It's been a while but we're back

Hello, yoo-hoo, remember us!?

It's been a while but we're back. Where have we been? Just around, doing our regular thing but with a little less time.  Despite our previous commitments to downshifting Adam started working full time at the start of this year. We enjoyed a charmed existence through most of 2015 when Adam was working (very) casually. We had heaps of family time and time to pursue other interesting projects around the house and in the community but the time came for Ads to get a bit more structure and a little more income in his life. He applied for a few jobs then came his dream job - Carnaby's Black-Cockatoo Project Coordinator with Birdlife WA. He coordinates the Great Cocky Count - a mammoth citizen science project plus coordinates surveys of nesting hollows and other side projects. Look, this is him cuddling a Carnaby's chick near Badgingarra. That thing is so ugly it's adorable. Only it's mother and Ads would love it!

Adam is really happy and motivated in his new role. As for the downshifting lifestyle, well, anyone who works for a not-for-profit can probably understand that we've got the earning less bit covered :) but that's fine. We can afford his pay cut and the upside is that Adam is learning a whole new set of skills and is enjoying his career more than ever. The full time work hours are a bit tough but he hopes to reduce his hours slightly as of next year. 

As for me, I'm still busy at work part time. This is me giving a worm farming workshop a few weeks ago at my second spiritual home Earthwise Community Garden:

And me volunteering at my first spiritual home, Hilton Harvest Community Garden giving a composting and gardening talk in May. Spot the difference!

Together with the other wonderful committee people, we have been really busy at Hilton Harvest (and do check out the website - I've been managing that and am pretty proud of how it looks at the moment). I'm there every Monday morning with a little rag tag group of gardeners whom I love. We compost, weed, plant and generally potter about. We also have a work for the dole crew who are hard working and lovely, plus we run the Buds n Blooms interegenerational gardening group. All our activities are listed here, just in case you want to join us! We've got an amazing vision and helpful City of Fremantle people supporting us. I get so much out of volunteering at the Garden - way more than I put in. 

So as you can see we have been working hard and are just about to choof off on a well deserved little holiday for some luxuriating in the warmth. I look forward to writing more posts soon as there is more to catch you up on including the wonderful Permaculture Design Course I did a couple of months ago and Ads is keen to share some geeky deets too. We are also mulling over a few interesting home projects including bees and special compost systems...stay tuned. We're back. 

xx

Let them play

We had a beautiful weekend, just the three of us pottering around at home. Ads and I have some serious work to do in the garden. We spent most of Sunday morning fighting with a section of boysenberry that we had let go feral. We won, but it was a bloody victory.

As soon as we had started working, however, Quincey chimed in with his usual 'I'm bored' mantra. As a keen (and recently frustrated) gardener, this was the last thing I wanted to hear the minute I slipped on my gardening gloves. Grrrr. I wanted to chuck him in the brambles Winnie the Pooh style. But I restrained myself and replied my usual reply 'You're not board, your just lazy. Go and find something to do'. And to my delight he did.

Any modern day parent will understand how truly heartwarming it is to see their kids play in nature, rather than on a screen. It's hard for us parents now, but we have to try. For us, Quin can nag for screens for 45 mins or more. I'm fairly stubborn and I consider this a test of my parenting. Most of the time, together we can push through this and something beautiful happens. He wanders off and finds something creative to do like he did on Sunday. It was a whole little world he had created. I was impressed with his patience - he was working on it for a good while before I found him. He'd also been working on some rather complicated Hero Factory blockade to our front door.

This was all much more fun than boysenberry wrestling so after I took these photos, I played too. It reminded me of how much I love looking for 'mini beasts' under rocks and mulch.

Our lives are not always as charmed as the pictures make it seem, but this was one of those rare and precious mornings. It rained in the afternoon and in the evening we went out with the torch to check on Quin's creation. A snail had moved in! How wonderful!

The Spirit Level - book review and an epiphany

This is an amazing book and it blew my mind. Not in a 'Wow this is such a beautiful and well written piece of art' way, because it is as dry as old chips and it took me about three months to read it but it blew my mind because it turns out there actually is a silver bullet to the worlds woes. True.

So I'll tell you about it and you will shrug and go, 'hu, well that's logical', like you always knew it. And yes, it is intuitive to agree that 'equality is better for everyone' but the really fascinating bits are in the details.

First bit of the book is about how the authors are proper type academics. They are don't use tricks with stats and are well clever. By the end of the book I totally agree (Though someone has written a book disputing the facts, which in turn has been disputed). Then they explained that they are looking at OECD countries only, ie only the rich ones. The idea here is that a country needs a certain level of overall wealth to provide basics such as clean water, education etc. But there comes a point when more overall wealth does not continue to provide the overall gains in living standards/health/social wellbeing - there are 'diminishing returns' on overall wealth.. One striking example of this is how now obesity is now generally an illness of the poor. It used to be that rich people were fat and poor people were skinny and malnourished, but now the reverse is true (although fat people can also be malnourished - but you get my drift).

The second bit of the book was all about the graphs (for me, anyway). They looked at a 170 different bits of research on:

• levels of trust
• mental illness (including substance abuse)
• life expectancy and infant mortality
• obesity
• educational outcomes
• teenage births
• homicides
• incarceration rates
• social mobility

and basically came up with the same conclusion: the bigger the disparity in income the more problems exist across society. And so all the graphs looked similar to this:

And then to prove its not a fluke, they repeat it for states in America. 

In relation to, for example death rates for working men, infant mortality and literacy they say that you are better off being poor in a country with lower income disparity than you are being rich in a country with high income disparity. Read that last sentence a few times because its mind boggling!

Then they started going on about how closely class and income disparity are related. I found the bit about violence really interesting. They say that acts of violence are 'attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation - a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming - and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride'. So people with less cash and of lower class feel shame and therefore react accordingly.

They also talk about how in working classes people tend to make poor decisions about what to do with their limited income. Its not that people in OECD countries don't have enough money to purchase food (though definitely some don't), its that they are so pissed off with being poor they want to purchase stuff which they think will improve their social status, like the typical example of people on the dole getting the latest iphones. The book goes on quite a bit about consumerism and how people buy crap to attempt to increase their general happiness and keep up with the Joneses. I can see that this is true. You only have to go to a shopping centre to see it in action (and to a landfill site to see the ugly, hidden end of the journey of unnecessarily purchased crap). But it got me thinking, why are we, Ads and I, different? We aren't rich, we might be a little bit middle class, but we are not upper middle class, and that's only because we went to uni. My parents didn't go to uni, Ads' parents did. But we don't purchase crap because it's stupid. I can, hand on my heart, say that I hate shopping. It makes me feel sick. Stuff is revolting and we avoid it as much as possible. 

Ah. 

Then I had the epiphany.

Are we really different? No. It's the reno, isn't it? That's us keeping up with the Joneses. We are no different to every other well educated, middle aged, middle class, gentrifying, bleeding heart lefty. There are lots of us around these parts. Not all of us have iphones but most of us renovate. 'Hm, how wide are your decking boards?', 'Oh yes, ours are recycled'. Our renos are nearly all finished, complete with recycled decking and a water feature. Even including the new room our house is still tiny compared to most but it was adequate before the renos. We didn't really need to renovate. And geez, it made a heck of a lot of waste (which has been sent to be recycled and salvaged as much as possible, but still). And I had to go to Ikea, the arch nemisis of any good Earth Carers type. Actually I had to go twice because I got the wrong cupboard door or something the first time. Actually I made Ads go the second time for fear I might completely lose my grip on reality if I had to go twice in one week.

It's easy to justify our renovation. We now have a spare third bedroom/sewing room, we used recycled timber, we've added to the passive solar elements in the house, we removed asbestos, we've made frog habitat with the pond and we've made a beautiful space. And yes, I'm sure it will be the subject of our next blog post. But the cost, the waste (two skip bins so far), supporting Ikea, the air miles for the materials, the concrete, the emotional investment... Anyway I'm rambling now and have totally hijacked this book review into a navel gazing post. So to round it all out, The Spirit Level is a super interesting book and made me reflect on many assumptions about society and also my own behaviors. If you are a politician or policy maker in any level this is a must read!

Look out for the posts on our renos! :)

The chook pooped on a book

I had to take my chook to work the other day. She is a beautiful girl and was needed for a photo shoot in the Grove Community Centre to promote the Less is More Festival. She was very well behaved and smiled when asked by the photographer.

However, she did poop. On a book. But we cleaned it up and the lovely staff at the library didn't seem to mind so much. And it resulted in a fantastic article on page 5 of the local paper - my chook and Lindsay Miles posing for the festival!

I absolutely love my job because I get to hang out with some amazing people and learn so much about living more sustainably. I spent all of Saturday at the Less is More Festival which was coordinated by Lindsay (an Earth Carers volunteer). With help from us in the office she gathered around 22 volunteer presenters and around 17 support volunteers to hold a day of rolling workshops and activities designed to help people live more sustainably and consciously. The festival is in its third year and 2014 was the best yet! I'm not sure if it was because we had some extra funding from Lotterywest for advertising or if people are just into it more, but there were hundreds and hundreds of people there. The nice thing about this year was that there were a lot of ordinary looking western suburbs folks who might not have been exposed to DIY toothpaste or composting much before. Lindsay specifically marketed the festival at everyone, not just our beloved hippies. I feel we really struck a chord with lots of people and we have been able to get the 'Full lives, empty bins' message out there.

I didn't take any photos on the day - I missed the chance to get one of Adam doing his fruit tree talk. He gave away a banana tree to a very happy chappy. And I did my usual on composting.

The festival was a lot of work, but its such a buzz to be able to share our passions with others and to get such a positive response from the community! My friend (and sometimes parallel blogger) Lindsay has popped some pics on her blog, so rather than duplicate here is the link to Treading My Own Path.

Love miles

I have this brilliant idea that no one else thinks is a brilliant idea. Here it is: you should only be allows to marry someone who lives within a 500 km radius of your birth place. I'm sure you can see the genius in this idea. But just in case it needs explaining...

The thing is that these days people travel so much. Its pretty much a right of passage to take a year off between high school and work/uni to pop over to the UK or South America, work, bum around a bit, have a blast, find yourself and meet the love of your life. This is a grave and terrible scenario because what happens next is that you move back to Australia settle down and have babies without the support of one set of grandparents, siblings and little cousins for the kids to play with. Said grandparents who live on the other side of the world of course feel pretty sad about missing out on seeing their own offspring, let alone their own grandchildren and then have to visit every second summer and on the summer they don't visit it is expected that you visit them. And if you don't, well, you have family that you barely know. Cousins grow up never having shared a Christmas day, Granny's don't know what size cloths to send, and siblings never get to just pop over for a cuppa and do the dishes for each other after sleepless nights with newborns. Its heartbreaking. I know this because Adam is English and we have family in England that we miss terribly.

We foolishly fell in love many many moons ago when I thought it romantic to shack up with a foreigner. I'm not entirely sure I could have helped falling in love, but had Adam never traveled to Australia we would have never met and I would be none the wiser. But he did travel, the rest is history. So we, like many others, find our selves in this position where we would love to visit England and have family visit here but, alas, the carbon.

Its serious, all this air travel and I don't like it. FIFO's don't just travel from Perth to Tom Price now, they come from New Zealand to Tom Price or Perth to South Africa. Kids fly over east ever school holidays to visit their Dads, and geez, do we love to holiday! Traveling overseas is so common - how can it be special if you go overseas twice a year? There is no 'trip of a lifetime' anymore, nowhere is new, everyone has been there before.

All that said, we are going back to England for Christmas this year. It has been about 6 years since our last visit and about 4 years since anyone has visited us so its due. Parents are getting older, babies have been born and teenagers are growing into adults. We are about to spew out some serious carbon. But we call them love miles and while we try to limit them, they are unavoidable.

Offsetting is not the answer to all of this but its a little something that is better than nothing - actually its not better than nothing, nothing is better, as in, not flying is better. Got that? Anyway, I offset our carbon emissions for the three of us for the flights to London and a few internal Europe flights too. According to Carbon Neutral we will produce 18.53 tonnes of carbon for which 111 trees need to be planted. It cost $416, which does seem a lot, but then, I nearly spent that much on a night out to see Beyonce (tickets, dinner, babysitter). I think a contributing to a safe environmental future is worth more than Beyonce - bless her.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to this trip of ours. We are going to exciting places that will be new for us and we will be renewing relationships with old friends and family.We just try for minimal air travel and where we do fly, we offset and we really look forward to it as a special, exciting time because it will be a while until we fly again.

Educating kids is not the answer

I have had to make a new label on our blog called 'Rants'. I wanted to call it 'nostril flaring rants by Amy that may use over generalizations and might offend people' but that would not fit on the label, so I'll stick with just 'Rants'. Ads is opposed to my publishing my rants because he doesn't want our blog to get all political. I promised him it wouldn't be political. But it wasn't a core promise.

This particular rant is about how I want to headbutt the next person who tells me that the solution is to 'educate the children' or 'it's up to the next generation'. This comment pisses me off for several reasons.

Firstly, how dare we stuff up the planet so badly, then expect our kids to clean it up. My Quincey can't even clean up his spilt milo, let alone the great pacific garbage patch. They are the children, we are the grown ups. We need to take responsibility now for our mess and try to leave them a planet that is not totally trashed.

Secondly, we don't have time. Just have a quick glance over the IPCC's latest report. We don't have 10 years to wait for our kids to enter the workplace, let alone 30 years for them to become CEOs and decision makers. That's what us grown ups are now and we need to use our positions to make the right decisions now.

Thirdly, I don't think it works - at least not alone. Ever tried to learn art from someone who can't draw or another language from someone who can only speak English - but has a book on how to do it? It's not very convincing is it? If we are to teach sustainability we need to walk the walk and talk the talk. The new Australian Curriculum now has 'Sustainability' as a 'cross curriculum priority'. To my mind, that implies that teachers should be taking some action towards sustainability in their own lives (demanding, hu?). These days it's totally unacceptable to see a teacher smoking because we value health and want to role model healthy behaviour to our kids, yet we try to teach sustainability while sucking out of a disposable coffee cup, walking by rubbish on the playing field, and printing worksheets by the rheem on virgin white paper. It's no wonder kids are experiencing increased mental health problems (controversial, hu?). In the classroom they are taught about climate change, the problems of non-renewable energy, waste, water and every other anxiety inducing problem we face and then told how wonderful it is to ride a bike, to limit air travel, turn off standbys, grow native gardens. But alas, what do children see around them? Grown ups who do the opposite. We've told the kiddos the world as we know it is ending soon and what do we grown ups do? Go to Bali.

I think my generation was one of the first to be taught about environmental issues at school. I distinctly remember being taught about the difference between renewable and non-renewable energy in about grade 7 (11 or 12 years old). Of course I panicked and went home and told my mum. Did she know about this? We are running out of fuel and the little we have left is stuffing up the atmosphere. Turns out she did know but had to do the grocery shopping right now and did I want to come with her. Yes, I did want to go with her but only if we rode our bikes. No, we couldn't ride because how would we get the groceries home? Well, I was stumped. After a time though, I concluded that the grown ups must have it all worked out because otherwise there would be panic in the streets and there wasn't. Now I am a grown up and I find that the grown ups don't have it worked out. Not even the ones like me who received environmental education as a kid. What are we doing? Well in WA we are mainly FIFOing in the resources sector.

I also hate the way we think that 'pester power' will actually work. Imagine this: traumatized kid comes home from school and tells his family to get solar panels, family can't afford this and are not particularly interested and just tell the child no. Child is left bemused and confused. Kids aren't (well, shouldn't be, in my opinion) the decision makers of the household. Adults are.

Okay, to tone down my rant, of course I believe we should teach sustainability in schools because it is essential to give kids skills and knowledge to help them make decisions and behave in a way that is kind to the earth. But for this to be effective they need to see it all around them in their parents, on telly, by politicians and by CEOs, not just teachers who are ticking a box. So we cannot put all our eggs in the 'education' basket, it's only one teeny tiny prong of the approach we need to take.

I love educating and inspiring adults at work with the Earth Carers program and hearing about the fantastic work that is done by the Living Smart gang. Adults have the world at their fingertips and can make changes immediately. I also love teaching kids about waste and sustainability, that's a part of my job too. I just hope that they are not being let down by adults.