THE WAY IT COULD BE:

A Visit to a Sustainable Society.

23.2.07

Ted Trainer.

Preamble.

It is increasingly obvious that there are fatal flaws in industrial-affluent-consumer society. Most of our problems are getting worse. In all rich countries there is increasing inequality, social breakdown, resource depletion, debt, deterioration of public services and a falling quality of life. We are probably within a few years of a very serious petroleum shortage. Even more importantly, our society is grossly ecologically unsustainable. We are rapidly using up the available resources and damaging the ecosystems of the planet. There is no chance that all the world’s people could have the per capita resource use rates we have in rich countries. Yet we are obsessed with economic growth and raising “living standards”; i.e., with increasing our levels of production and consumption and GNP, constantly and without any limit.

In addition we few who live in rich countries can only have our affluent living standards because of the gross injustice built into the global economy. We are grabbing far more than our fair share of the world's resources and condemning most of the people in the Third World to extreme deprivation.

There is a way out of this alarming and accelerating predicament --- but only if we accept that the problems are generated by some of the fundamental principles of consumer-capitalist society, and therefore that the problems can’t be solved without radical and extreme change. We must move to The Simpler Way. This must involve materially simpler lifestyles, high levels of local economic self-sufficiency, more cooperative and participatory ways, a very different economic system…and some very different values.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of out situation is that it would be so easy to eliminate the problems --- if we were prepared to make these changes.

At first encounter the idea of having to move from our present affluent living standards can seem quite threatening, but this is a misunderstanding. The purpose of this book is to make clear how workable and attractive the alternative could be. We could all live very well on a small fraction of the present amount of work and production and resource use and waste, in pleasant surroundings and in supportive communities, with much time for arts and crafts, or learning or personal development, and knowing that we are no longer causing global problems --- but only if we abandon affluence and growth, and the institutions, systems and values that go with them.

I have given an account of the necessary alternative ways in my The Conserver Society, and more recently a considerably revised account at http://.socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/12b-The-Alt-Sust-Soc-Lng.html

What I have tried to do in The Way It Could Be is to give a much lighter and more readable account, in the fictional form of a visit to a town that functions on alternative lines. My conviction regarding the availability, workability and The Simpler Way comes primarily from the fact that it is the way I have lived my life, in so far as that it possible when one is trapped in consumer-capitalist society. Many of the ways dealt with in this account derive from my own experience of seeking to live frugally and self-sufficiently on a homestead.

There is now a Global Alternative Society Movement in which many small groups are attempting to live in and demonstrate this way. There are now many “eco-villages” in existence around the world. Some are more than 20 years old. However most are rural communities and the most important step to a sustainable world order will be the development of alternative communities and economies within urban situations.

Our greatest problem is the steadfast refusal of the mainstream to address these issues, to even recognise the possibility that consumer-capitalist society is grossly unsustainable and unjust, and that the alarming problems facing us cannot be solved without radical change from the obsession with affluence and growth. What then is the best strategy for us to pursue if we wish to contribute to the transition? I firmly believe that the fate of the planet depends on whether the Global Alternative Society Movement can establish a sufficient number of impressive examples of The Simpler Way in the next two or more decades, so that as mainstream consumer society runs into more serious difficulties people will be able to see that there is a better way. The purpose of this book is to increase the understanding that The Simpler Way would be easily established – if we wanted to do it, that it would more or less eliminate global problems, and that it would bring a much higher quality of life than we have now.

--------

The index lists the location of the topics dealt with throughout the three day account.

The Way It Could Be.

Part 1 of 12.

As a journalist, Mike had come across accounts of alternative settlements and lifestyles

from time to time and although in general he thought well of people who lived that way he

regarded them more or less as fringe dwellers who had opted out of conventional life. He

had never really thought of them as being of much social significance, as in any way pioneering important new ideas and practices. He was

therefore somewhat surprised to receive a letter making the rather bold claim that a tiny town within a

few hours of his city held the key to a sustainable future for the entire planet.

This sounded rather implausible but he could see the possibility of an interesting story.

Occasional discussions with others in his pool eventually led him to suggest the idea to

his editor, but the project was not regarded as being worth the time and effort. He did

say though that if Mike wanted to visit the place taking a few of his holidays and a

useful article came of it, then he would be willing to credit that as work time. This put

Mike off for a while but then office politics intervened.

The Features Department ran at a hectic pace with pressure to churn articles out in competition with tough colleagues, always eager to get the jump on each other in the pursuit of good stories. Then there was the competition for the investigative assignments, the effort to fool the executives higher up to secure privileges, and jockeying for positions likely to become vacant. Mike had been outmanoeuvred for the office he’d had his eyes on getting when Henry left. He was nursing the bruise that gave to his self concept. The office and Henry’s job went to Madeleine, Medusa as Mike called her. He rated himself as pretty good at street fighting – you have to be to survive at his level, but Medusa was in mega-vicious class.

Mike recognised that he had been outsmarted on a number of occasions in the jungle of petty office warfare and felt that he probably deserved his place in the lower ranks of the pecking order. If he’d been better at the in-fighting he'd have more than Henry’s office by now. He could admit to himself that bad feelings were smouldering away; how nice it would be to even some of those scores. He always kept his eye open for chances. But when there’s a mortgage like his to live with you think twice before lashing out, and indeed you bless your stars for having a job with a reasonable income. He knew he was lucky to have some freedom and scope for initiative, like deciding how to approach a story, at least before the sub-editors hacked it into what they regarded as acceptable form. It was a long time since he’d had a break. So the idea of getting out for a few days became more attractive. It wasn’t difficult to convinced Eleanor that the trip was an assignment.

As he set out very early that morning Mike realised that he had been so busy on other tasks that he had done almost no homework on this project and had little idea of what he was going to find. He’d left a pile of unopened mail and folders in his tray. He hadn’t thought of a possible angle, let alone searching questions. What’s more, he was most at home writing about economic affairs and was not at all familiar with anything to do with alternative lifestyles. He decided that he might as well take the relaxed approach – look around at a leisurely pace and chat to a few of the locals, and just treat it mainly as a three day break from the office. He took along a folder of work he’d have to get through if urgent deadlines were going to be met in the week after, neatly tied with a red cord.

The Glen was a tiny town on one of the minor country rail links still functioning. He had arranged to be met at the station. When he found that that only one train stopped there each day his doubts about the entire project rose another notch.

He nearly missed the stop. He was dreaming but with part of his mind on the need to watch for the station signs. The train slowed and he was dimly conscious of dense forest and scrub all around. The train clunked to a stop, apparently in the middle of nowhere. He chanced to look across the aisle and out of the window on the other side, and realised they were standing at a primitive wooden station, and there on a seat was written “The Glen”. After a grab for his bags and a scramble down the aisle he dropped awkwardly to the decking, some way below the level of the train door. He looked around but was the only person on the short platform. A couple of sheds, a small crane at the end of the platform and a patch of bitumen were just about the only signs of human settlement in the middle of what now clearly was dense forest in all directions.

Then he saw two people walking quickly out of the forest and towards the platform. They waved and in a few seconds Mike had descended the ramp to meet them.

“Hi, Mike I guess, I’m Jan and this is Pete.”

“Gerday. Yeah, I’m Mike.”

“Sorry we weren’t here. The train was a bit early.”

“How was the trip?”

“Not bad. Nice to travel by train for a change. I mostly have to drive.”

Jan was maybe in her forties, somewhat tall and thin, and seemed to have an energetic manner, moving quickly and using her hands expressively. Pete was a little older, more stocky, and seemed to have a more slow and relaxed manner.

After a few more words Pete picked up one of Mike’s bags and said, “Well, lets take you down town.” He led off across the patch of bitumen towards the wall of forest. Mike looked around for a car, but couldn’t see one. Within seconds Pete had plunged into the bush, striding along a narrow path. Mike thought, “Down town?” It suddenly struck him how thoroughly unprepared he was, and the fumbled for a way of partly apologising for having no idea of what he was getting involved in, and partly trying to elicit some clues without appearing to be too incompetent.

“I have to confess that I really have little idea what to expect.”

“Good.” said Pete. “Best if it can be a discovery adventure for you.”

After no more than three minutes they were coming out of the forest, as if through a curtain, and there about three hundred metres ahead, down the slope, was the edge of a settlement of some kind. All he could see were some house roofs above and between the tree tops. Pete walked a few metres more and stopped.

“Welcome to The Glen,” he said, spreading his arms as if performing to a fanfare. “Our place is only another three hundred metres or so over there, but this is a good spot to explain a bit about the geography. We’ve just come through what we call The Wall. Most of that forest was planted twenty years ago, to screen us off from the railway. Twenty years ago you could see the whole town from here. Mind you twenty years ago there were a lot more trains thundering through all day than there are now.”

“Twenty years ago you could see the town dying you mean,” Jan said. “It was a typical tiny and struggling country town. From here you could see all the streets and just about all the houses, because the streets were pretty bare. Can you make out how those house roofs there form a line, well they were along a street. Our house is on that line, but you won’t see a street there now, just a path with a lot of green. We dug up the road and planted most of it…

“...and put in fish ponds and woodlots and swings and the odd windmill. Lets go on,” Pete said, picking up the bag again. After a few more minutes on the path they turned sharply through a gate in a hedge and seemed to be walking through someone’s garden, then through another gate into a thicket, around a bend the other way and out of the low hanging overhead foliage onto a small pasture surrounded by trees, again with a few house roofs visible. They could now hear sounds of settlement; chickens somewhere close, people talking from time to time, someone hammering. An engine started up some way off, and then a cow could be heard. Mike thought of traffic and realised he couldn’t hear any, although they were now only a few metres from the closest houses.

Soon another gate, this one with a low dense vine above, making Mike bend to pass thorough. As he straightened up he found himself in a neat and compact domestic garden, with a house veranda up a few steps some metres to the left.

“Here we are,” said Jan. “This is base camp. This is our patch. This is where you’ll be staying.” Mike was caught off balance; he’d thought a room had been booked for him at a hotel. Well, boarding would be alright, as long as he was left to his own devices most of the time.

They mounted the steps. “Take a seat and I’ll put the kettle on.” Jan directed Mike to a rocking chair. Mike put his bag down, turned and lowered himself into the chair, gave it a little rock to get the feel, then looked up. He was surprised to find sloping away before him an extensive landscape, with long views across clumps of trees, fields, houses, stretches of water, to thickly forested hills not far away. Immediately in front of him was a cottage garden beside the patch of lawn they had come across. He hadn't seen the pond, or beyond that a low ornamental fence bordering a vegetable garden, then a chicken pen, then orange trees and a high bamboo clump arching from the left . A little further off to the right a thick cluster of very tall eucalypts jutted into the sky. In the middle distance were fields, a large lake and two windmills. Dotted throughout were several house roofs almost obscured by the dense clumps of foliage. Mike felt he could spend hours zooming into parts of the complex panorama to examine what was in each little section.

“Look at this,” Pete broke in, as came from the house holding a photograph. He gave Mike a few seconds to get confused, then said, “This is what it looked like twenty years ago, from right here. See the edge of the old fence over there, that was this bit of fence in the edge of the picture.”

“But, there's a town there,” said Mike, looking up from the picture.

“Still there,” Said Pete, “Just buried in the trees now. See that's the tip of Madison's house roof, over there, see just to the right of the oranges. And see how those houses are in a line, along the street, well, when we go for a walk there soon you will see they are still in that line, but not on a street; we got rid of that.”

“Got rid of it; what do you mean?”

“Just dug it up and planted it, left a wide cycle path wandering along but mostly that area is a sort of cross between a park, a forest and a farm now. Still all public property though.”

“Well, well,” muttered Mike, jiggling the rocking chair around so he could face straight down the view, and looking up at it and down to the photo again and again. “You'd never know. And the town in the photo looks so bare, you can see road surface over there, but it’s like a jungle there now.”

“Yep. We sure jungled Elm St. Fancy calling that strip of grey dirt Elm St in the first place. No elms there then, but see that crown there, that's a Pecan, and I planted him, about eighteen years ago now. He's one of my children you know. There are probably another fifty of mine out there we could see from our roof.”

“It sure is a nice landscape,” Mike said.

“Yes, but that's only half the story. It is also a very productive landscape --- we say 'edible landscape'. Nearly all the green you can see belongs to a tree or a shrub producing something useful, mostly fruit, nuts or timber. And just about all of it is public, I mean it’s planted on what were roads or parks and those areas are now growing things for the community to use or enjoy.”

“..and fish,” said Jan who appeared with a tray carrying a pot, teacups and biscuits.

“Fish?”

“Yes, there are lots of fish out there too.”

“In the ponds,” said Pete, “…nibbling the feet of all the ducks and geese out there. You can see the edge of the big pond down there, but you’ll find many more smaller ones in among the trees. Parallel to Elm St, about where the back fences were there’s a shallow natural water drainage line. It used to rot the wooden fence posts out. Now it’s been turned into a chain of ponds along a creek. Most of them have fish in them. Some have islands for particular types of bamboo. Some bamboos will run everywhere and become a pest, so we confine them on little islands. But others, the clumpers, don't need that. See that big one arching from the left just down there. He's a clumper. We get building materials from that one, and things like our tomato stakes from the smaller ones.

“That's where our dinner comes from,” said Jan, waving at the view. “Just about everything we eat comes from that scene in front of you. We have to import a few things, but I'd say 95% of what we eat comes from land you can see from our roof top. Mostly vegetables and fruit, but there is also poultry, fish and rabbits for the meat eaters. Can’t see the dairy from here but it ‘s about a kilometre away.”

“And there’s a lot of manufacturing industry out there too. You’ll see when we go for a walk. Many little firms and industries throbbing away. Many people work from home here, or in small firms that are around the corner from where they live.”

“Ah, that will be interesting,” said Mike. “I’m interested in your economy. I do features, investigative stuff, but mostly on economic themes.”

They heard the door at the front of the house open. “That’ll be Gran,” said Jan. And within a few seconds an elderly lady came into the kitchen adjacent to the veranda, wearing an apron and loaded down with baskets and bags. She was almost tiny, a little stooped and wearing thick glasses, but moved quickly.

“Gran, here’s Mike.”

“Hello Michael. Nice to meet you. Are they looking after you?”

Pete Said, “Gran is the world’s best dinner baker…”

“…and knitter and herb gardener,” Jan cut in. “This jumper is one of her art works.” Then, looking at the bags, “Gran what on earth have you got there?” .

“It’s all from Mary, you know the story. I only pop in to say hello and now it’ll take me an hour just to plant the cuttings, let alone put away all this other treasure. Look at this a bottle of marmalade. She says it’s a new recipe.”

“By the way,” said Jan, “Where’s Amy?”

“No idea. Said she’d be home for tea. I think she and the Smith twins were going up to the lookout on their bikes.”

“Did she take a jumper? It’ll be cool this evening.”

“Don’t know, she can always borrow something from somewhere.”

Pete turned to Mike. “Amy is our nine year old. Occasionally she comes back to visit us. Spends most of her time in somebody else’s house.”

Jan said, “That evens out when she brings her friends back to camp here without any warning. That’s when you send out the distress call to May for emergency egg delivery, or to Tommy for loaves of bread. She knows Mike will be here, so she’ll be back sometime. You know what she said? ‘I’m very interested in aliens’. I hope that’s not too offensive Mike.”

“Actually”, said Pete, “I should explain. In this town we feel such a huge gulf between mainstream people and us. It’s an uneasy, maybe a confused relation. We really are a friendly easy-to-get-on-with lot, but we so strongly dissent from the mainstream ways, that I have to say there is a strand of resentment there. Let’s face it, we think we’re on the right track, and the mainstream isn’t. And it’s important you know. It’s actually a matter of saving the planet. So there is a tension in how we connect with visitors from a very different situation. Amy puts it in terms of visitors being aliens.”

Mike was not sure on how to respond. He didn’t recall any reference to this in any of the correspondence he’d seen before setting out. He just nodded.

There was a lull and Jan said “Let’s get back to our landscape. Do you realise that we’ve crossed two farms to get here?”

“Well it did look like a farm when we came out of the trees, but surely that place was too small to be a farm.” Mike said.

“Yes that was the Wilson’s farm, made up of three old house blocks, and that’s a common farm area around here.”

“Even including the homestead!” Pete added.

“You see many people here grow lots of things around their houses, for their own use, but also to sell. Often the quantities are very small. But they are really mixed farms. They are parts of this neighbourhood’s agricultural system. The Wilson’s actually have two cows, but they don’t feed them just on their land. They tether them around the neighbourhood much of the time. Mol and Mim supply several houses here with their milk and butter and cheese. Dairy products are one of the Wilson's sources of income but it’s a very mixed farm and they also produce vegetables, flowers, poultry, herbs, honey, and fruit.”

“We have much bigger farms in the area, but they grade down to the point where you would say they are just home gardens which might sell the odd bunch of surplus carrots now and then. Most families have backyard gardens where they produce much of their own food and they sell or swap what they don’t use.”

Pete came in, “...or give it away. You’ll see surplus stuff down at the neighbourhood workshop later, just there for anyone to take.”

“And Harry Wilson is a good wood turner, and Meg knits. They sell some of that too from time to time at the weekly market. I’d say they probably derive their cash income from about twenty products.”

“Hold on,” Mike had to say. “Back up! How did you get this landscape. How did you end up with mini-farms, right in the middle of what used to be a normal town?”

“Well the farms and gardens and these woodlots and ponds have just been put on land that was backyards, or parks, or wasteland, or land beside the railway line. And then there is the space that was unused at the back of the hospital, and all the nature strips even where roads were left, and of course then there were all the roads we dug up. Did you know that in a normal city roads and cars and parking lots take up more than one-third of the space. Convert some of that to fruit and nut trees and you’re off to a good start.”

A knock at the front door. “Who’s that?” Jan said to herself, as she left the room. She came back accompanied by a somewhat short and slight older man in scruffy overalls and a battered straw hat, wearing glasses and carrying a large basket.

“Mike meet Barry. He’s just brought us some eggs.”

“Hello,” said Barry. “Have Jan and Pete run you off your feet yet?”

“Not really, only just arrived.”

“I’m sure they’ll wear you out fast.”

“Can we have a dozen Barry?” Jan said. “I think that will do. Oh, I should check; Mike do you like eggs?”

“Yes.”

“Our hens more or less keep us in eggs for most of the year, but when we have someone else in the house, we need to get more in. These are from the Wilson’s. I could’ve got some from the co-op, but May said Barry could drop some off. Do you have some for others Barry?”

“Yes, May’s got me running errands all over the place, I’ve still got three lots to drop off.”

He was such a quiet and timid looking man, Mike thought, and he couldn’t classify him at all confidently. He was well spoken and seemed slow, but maybe it was just his retiring nature. He smiled a lot. Mike’s best bet was that he was a timid old grandpa and made himself useful doing odd jobs when asked, such as delivering eggs. After a few more words with Jan, he said “Cheerio” to Mike, predicting that their paths would cross again before long.

Jan called after him, “Tell May to debit me a dozen in case I forget.”

Pete explained, “That means record us as owing for the eggs. May tells the accounts office who owes what to whom, and later we all send in our debts and credits. Someone types them in and at the end of the month a computer sends us a statement. You more or less try to keep your trading account around zero over time. If you find you’re in debt at the end of the month, you make a note to supply a little more to people than you get for a while. It’s a cashless exchange system.”

“What do you trade?”

“More or less anything you want to sell and anyone wants to buy. Mostly produce from home gardens and crafts, but also things like piano lessons.”

“What if someone runs up a big debt and can’t sell enough?” said Mike.

“You could just write a money cheque, or better still opt to work it off on some community project. You can pay some of your rates or electricity bills by work time inputs, for instance, on the teams that maintain the windmills or the power lines”.

“Can I get back to the mini farms?” said Mike. “I write on economics you know and farms that small can’t possibly be viable. They must be too small to use tractors even.”

“Yes, many of them are. But our farms don’t use much machinery. Certainly nothing large. Some rotary hoes are used, and the local farm cooperative has two very small tractors the commercial farmers hire when they need one. You see much of our produce comes from home gardeners and from permanent trees and shrubs. Very little ploughing and digging gets done. Most of the food producing around here is done by hand, because most of our farmers are more like home gardeners. Did you know that the home gardener is by far the most efficient food producer of all?”

“No. That’s not possible!” Mike replied. “These days only the biggest farms can survive. They’re the most productive, and that’s why they drive out all the little ones.”

Gran had been sitting quietly in a chair in the corner and had taken up some knitting. At this point she suddenly said, “Not at all. Yes they get large yields, but only by using huge amounts of fuel energy, and water and pesticides and fertilizers. Home gardeners don’t have to use any of those inputs. And home gardeners improve the soil, whereas agribusiness damages it. Agribusiness cannot return soil nutrients to the soil. All our scraps and animal waste go back into our soil. That’s not possible when food is transported long distances. Do you know how far the average bit of food in the US is traveling now? “

“No.”

“One to two thousand kilometres! “

“Well that must be the most economic thing to do. If it was cheaper to produce locally that’s what they’d do.”

It was Jan’s turn. “No. Whether you measure crop output in dollar or energy terms the home gardener produces food at far lower cost.”

“Nonsense!” said Mike. “Farming is done by agribusiness now, because big and mechanised and computerised is most efficient. They wouldn’t have got to the top otherwise.”

“But that’s because you only judge in terms of corporate profitability. It can take agribusiness ten times as much energy as there is in the crop to grow it, but we grow perfect food without any energy cost.”

Gran’s turn. “Well we do use energy, but it’s only in the form of porridge.”

“What?” said Mike.

“She means our gardeners are fuelled by breakfast. Our farms mostly use only human energy, hand tools. They don’t require imports of petroleum from the other side of the world, which could be cut at any moment by wars or price hikes. “

“But you can’t beat supermarket prices. The corporations are big and they dominate the market because they are cheapest.”

“No.” said Gran. “Our bottled tomatoes are cheaper. We have costed it out.”

“Including labour?”

“Yes, but that should be accounted as a benefit not a cost, because we love gardening.”

“And that is not taking into account many factors like the energy and pesticides and fertilizers we don’t have to use to produce our tomatoes.”

“Nor the energy cost of trucking them to and from the supermarket,” Pete said. “Nor the energy to light and clean the supermarket.”

“And then there are the intangible things like the sensation of cooking with and eating vegies you produced yourself. That’s nice, apart from the freshness and the fact that you know they have no pesticides in them.”

“And above all a home grown tomato has a far better taste than the plastic ones you have to buy from the supermarkets.”

Mike was getting a little annoyed. “No. No. If you could beat agribusiness the supermarkets would buy from you.”

“Oh, no, there are many reasons why they prefer to buy from agribusiness. They can buy 100 tonnes in one order, from a crop genetically designed to all ripen at the same time. They’re not going to buy from 10,000 little gardeners like us are they?”

“And think about that uniformity in the crop; that’s bad. In biology preserving diversity is important. We are losing thousands of varieties because agribusiness wants to grow only the very few that maximise their profits. They get all the tomatoes to ripen on the same day, but the last thing a home gardener wants is for all the tomatoes to ripen at once. We want to be able to duck out for one or two a day for a month from the same vines.”

“And the food from the home gardener, or the small local market gardener, is of much higher quality than what you get from the supermarket. That’s been stored and it’s full of preservatives and pesticides.”

“And of course agribusiness grows only those varieties that look good and are big, and last a long time on the shelf, and are tough enough to be packaged and transported. They don’t develop the varieties that are most nutritious and tasty, or least dependent on pesticides and fertilizer and water.”

“And our food is very fresh. We can eat carrots here a few minutes after they were growing in the ground.”

“And that in turn means we have few fridges here, and little packaging. We don’t have to store food for long before its used. The vegetables in your supermarket have probably been dead for weeks, oozing out vitamins all the time. For example, if we have roast chicken for tea, that rooster could have still been strutting around at afternoon tea time.”

“And there is one very important thing we haven’t mentioned yet,” said Gran. “Small farms give a very satisfying livelihood to many little people who just love small farming. The economy you have come from couldn’t care less about them. It just strips them off their land and into unemployment, because it allows some giant corporation to take their business and livelihood.”

Mike felt somewhat overwhelmed, having been unable to get a word in, and was not convinced, but decided to let the issue go for a while at least. “I like the greenhouses, up against the house walls here and there. They’d be nice to wander into on a cold day.”

Pete said, “Yes they are. But greenhouses are also used to warm our houses…”

“How do they do that?”

“Oh just by ducting the warm air from the greenhouse into the main house, sometimes with a small fan, but mostly by the normal tendency for the warm air to rise.”

“Sorry, I cut you off. What were you going to say, about other things they do?”

“Our greenhouses are also fish farms, house air coolers in summer, and hen houses.”

“You’d better explain. How can a greenhouse be a fish farm and a hen house?”

Jan jumped to her feet. “Come on. Best way is to have a look. That’s Amanda’s place next door. She won’t mind us popping in to her greenhouse. Be back soon Gran. “

Within two minutes Jan was opening the glass door into a cavernous jungle of green, with hardly enough space for a person to walk down the narrow little path between shelves packed with pots, plants and containers..

“See,” said Jan pointing, “…down at the end, those are small water tanks . They produce pond plants, and fish. See in the bigger one at the back, they’re Tilapia. Amanda cemented a glass sheet in the front so the kids could see them swimming. You can raise a lot of fish in small tanks. And see here, this is where the hens roost in the corner of the greenhouse, behind a wire screen that keeps them away from the plants. The greenhouse helps to warm them in winter and they help to warm it., They get in at night through the opening there, from their run outside. Their breathing throughout the night and their droppings add carbon to the atmosphere. That increases plant growth.”

Pete elaborated. “That’s an example of how we get things to overlap. I mean we try to put things together so that the needs of one are met by something the other does naturally. In this case the hens get warm automatically in the greenhouse while they provide carbon dioxide to it. Meanwhile they also provide eggs, meat, feathers, and manure for the gardens.”

“Yes, that’s really important,” Jan said. “That’s an essential Permaculture principle. You always try to design your systems so that any one thing is performing many functions, and benefiting in several ways from other things in the system. For example ducks provide eggs, but they also provide feathers for insulating clothing and making pillows, and they produce ducklings...”

“And they’re a great source of entertainment! “ Pete said. “They’re comical and self-important, and bunglers, and clumsy. Being able to watch them now and then is part of my leisure and entertainment world. And the ducks benefit from other aspects of the system. For example the gardens sometimes have pests like slugs, and the ducks like eating snails and slugs. Many things in a well designed system perform functions automatically for each other, whereas in conventional agriculture you would buy energy-intensive products to kill the snails, and energy-intensive food for the ducks.”

“And anyway the snails would be on one farm that was growing nothing but lettuces while the ducks were on another farm miles away...”

“...eating food trucked in, rather than finding their own snails. In fact they wouldn’t even touch the ground let alone be scrabbling through lettuces. Did you know that in factory farms hens are kept all their lives in a cage that legally has to be no bigger than and A4 sheet of paper?”

Pete didn’t wait for an answer. “And of course the water in the fish tanks in the greenhouse is a great heat store. The sunlight warms up the water in the day time and it keeps the greenhouse warm overnight. No fuel is burnt to keep it warm.”

“We have three little fish farms in this neighbourhood. Many people have a small number of fish in some tanks around the house, but we have three families whose main source of income is fish grown in their tanks, or in community ponds that they’ve leased. Come and look.”

Pete led the way out of the greenhouse, and pointed into the middle distance. “See that water down there, about 200 metres away. That’s the Smith Street lake, although it’s really only a shallow pond excavated where two roads used to cross. We dug it. Took the earth to make two houses and some animal sheds. One fish farmer has the lease on that while it’s used by all of us for recreation. I mean the kids can paddle their canoes, at the same time it is growing bigger fish that Bob Simmons will net some day and sell.”

“What do the fish eat?”

“At the domestic level their food’s mostly household scraps, but farm wastes can go in. With small ponds you have to change the water from time to time, so that’s a great source of nutrients for the garden. Some things are specially grown to feed them, like worms, but mostly they just feed on the critters growing in the pond. See all the thick reeds and rushes around the edge. The pont’s also part of the drainage system for the neighbourhood so nutrients are coming in all the time. In other words the lake catches nutrients that would be wasted in run off and enables them to be recycled through food.”

“Again you can see the interlocking functions. Our worm farms obviously contribute to soil enrichment and recycling of food wastes, but some worms also go into fish feed. All food scraps end up back in the soils or ponds, but on the way it makes sense if they can be food for animals. The nutrients are actually improved for the soil if they go through an animal, rather than straight into the compost heap.”

Pete suddenly said, “Hey I forgot to explain how the greenhouse cools the main house in summer. See back there, on the top, that vent allows warm air flow out through the roof and another there low down opening into the greenhouse from the house. As the hot air flows out of the greenhouse it draws air from the house via the low vent, and that draws cool air into the house from a fernery at the back of the house.”

“Let’s go for a ramble,” said Jan.

“I should be writing a few things down,” said Mike. “ Can you wait till I go in and get my pad?”

When he returned Jan led off. After walking for a few seconds they came onto a broad cement footpath.

“This is one of the original footpaths. It was beside the road, which you can see used to be here. The footpath is now a cycle way. They run all over the neighbourhood. This one’s been widened a bit, so in an emergency a fire truck or an ambulance could get along here, to access these houses that are not on a road now.”

“In general we left the path on the southern side, when we dug up