard with vegetables, and began, as the title of Cockburn's 2006 book on the project put it, living the good life.
Five months on, goat cheese and pumpkin were starting to pall—"I'll never go without chocolate again," says Cockburn, an ebullient New Zealander—and they were looking forward to real toilet paper. "Like any adventure," wrote Wittmer in their lintrezza.com webdiary, "the satisfaction is not always in the journey but the achievement." Which was substantial, Cockburn says: "We managed to reduce our reliance on petrol, coal-produced power and town water by 95%." Aside from rates, mortgage, insurance, phone and medical fees, they spent just $300, she claims—though they invested $25,000 in power and other infrastructure before they began, and she gave up her IT job to tend the garden. The bottom line: the ecologically virtuous life can be enjoyable, too. "I don't think you have to have that living-without concept to be self-sufficient," she says. "It's a really healthy, livable life, and it's not difficult."
Eighteen months ago they sold up and moved to a five-acre block near Hobart, Tasmania, where they're living in a caravan while they build a "chemical-free, sustainable, straw-bale house." Their carbon footprint might be bigger these days—they're using grid power and have bought an old ute to haul timber. And the house is absorbing more cash and time than they expected. "A good sense of humor has helped," Cockburn admits. But the garden is bearing fruit, and so is their book. "We get emails from people all over the world" who've been inspired by Good Life, she says. Which gets her thinking. "If all these people are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions," she adds with a chuckle, "then maybe I can go into Hobart and back today on a shopping trip—I've got a few carbon offsets."
In the four years he's been working on his rammed-earth-and-car-tire house, David Alder has learned a lot. How to speak wombat: "Tsch, tsch," he says, and Jazz, one of three orphaned pets, trundles out from beneath the rainwater tank. How to build houses: as a test run, he and his wife Suzanne put up a small cottage, teaching themselves from books and the Internet. And how to gauge which appliances you can run for how long before the solar power cuts out. When the Alders moved to the hillside block near Lithgow, west of Sydney, they installed $50,000 worth of solar panels and soon wished they had more. "The moment you switched on the electric jug you could see all the lights dim," says David, a retired geologist. They now use a kettle on the bottled-gas stove, reserve the microwave for warming milk for the wombats, and limit Web surfing by their three adult children.
But brownouts won't deter them from what David says is "a commitment to an ideal and a way of life." They're not there yet. The house building—the tires serve as both formwork and insulation—is slower and costlier than they anticipated. Suzanne, who works as a psychologist in Bathurst, "is our income to keep things running." She drives about 60 km to work each day; their youngest daughter travels about the same distance to TAFE college in Lithgow. The permaculture-style garden, mingling berries, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuces and olives, produces much of their food, but winter frosts almost wipe it out. "There have been times we've thought, What on earth have I started?" David says, standing on what will be their front porch. "But you just keep taking one small step at a time."
Butterflies flit across the garden, chickens peck in the orchard, and the wooded slope on the other side of their small valley sinks into blue shade. "When you get really down and think things are getting on top of you," he says, "you just sit here and look at this wonderful view and this property, and it puts everything back into perspective."
When Julie Goodchild first started sizing up her family's ecological footprint a year ago, she and her engineer husband John Kniest dreamed of swapping their project home in Newcastle, N.S.W., for a country place where they could grow their own food. Then one day, "I was thinking about all the things I had to do and it suddenly came to me: Where did I think I was going to get the time to look after a small acreage? The maintenance alone. I realized I was in lala land." Given that most Australians live in cities, she reasoned, it would be better "to stay where we are and see what we can produce in our own backyard."
In the calm, tidy house, the sole clue to her eco-preoccupation is the Thai curry simmering in a power-saving slow cooker. The eggplant in it came from the garden, where flowers are fast giving way to dwarf apple trees, tomatoes, berries, asparagus and cauliflower. The family's first steps on their new path were easy: "We halved our footprint in a few months by looking at the average tips on saving water, petrol, electricity": timing showers, limiting car trips, turning the microwave off at the wall. But Goodchild, an environmental scientist turned fulltime mother of three, wanted to go further—and ran into a minefield of dilemmas. What to buy first, a rainwater tank or a solar hot water system? Is it better to get rice from Australia or Pakistan? What's the best alternative to plastic food wrap? Recently she had to buy winter pajamas for the children. "I thought, Do I pick something that's synthetic, made from petrochemicals, or do I pick something that's cotton, that's taken kilos of pesticides to grow? My head spun."
She sometimes stays up till 1 a.m. doing research—"it's my hobby"—and posting the results on her blog, Towards Sustainable Living. "The whole process has been a bit like parenting," she says. "It can be very frustrating and time consuming and difficult, but also the most rewarding thing you've ever done. And at the end of the day you still don't know if you've done the right thing."
Nigel Reid lurches forward just in time to push a swooping kookaburra off his nut-butter sandwich. Sitting on the verandah of his self-built house in Jarlanbah eco-village, near Nimbin, in subtropical N.S.W., he's just as ready to wrangle with his fellow environmentalists. In the 12 years since he and his wife Yoko moved here, Reid has taken a hard look at what he calls the movement's "articles of faith." Back to the land? "The last thing you want is for everybody to leave the city and buy their five-acre hobby farm and try to do the back to the earth thing. It would swallow all the arable land in Australia." Growing your own? Food is so cheap, he says, that "if you could work day and night and be self-sufficient in food, you've only offset 15% of your family's expenses. People say, "We support our whole family on our hobby farm. If you were any sort of a farmer you'd be feeding 100 families." Build your own house? "Alternative building methods like straw bale are not environmental." As for economical, "What is your labor worth? You'd be better off getting a low-paid job and getting a professional to finish your house in six months."
Reid wants to drag the back-to-the-earth movement into the urban 21st century. "Most people would like to do their bit for the planet but don't have the wherewithal to do it all themselves," he says. "If you can offer an energy-efficient, resource-efficient, water-efficient house, done for them at a reasonable price, they will go for it." On a 16-ha property a short walk from Jarlanbah, he's about to test that belief. In a year or so he'll start building Rivendell, a parkland village of 50 terrace-style houses that he hopes will combine the peace and privacy of a rural lifestyle with the convenience of a city one. Beside the village will be an Eco-City Farm, a patented system that Reid claims "makes it possible to produce a huge amount of food in a very small area." Wastewater from the houses will grow larvae to feed fish and irrigate the farm, which will supply houses and restaurants with food, whose scraps will be composted to fertilize the farm, and so on. By clever use of technology, "I hope to reduce the carbon footprint of the households by about 80%."
Rivendell has to be not just functional, says Reid, but beautiful. "The whole green thing's got this image of bloody ugly. Contraptions all over the place, uncomfortable." He wants the architect-designed houses to be as stylish as his Mac computer—and as covetable: "The impact I'm having is insignificant unless it becomes a model and is copied, and taken on by larger developers." Reid is looking at the site's green meadows, but he could also be imagining the green movement's future: sleek, chic and profitable.
- Elizabeth Keenan
- Don't say hippie: all sorts of Australians are getting their hands dirty and giving their lives a green makeover
