A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

We now face an existential crisis that may bring human civilisation to an end. This needs

a whole of society effort to try and resolve it.

Our current system is a planet-killing Ponzi scheme. It’s a giant casino of absolutely

epic proportions.

The consumer way very easily debauches.

I think we are losing a sense of community in many ways.

We need to learn about these fundamentals of a deeper connection to one another

and to nature.

Maybe there’s another option, maybe there’s another way - way to live which isn’t the

way that I have grown up with or become accustomed to or just fallen into.

The story of industrial civilisation tells us that limitless economic growth, advanced

technology, and material affluence are the pathways to prosperity. But as we reflect

on the world today, it is clear that this is failing both people and planet. We know

this in our heads and feel it in our hearts.

And yet, it seems we have not found a new story by which to live. We are the generation

in between stories, desperately clinging to yesterday’s, but uncertain of tomorrow’s.

But then again, perhaps the new story is already with us.

Perhaps we just need to live it into existence.

I came because I was looking for a way to simplify my life. I knew that the way that

I was living my life wasn’t right and the things that seemed – that it seemed necessary

to strive for weren’t the things that I really wanted to strive for. And I’ve always

felt that. So I guess for the last five or six years I’ve sort

of been paring back. I just, yeah, I felt I didn’t want to have debt, I didn’t want

to… didn’t want to feel obligated to work a 40-hour week and not have time to do the

things that really mattered to me.

So, for the past year or so I’ve been experimenting with, I guess, living simply, living sustainably,

and trying to challenge myself, I guess, to live in a way that is less ah harmful towards

the planet and, ah, less energy intensive. I guess I feel like this experiment is an

opportunity to push myself a little bit further and challenge not only myself but the modern

environmental movement to, yeah, come to understand what it is to live sustainably.

I’m really looking forward to this year, being part of a team working together to explore,

ah, what it really means to live simply and sustainably, to work towards living within

the resources of one planet. How we can just improve constantly. And I’m really excited

about sharing that beyond the group here and beyond this place as much as we can to inspire

and educate others as well.

The idea of this project really interested me because I’d been trying to apply these

principles in my own life in quite an individual way, hadn’t had much support from the wider

group of people I was with, so the idea of coming here to be in a supportive learning

environment and to be meeting lots of new people who are asking similar questions, challenging

things in a similar way, that’s what excited me, that idea of working as part of a larger

movement.

Ah, I guess my interest in this project was to join with like-minded people, learn some

skills, give my daughter the opportunity of living, living on a rural property. Being

part of a documentary to…to educate and inspire others to one planet living, sustainable

living.

Um, so I was interested in this project because it provided me with the ability to put the

theories of natural building and natural food production into practice on a bigger scale

than I’m able to do in cities and without actually buying any land, because land’s

so expensive at the moment.

I’ve been studying permaculture for a long time, but I’m excited to put it into practice.

I want to have experiences and I wanna be able to use my hands, and have knowledge from

experience rather than from books.

In terms of the existing infrastructure, in addition to the house there, there’s a small

earth ship, a cob round house, some basic composting facilities, and a moderately sized

farm shed, if you like. My mother loved this place. So much so that my sister and I spread

her ashes here, once she passed away. She is very much the seed for us, in being able

to explore sustainable pathways for the property. It was not long after this that I was introduced

to Samuel Alexander’s book Entropia, and realised that we were truly on the same page,

envisaging a simpler way. I shared all this with the Gunai Kernai Land and Waters Aboriginal

Corporation’s cultural heritage manager about our small Braiakolung patch, and Wurruk’an

was born. With permission to use “Wurruk”, a local indigenous word for earth and story,

fused with “k’an”, a Mayan term for seed.

We are beginning the build of a tiny house. It’s about 2.7 by 3.6, and about 3 metres

high, so it’s got a footprint of about 10 square metres. We’re trying to use as much

reclaimed timber and reclaimed iron as possible. For the last two or three months I’ve been

jumping into skips on the side of the road or jumping into people’s back yards when

they tell me that they’re renovating, or going to the tip shops or salvage yards or

finding windows on the side of the road. We’ve got about 15 people here for the build over

the next week and at the end of that build I’m hoping that we’ve more or less got

ourselves a beautiful, unconventional, tiny house.

This is the tiny house that was built by a group of people in, when was it, it was January,

as well, so it took about a week, and then I had to install some of the ceiling and a

few other bits and pieces myself, but it got finished in a week. So this is the outside

of the tiny house. It’s made out of pretty much nearly all recycled materials, building

materials, it’s probably about, I would say about 95% all recycled building materials.

These weather boards are actually skirting boards that we sanded down and varnished.

So I guess that the main feature of the tiny house is the geodesic window, which our carpenter

Nick made. It’s beautiful. He actually made the frame and I cut all the glass and did

the patterns. First time cutting glass and, what do you know it worked! And then I made

a candle-holder for it and everything. This makes it a really warm and beautiful space

to be in and I look forward to many winter nights with candles. Then we’ve got, like

most tiny houses we’ve got a loft for either storage or a bed. That’s my bed up there.

It’s got a really cute little window. You can fit quite a lot of things into a tiny

house and to be honest it’s quite comfortable. I’ve got my couch, my bed, I’ve got a

work station as well. This is my little desk, where I end up doing designs from, which is

a really beautiful place to work. I often work with the door open, I’ve got a view

down into the valley there. I often work with a kerosene lamp, candles, sometimes a head

torch if it’s getting a little bit too dark. There’s no power in the house and that’s

what I like about it. I like to kind of go back to nature and it really gives you a feeling

of the fluctuations of the seasons and the cycles of nature as well. I prefer to live

in a tiny space. I like to nest, and I don’t think that you miss out on much … much more

than living in a conventional house, in a quite a larger house, and that’s because

it makes you minimise, it makes you realise how much you don’t need, as well. It makes

you realise how functional a small space can be. In our modern society we have the, usually

the feeling that bigger is better, and I don’t necessarily think that that’s the case.

I think that smaller is more cosy and more nourishing.

I grew up in quite a conventional way, in a little family in sort of suburban England,

but my family had a really strong connection to the natural world. We’d often go for

walks in the forest and along moors and I had a deep love of nature from a young age.

And when I was a teenager I, through videos on the internet and through publications,

discovered the extent of the ecological and social crises happening in the world today

– the deforestation, the pollution in the oceans, the toxic dumps, the factory farming.

That really hit me very hard and I became really concerned about how we were living.

I had a deep sense that we shouldn’t be going down that track but at the time I had

no idea that there was an alternative.

You can’t produce an answer unless you name the problem accurately. Unless we really understand

the circumstances we’re in, we’re not gonna get the solutions to find the path to

it and I’ve seen what I call, after Barbara Ehrenreich, a lot of bright siding. Aah…

It’s all happy-clappy, it’s all good, we’re all going in the right direction,

there’s renewable energy, sunflowers, all of this. I think, in part, some of that is

a personal psychological response of people wanting to talk about the good news because

it allows them to go on. But we have to deal with this problem as it really is, and it

is arresting and it is difficult. And to pretend otherwise, to pretend it’s going to be light

and easy, that it’s going to be business as usual, that everybody can keep on making

profit and we won’t have to change much, to think like that, actually means that we

can’t get to the solution we need. We need brutal reality in order to solve the problem.

Techno-optimism in particular is, is really insidious, it’s about telling us we don’t

actually have to change anything, we can still have everything we have now. So we don’t

have to worry about any of these pesky limits, we’ll have everything we have now we’ll

just do it all in a green sort of way. … I think we have to have a recognition of the

fact that we are facing limits, and some sense of the relative timeframe for the different

limits that we’re facing, because then we know what we’re trying to prepare for, and

we have an appropriate kind of sense of urgency as to the need to do it.

I hope that by the end of the year I’ll have a deeper grounding in what it means to

live simply, and a greater confidence that this is in fact a way of approaching life

that is deeply nourishing. I believe it is and the experiences I’ve had so far tell

me that it’s something that could be applied to lots of peoples’ lives for great benefit,

but I think the explorations of this year will help give me confidence in communicating

that message and sharing it with a wide range of people. I hope that by the end of the year

these practical explorations will give me greater clarity of my own realities and vision

and how I see my life being a beautiful contribution to these difficult times that we’re in as

a species. I want my life to be a gesture towards a more stable and loving world.

I guess I’m expecting this year to be difficult. I’m expecting to, yeah, again push simple

living to its probably more extreme ends and try and, I mean I know it’s gonna be uncomfortable

but I wanna try and find what my limits are and try and pare it back to something that’s

somewhere in between and more comfortable. And I guess I’ve been doing that by myself

for a little while now and I’m hoping to do that with a bunch of other people that

are interested in the same kind of thing and maybe we can work together and as a community

it might be more rewarding or more enjoyable or even a bit easier. And yeah I mean if you

can extend that to community living, I guess it’ll be easier to extend to much broader

society.

I spent the last eight years working in an

office, as a town planner, in a number of different roles, doing different things and

in the end of those eight years I was actually partaking in projects that I was very passionate

about, but the bulk of my work that was coming from up above, my bosses, was not something

I was proud or really fully passionate about. So quitting my job and doing a bit of travelling

and then applying to be a part of this project gave me the ability to remove myself from

the daily grind, I guess you could say, and you know I found that once I you know built

my salary up over those eight years working from part time to a full time, senior employee