There's the sustainability reason to consume less and there's the resilience reason,
and they're both important and it's interesting how much overlap there is
between the practices of sustainability and the practices of resilience.
In this context there seems to be almost 100% overlap. The same practices of
self-sufficiency, frugality, exploring renewable energy, can take the same form
whether you're being driven by sustainability reasons or wanting to be
able to adapt if you find yourself with less money or with a more insecure financial
situation or a contracting economy.
Hi, I'm Helen. –I'm Sam. – We live here in Coburg, which is about
seven kilometres north of the melbourne city centre, with our son, who's 12. It's a
fairly standard three-bedroom weatherboard house on about tenth of an acre.
So when I moved here, to this house, in 2004 it had a very
lovely green lawn out the front and a garden out the back with lawn and a few
natives, but it wasn't a productive space. So one of the first things that I did
was dig some veggie beds. And over the years Sam moved in, we worked together
and planted fruit trees out the back and then started doing some more work at
the front, expanded the areas there. So it's now become a really productive space.
Producing food in our home is a really important part of this, certainly for me,
and then cooking that food, preserving it and just enjoying it.
The more you read about environmental problems, the more you read about social justice issues,
the more you learn that the world's going in a difficult direction –
– we're grossly over-consuming the planet's resources, there are literally billions
around the world who are by any humane sense under consuming,
and yet even the richest nations, even the richest people, are still seeming
to seek ever more and more. If it's the case that we're in ecological overshoot
while billions still need to lift their material living standards in some form
to live well, that implies that the most over-consuming nations and regions of
the world need to contract. Not through a recession but through sort of planned,
deliberate contraction. That's what "degrowth" means.
And it seems to me to be the only coherent way to move toward one planet living.
This is our solar dish and it works like a stovetop, so you just pop a
kettle or saucepan on there.
It uses the power of the sun to heat up.
And the other great thing about it is it packs down really neatly so it's pretty portable as well.
One of my passions and concerns is the role of energy in the civilization that
we find ourselves in. There's this widespread idea that we'll
simply be able to transition to green-energy solar panels or even nuclear
power and maintain this way of life.
I've come to the position that we probably can't run a globalised consumer society purely on green energy.
And that's made us think through a range of energy practices that are trying to build
resilience and to kind of deal thoughtfully, coherently, with the
problems of peak oil and climate change.
In our suburban plot we have started by
putting solar panels on the roof; about five years ago we put two kilowatts on
and then when we disconnected from gas about six months ago we put
another four kilowatts on.
This is our most recent and perhaps unusual renewable energy technology, it's
a biogas digester which we call Betty. We have been putting in about a kilogram
and a half of food waste into the biogas digester and
over the last four months it's provided essentially all of our cooking gas and I've also set up a
biogas hot water system and it's connected to an outside shower so it
doesn't replace our indoor hot water system, but it does supplement it.
We don't produce enough food waste to feed it ourselves; once a week I'll bike down
to the local fruit and veggie market, hop into their bin and take about ten kilograms of food.
Biogas is produced when organic matter biodegrades in the absence of oxygen and
when it does that it produces a mixture of gases which can be used to provide a number of
energy services from cooking, to heating space, to lighting and heating water.
It's been an incredible means of providing clean green free net zero carbon emissions energy in it.
For me the first year of doctoral study you have this extraordinary privilege of essentially having to
read a lot. And through that exposure to environmental literature,
social justice literature, I came across the writings of Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau's message essentially is to explore the good life in non-materialistic ways.
And that struck a chord with me. And I guess most of my work has been about thinking through the politics
and the macroeconomics of that notion of sufficiency.
You know it just made sense, if there were certain problems that had certain solutions,
even if they were vague solutions and uncertain solutions, to try to
explore them in practice. That's been the experiment of our
household in the last decade. It's been a process not a destination, and it will probably remain a process.
My upbringing was very much centred around growing your own food and making things and repairing things,
Not necessarily for
environmental reasons, more related to being less wasteful and being self-sufficient.
And so being able to be somewhere like this, where I've been able to practice it, has been important.
I think it's been a bit of an evolution rather than a sudden change. For me
certainly it wasn't a case of waking up overnight and saying I've got to change something.
We have this tenth of an acre in Melbourne suburbia and we recognize
that there is a privilege that comes with that. And that not everybody can
access, especially in Melbourne, like we probably wouldn't be able to afford this
house if it was purchased today. These practices are available to us but not
necessarily universally available and I think that's important for people to recognize.
Some of Sam's ideas seemed quite radical. I've needed, on occasion, a bit of
persuading to adopt those, but actually it turned out pretty well, so no regrets at all.
People ask me how how do you have time for all the stuff that you do. I work four days a week.
But it's partly about making time, it's about prioritizing work in the
garden or cooking or sewing over watching TV or something like that.
But it's also it's a really enjoyable activity to get out in the garden and harvest food.
So it's about valuing the process as well as enjoying the outcome.
And you know we both have been able to work about four days a week each, which
again we recognize is a privilege, but also it's been enabled by us being
pretty frugal and thoughtful with money and practicing voluntary simplicity,
living as simply as we can in a material sense.
And when you kind of go through the various aspects of a household's
outgoings you can often find that it can be trimmed.
So this is our car. We generally don't use it all that often because we cycle or we
get public transport most of the time, so we recently put it on the Car Next Door
platform. It enables people that are close by to rent your car when you're
not using it. So it's all done through an app. When somebody books the car, in the available time,
they're given a code for the lockbox and the person can then
go and get key and and off they go.
When a borrower takes our car they pay a daily
or an hourly charge and they pay per kilometer. We then get a bit of income at
the end of each month. It means that not so many cars are necessarily on the road.
So far it's worked really well for us, so we're able to book out the car when we do need it,
and the rest of the time other people can book it. Otherwise our car would have
been sitting in the driveway doing nothing, so it's win-win.
There'll be, again, households that won't be able to tighten the belt easily but I
think in Australian affluent society there are lots of households that would be able to consume considerably less.
And that means you're less committed to working those hours to pay for that consumption.
That's the kind of of key trade-off and the most attractive self-interested argument about this way of life
is that you're exchanging superfluous consumption for more time, more freedom.
It looks as if the burden is going to be on individuals, households and communities to be
the prime driver for change.
And so it's not that that's necessarily the best or the most efficient way to do it, but if people
come to the conclusion that they can't rely on governments then it follows that
the drivers for change have to be ordinary people at the grassroots level getting active.
And so that's what motivated us to do everything we can here but household
action in itself has its limitations.
These are ultimately systemic structural problems.
Then the question becomes how can household action help change those structures?
I think that's where community engagement becomes important,
and collective action becomes important. And also to think through the question
of how structures change. There will never be a politics or a macroeconomics
of sufficiency until there is a culture that demands it. We feel the need to try
to practice our values in our context, knowing that household action is a
necessary part of any change, but ultimately the problems of the
environment and social justice issues are systemic issues.
There's a deep self-interest in practicing this way of life as well, like
it has the background motivations for environmental and social justice reasons but ultimately
we're living what we feel are happier, better, richer, freer lives because
we don't need to fund high-consumption living.
Somehow it's just right. If you've got land grow food, if you have the opportunity to buy
something secondhand why would you buy it new? If you can ride a bike why would you take a car?
It just feels right to do things that way.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching another Happen Films short.
It was really cool to explore another urban example of resilience and we're excited to be doing more of that in the future.
If you'd like to help us make that happen please consider supporting us on Patreon.
There's a link in the description below the video, which you can click and find out more info on how to do that.
Thank you for watching and we'll see you the next film. – Bye guys!