‘To me it seems archaic to be delivering power to millions of houses when each house is touching the power of the sun.’
—Michael Reynolds, architect and inventor of Earthship Biotecture
‘We desire to liberate ourselves from the cruder forms of exploitation; the plunder of the planet, the slavery of man and beast, the slaughter of men in war, and animals for food.’
—Helen and Scott Nearing, The Good Life
‘Happiness then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient.’
—Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Kate Hall is tipping the ends of green beans and the insides of a capsicum into the biscuit tin she keeps on her kitchen bench. ‘It’s for the compost,’1 she explains, brutally dispatching broccoli stalks to the same end.
‘You could eat those, you know,’ I say, just to push her buttons. I am not one to talk—we do not compost (about a third of Australians do; another third are ‘compost aspirers’2). Admitting that in these pages feels shameful, like confessing to a McDonald’s habit or voting for Tony Abbott. I do not tell Kate Hall. She is twenty-one and newly married, her whole life ahead of her to be disappointed. She still thinks the world is a good place.
‘We tried,’ she says. ‘It was ruining all our meals. I hate broccoli stalks.’ Compost loves green veggies, grass clippings, leaf matter. ‘You can put old newspapers in there, not too many, but a few is fine.’ Vegetable matter is broken down by aerobic bacteria using oxygen, so a healthy, airy compost heap doesn’t smell bad. Not unless you contaminate it with the wrong sort of rubbish. Meat, for example, produces a different sort of bacteria: anaerobic. Those bacteria heat up and stink as they do their rotting work, attracting rats and other scavengers, and breeding flies along the way. The healthiest compost is basically vegan.
Hall, a sustainable-lifestyle blogger, spreads it on her rose garden and tomato plants, but it’s her musician husband Tim (she sings, they met while playing a gig) who really gets excited about the compost. ‘He’s into growing competitive pumpkins. He got the seeds from this guy who grows the biggest pumpkins in New Zealand.’
I’m visiting the Halls to try to figure out how young sustainably minded folks live in cities, integrating the green lifestyle movement into their ordinary lives, without making the sorts of drastic changes (building THOWs, giving up takeaway) that the mainstream finds alienating. From what I can see, it’s entirely possible to ‘be the change’ by increments, and to be pragmatic about it too. Hall admits she’s still learning and often changes her eco routines and ideas.
The couple shares a house in a beachside suburb of Auckland with two flatmates. It’s a challenge getting the flatties to fully commit to Kate’s war-on-waste kitchen rules, she says, but she keeps trying. One of them has a plastic bag habit. ‘She’s awesome,’ says Hall, ‘but I just, I mean … ’ She flings open the pantry door and shows me a fabric tube, the likes of which I haven’t seen for sale in twenty years, designed to store plastic bags. It’s full. Her expression says: how hard is it to take a cloth bag? It can’t be as hard as being the enforcer.
‘We’ve given up bin liners,’ she says, inviting me to inspect her kitchen waste baskets. There are three, in addition to her compost tub. The smallest, the sin bin, is marked ‘Landfill’. All that’s in it is a clump of dust from the vacuum cleaner and one of those bewildering juice-absorbing cushions from a packet of organic chicken breasts. The bin marked ‘recycling’ contains a wine bottle, a milk carton and a few bits of cardboard.
‘Soft Plastics’ is for the plastic packaging she hasn’t yet managed to edit out of her life: post satchels, cheese wrappers. Tim likes sliced bread and the odd bar of commercially produced chocolate. The plastic packets go in here, and when the bin is full, Hall takes it to the Love NZ Soft Plastics Scheme bin at the mall. As in Australia, where REDcycle runs a similar initiative, this plastic is used to manufacture playground furniture, bollards and speed humps.
‘I haven’t worked out how to make candy for Tim,’ says Hall, ‘yet.’ She is trying to tackle one thing at a time to avoid the overwhelm. An early win came from making her own muesli from nuts and grains from the bulk-goods store; she toasts it at home with honey and oil. I have eaten this muesli—it’s fantastic, much nicer than the overly sugared junk you can buy in the supermarket.
The Halls are not technically zero-waste, but they aspire to it. They’ve switched to bamboo toothbrushes and use shampoo bars wrapped in recyclable paper. Hall has given up tampons in favour of a menstrual cup, which she insists is ‘convenient and not gross at all’ and something called Hannahpads. (When I get home, I look this up and discover it’s a weird brand of floral cloth sanitary napkin made in Korea and designed to be washed and reused. I seriously consider buying a packet. Could I become Hannahpad Woman?)
Hall makes waxed food wraps out of old pillowcases (Tim’s has a Star Wars logo print). They’ve carried reusable water bottles ‘since forever’ and think people who don’t have a KeepCup are ‘super old-fashioned’. Tim works in events marketing for a hipster burger joint that is big on healthy ingredients and uses eco-friendly packaging but has yet to solve the straws problem. When the Halls go out for drinks, they both happily lecture the bar staff on the evils of plastic. ‘You have to say why,’ says Kate. ‘Otherwise they just think you’re a freak who hates straws.’
‘But you are a freak who hates straws.’
‘Ha ha, but we hate them for environmental reasons. You have to explain yourself to change minds.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Sometimes.’
She feels confident holding forth on plastic, less so on meat. ‘People do ask, “How can you be sustainable if you’re not vegan?” but I’m not perfect,’ says Hall. ‘I’m just learning about all this. I’m doing my best. For now, I feel like, I grew up eating meat and I think I’m okay with it as long as the animals have been treated right.’ She has coeliac disease; there are enough foods she can’t eat, and New Zealand, she points out, is a farming country. Her father is a vet.
Her cockatiel Zugda whistles as if to agree. He hops on the workbench and starts to peck at a stray bean stalk. Zugda?
‘It means policeman in Mongolian. I’ve had him for ten years.’
Hall acquired Zugda when she moved back to Auckland from Ulaanbaatar, where her father worked for two years as a vet. Hall was ten when she arrived in the Mongolian capital, with her older brother, younger sister and their mother, who is a speech therapist. ‘I didn’t even know it was a country until Dad was like, “Right family, we’re moving to Mongolia.” He went off for a month to check it out then came back, and was all, “Let’s do this.” Mum hates flying; she is so scared of it, I’m surprised she agreed.’ It was the best thing they ever did, says Hall. ‘I don’t think my brother and sister felt that way, but I loved it. I still miss it.’ Life in Ulaanbaatar taught her at a young, impressionable age that ‘after a certain point, when you don’t have to worry about food and shelter, money has nothing to do with happiness.’
When I ask her to describe the happiest day of her life, she describes the time she spent with a Mongolian girl of her own age who couldn’t speak English, while their parents tended to some sick goats. ‘We had to entertain each other. I don’t know for how long—it felt like hours—and we communicated through sign language and play, pointing and having fun. It stuck with me. I think that was when I felt most alive.’ Then she laughs, and says, ‘Oh and my wedding day, obviously. That was pretty cool. Dad grew the sunflowers for my bouquet, and as I was walking down the aisle I saw there was a caterpillar hanging out on one of them.’ It was a makeshift aisle, not a flouncy, flower-decked church one; really more of a path. The Halls got married in a park and ran their own ceremony, only allowing the celebrant to step in for the bit required by law.
Hall says her Mongolian years ‘were the exact opposite to our life in New Zealand in so many ways. Even going to the shop or for a walk was a challenge and maybe an adventure. I remember a bus trip to the Russian border sleeping in tents, and Dad doing surgery on a reindeer. [In the city] from our kitchen window, we could see a ger district—you know, yurts? And people were still living so traditionally in their tents; there was still horse-and-cart transport. We had this friend who was a homeless man with one leg. We would hang out with him. It made me assess all the ways I live my life because there are so many other ways you can do it.’
‘But you were only a kid,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it possible that you didn’t think that then? That you only put that spin on it in hindsight?’
‘It’s possible, but I don’t think it matters really, do you?’
The next time Hall had a ‘What the?’ moment was on her honeymoon. They’d been travelling in South-East Asia then took a South Pacific cruise. It was meant to be a luxury treat, and while Hall is quick to say that it was and that Tim was being so sweet and they had fun drinking cocktails and watching shows and swimming in all three of the on-deck pool options, the excess of the set-up freaked her out. ‘It was ten storeys of people taking advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet.’ Watching the ship staff clear the plates, she realised ‘this is not a compost situation. I’ve heard sometimes waste from ships gets offloaded into the ocean; I don’t know if it does or not, but it made me question everything. Even carbon emissions. I tried to think, Would it be worse if all those thousands of people took separate holidays? Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the ship is more efficient. I’m not an expert; I just knew the waste made me feel uncomfortable, and the greed. The whole thing was so greedy.’
Hall was raised to get two cups out of every tea bag. ‘[On the cruise] there were people piling everything on their plates at breakfast: pancakes, cream and yoghurt and berries and fruit and bacon and eggs and pastries. And it was 24/7 pizza land! All the cocktails came with straws. There was no off-switch.’ Nothing the humans could not consume—they only had to ask, any time of day or night. Hall came home determined to live as sustainably as possible, and to talk about it to anyone who’d listen. She says most of her friends either feel the same or are getting there. ‘My generation doesn’t look at waste and resources the way yours does,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You’re right,’ I tell her.
Hall is optimistic that the world is changing, and she’s busy doing her bit. She shares her hints, tips and discoveries on social media, and blogs as Ethically Kate. ‘If I want to make a difference, I have to share my experiences, even when I get it wrong,’ she says. ‘It’s a process.’
Yurts (or gers—the words describe tents with slightly different roof shapes, but have become interchangeable) are traditional Mongolian tent dwellings with domed roofs, made from wooden poles and lattice, with a wool-insulated canvas outer. Typically, they’re about 2 metres high, have a hole in the top for a chimney and are home to between five and fifteen people. The bigger ones are usually divided into smaller spaces inside, sometimes with a loft platform, and the circular shape is practical—it helps them withstand the strong winds that blow on the Central Asian grasslands and mountain slopes, where for thousands of years Mongolia’s nomads have regularly packed up their homes and transported them by horse, yak or camel to graze their herds and follow trade routes. There is something romantic about these tents. Kings and warriors lived in yurts—Genghis Khan ruled from one—and the crafts of carving and sewing them have been passed down through generations. In a modern city, however, yurts spell hardship.
The ger district Kate Hall could see from her kitchen window is an informal settlement on the edges of Mongolia’s capital. After the revolution of 1990 started the process of ending Communist rule, shepherds began to migrate there in large numbers, lured by the empty promise of economic empowerment; unemployment in Ulaanbaatar’s ger district is around ten times the national average. Most tent dwellings are not connected to the municipal water, sewerage or power supplies, which is a problem when they’re crammed into small spaces. They burn coal or whatever else they can find to keep warm, contributing to the city’s chronic pollution problem.
Tenting it on a secluded New Zealand hillside with its own wells, solar panels and back-up generator couldn’t be more different. Lucy Aitken Read lives the good yurt life with her husband Tim, their daughters Ramona, seven, and Juno, four, and dog Zoe. I found them on the internet, where Aitken Read shares video diaries on her YouTube channel, Lulastic and the Hippyshake. These have titles like ‘How to eat a stinging nettle’, and ‘Are we a feral family?’ and show her kids joyfully playing in their mud kitchen or harvesting pumpkins they’ve grown themselves. The videos make you yearn for a simpler life, until Aitken Read comes out with something that stops you short—that she collects her menstrual blood in a vintage teapot and uses it to fertilise her flowers, for example—and you think, Hang on a minute; these people are completely bananas. Their kids don’t go to school. Aitken Read hasn’t washed her hair with shampoo since 2012. She didn’t flinch when a strange woman (me) emailed out of the blue and asked to visit. ‘We have the river, hiking, waterfalls all just at our fence line.’ I was welcome to stay the night, she replied (there’s a second, smaller yurt on the property for guests).
I’m approaching the mountain, and the green gets louder until the tarmac, now a thin grey vibration, is all but drowned out. The forest rises steeply to my left while, down the hill, the river (which in the late nineteenth century was so polluted from goldmining that the government declared it a ‘sludge channel’) runs clear. Serenity, finally. It’s been a white-knuckle ride; I’ve spent the last hour being bullied by speeding trucks on the freeway. I unstick my palms from the steering wheel and, for the first time, give some proper thought to what I’m doing … which is? I’m not even sure. I don’t know these people from Adam, and my experience of self-sufficient living stops with watching 1970s sitcom The Good Life.
In the first episode, ‘Plough Your Own Furrow’, Tom (Richard Briers) turns forty, flips out that he’s ‘a grotty little cog in a whacking great machine’ and quits his job designing plastic toys. ‘It’s quality of life, that’s what I’m after,’ he tells his wife Barbara (Felicity Kendal), so they surrender their telephone, buy a goat, cry off the acquisition of ‘things’ in general, and turn their suburban garden into an allotment—much to the horror of their snooty neighbours. I seem to remember an episode about generating power from poop.
The concept of obtaining ‘the good life’ via a green thumb, embracing voluntary simplicity and unshackling oneself from reliance on corporations or government-run utilities was popular in the ’70s. The back-to-the-land movement was growing in response to the pressures of consumerism and the feeling that the ’60s revolution hadn’t quite delivered on its promise. Young renegades were picking up dusty old copies of Scott and Helen Nearing’s 1954 book Living the Good Life: How to live simply and sanely in a troubled world and retreating in search of rural idylls.
In 1970 another American couple, John and Jane Shuttleworth, founded Mother Earth News out of Ohio, providing much-referenced DIY info on off-grid living and alternative energy, while in the United Kingdom, John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency did a similar job. (The Good Life writers were inspired by Seymour.) On the fringes, there were the communes where everything was shared, including, perhaps, lovers; but mostly the self-sufficient ’70s were more Tom and Barbara than anything else. Part-time practitioners stayed put and dabbled. They grew a few tomato plants and swore by the vegetarian recipes in The Moosewood Cookbook.
Today in America, the off-grid scene is thriving among doomsday preppers, but in New Zealand, as in Australia and the United Kingdom, the resurgent movement is gentler. It’s mostly tree changers—families and couples looking to reconnect with Nature. Escape to the country. Keep chickens.
Nevertheless, it crosses my mind that Lulastic might be a cult, that on arrival I will be asked to surrender my possessions and prepare lentils in the nud. They had a camp here the other day, where scores of off-grid, homeschooled families from across New Zealand came together. Perhaps they formed sacred feminine moon circles and chanted (Aitken Read has written a book about this: ‘By meeting together on a New Moon we are reclaiming our power as women.’) I haven’t been able to find out much about her husband. They’re not vegetarian, that I know. They might boil me in a pot over their Bunsen burner or whatever it is they cook dinner on.
Nah. They would have an oven. ‘Off-grid’ simply means you’re not connected to a utility power source and instead generate your own electricity. Create more than you need, and you can feed it back into ‘the grid’ to make a profit. Plenty of people do just that by installing solar panels on their roofs in Australia. But the 2014 Canadian documentary Life Off Grid shows how those who are self-sufficient with their energy may ditch other grids too: municipal water, sewerage, garbage collection, phone lines, even wi-fi. If you live in a remote place, it is sometimes the only way, but others are motivated by their values. Rediscovering practical domestic skills like sewing and mending is common, and off-gridders become ‘handy’ by necessity, learning to fix and tinker with machines and systems. Many rear animals and grow at least part of what they eat. Some build their own houses, like Amanda Chapman with her THOW, or those inspired by cult hero Michael Reynolds to build an Earthship.
In 1972, Reynolds used bricks made from old beer cans wired together to build his first house made from recycled materials in Taos, New Mexico. He went on to pioneer the use of other reclaimed materials, notably earth-rammed tyres, to design houses that act more like machines than simple shelters, to maximise natural heating and cooling, and capture and recycle water. His architecture recasts waste as a resource, not just by material use, but through the functionality of the buildings themselves—with grey water systems, for example, that collect rain, pipe it to showers, then reuse it to water plants. Reynolds compares on-grid living to a human being linked up to life support in a hospital. He is the off-grid philosopher, encouraging all of us to change, even if we’ve no intention of moving house. ‘The way we’ve been living is over,’ he says.3 ‘Our rules and regulations are about things that aren’t pertinent any more—stick frame houses that you pump heat into, endless amounts of energy and water, wasteful methods of living.’ That first house he built? The one with the cans. It was round. He was inspired by the traditional Navajo hogan, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a yurt.
I get lost of course—dead ends, dirt roads, no phone signal. Then I spy a painted sign nailed to the fence: ‘tribe offgrid.’ Bump past a few other properties—each house in this valley is off-grid—and an arrow leads me to the yurts. I gladly ditch my wheels and hike up the hill. A gang of surprisingly vocal chickens comes to greet me, followed by Aitkin Read. Her hair looks fantastic. So that’s what no ’poo can do, if you’ve the stamina to get through the greasy weeks while your sebum rebalances.
I’m mid prattle when she smiles and says, ‘How about a swim in the river? It will change your energy. Cold though. Can you handle cold?’4 I tell her I’m from Leeds. I was born cold.
‘I’ll go again!’ calls Ramona, appearing in her togs.
They wait while I duck into the composting toilet to get changed (for the record, it’s not smelly; a diverter captures the urine and sends it off to water the fruit trees), then we stroll through a field of English weeds: clovers, buttercups, cow parsley. Déjà vu. It’s just like the fields I grew up with. Aitken Read thinks the early settlers might have brought their own weeds with them ‘to give their cows a rounded diet. Probably there were beautiful native grasses that would have done that, but they didn’t want to give them a chance.’ She sounds like a Kiwi, less English than she does on her YouTube channel. ‘I pick up accents. I might pick up yours talking to you,’ she says. ‘I grew up in Yorkshire. My accent was so thick no one could understand me.’
Lucy’s parents worked for the Salvation Army and moved around a lot, but lived in south London when she was a teenager. When she was eighteen, they left for New Zealand and she went with them, then yo-yoed back a forth for a few years. She met Tim in Wellington. ‘I don’t have a Yorkshire accent,’ I say.
‘You do a bit.’
‘Come on!’ says Ramona.
We pass through a thicket with a gap hacked into it. A carved staircase leads down to the swimming hole. The water is absurdly clear and cool, like someone filled a pond with Evian from the fridge. Along the shores, the orange flowers of a tree whose name I don’t remember lean down to gaze at their own reflection.
Ramona and I talk about how much she loves to swim in the river, and I say I bet she wishes she could do it all day, and Aitken Read says, ‘Sometimes she does, if she wants.’ The kids are as free-range as the chooks. I ask about the homeschooling and she tells me, ‘Look, it’s more unschooling to be honest. It’s just that we don’t tend to use that phrase upfront because it alarms people and then they bring their prejudices. Once you see how this works, and you see how the children are learning, it all makes sense, I promise you.’
She says both terms—unschooling and homeschooling—feel inadequate to her: ‘I’m trying to call it “life-learning” because school just isn’t on our radar; we exist outside of the school paradigm. We believe that children are made to learn; they cannot not learn. From the moment they wake up, they’re driven by curiosity, so we want to foster this environment where their learning continues to be completely autonomous and completely joyful, and no one ever tells them how they have to learn or what they need to learn now, or how fast they need to learn it. They will just do it at their own pace, and we will trust them to do so.’ She won’t teach them to read until they ask her to.
‘But what if they don’t?’
‘They will, when they’re ready.’
She has a master’s degree, but when I ask, where from? she can’t remember, even though it’s the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious educational establishments in Britain. ‘Oh, who cares? I mean, what does any of it mean, really?’ Hmm. Tim trained as a teacher, so while they may reject traditional schooling now, they are both formally educated to a high level, which obviously has an effect on the kids, even with the lack of structure, so I do find it all slightly, what’s the word? Bewildering? Unique? Then again, I don’t have kids of my own, and in truth I don’t feel strongly about how other people choose to raise their families. Who am I to judge? When Aitken Read says, ‘We are parenting on the edge. There’s not many people doing it.’ I think, fair enough; it appears to be working for them, in this moment, rather as this river swim is working for me. ‘Did you know that a study found more kids could identify a Dalek than an owl?’ she says.
Back at camp she shows me around. They grow veggies and fruit, collect eggs from their chickens, farm cattle and ducks for meat and keep bees, but they aren’t entirely self-sufficient. Aitken Read says she tried that but something had to give; to make time for content-creation for Lulastic, she happily buys some vegetables. The family is plastic-free; they compost, and farm organically, using no synthetic chemicals on the land or in the home. Power comes mostly from solar panels, although they have gas bottles for their stovetop.
‘Off-grid isn’t this thrifty hack,’ she says. ‘The solar system was thousands to pay upfront. It is quite a privileged thing to do because of the money required at the start. If you’re doing it in community, you can avoid some of that. We lived for fifteen months on somebody else’s land with no costs, working for our rent.’ That afforded them valuable experience, a sort of apprenticeship, but it wasn’t a trial. They already knew they’d enjoy it.
The Aitken Reads used to live a ‘normal’ life in London, in that they owned a house in a street. She was working as a climate-change campaigner for Oxfam, biked her commute, and loved her job. ‘I know it’s common in the NGO world to come away feeling disillusioned, but I felt the opposite,’ she tells me. ‘I worked there for five years, and I saw some significant change happen as a result of this continuous working away at little things every day, as well as some of the big projects we ran. I really believed in it, and still do now. It’s hugely affected my life, knowing that the small things can make a difference.’
In the summer of 2013, when Juno was a newborn, they moved out of Camberwell and into ‘Betty’, a VW campervan, taking off around Europe for three months before returning to New Zealand. They didn’t know where they would settle, only that they wanted to make a life off-grid and ‘find their people’. They had money from selling their house to buy a parcel of land. Aitken Read describes finding it as ‘a Heavens-opening moment: Taa-daaa! We just absolutely knew that this land, way farther away than we’d wanted to be, was right.’ Soon she was sharing a blog post titled, ‘We’re moving into a Mongolian tent, LOL.’
They sourced the big yurt on Trade Me, still in its box. It went up in a day-and-a-half with the help of twelve friends on a working bee. ‘The little one goes up in three hours,’ she says. It’s like a hip hotel room, complete with carefully selected vintage furniture and a proper, comfy bed. Lie down, look up and the ceiling is a storybook circus tent. ‘You can close that,’ she says, pointing to the hole in the roof, ‘but it’s nice to see the stars.’
Aitken Read defines herself as an activist who wants to make the world fairer for everyone. ‘In our rational brain, when we were living in the city, we believed that was where the most change would happen,’ she says, ‘pushed forward by pioneers who were taking sustainability and making it work amongst the high rises. We were really disparaging of the hippies who just took off to remote corners of the world.’
‘Like they were opting out of society? Giving up, somehow?’
‘Exactly.’
I tell her about my interview with the economist Richard Denniss, and how he insists that individual piety won’t change the world, and she nods. ‘Yes, I see that, and we did worry about that. But we had this really strong urge and now I feel like it was the call of the wild … calling us to this place, this mountain and this river, to live this life here. It was like a mystical calling, and we did it; we yielded to this heart sense. But look, I do remember that we were really disparaging of this sort of thing.’
‘So how did you reconcile it?’
‘We were wrong! If you look through history, there are always outliers in any social movement who are pushing, pushing, pushing, and they are called the weirdos, and people hate them, people get angry about them, and we need these people.’
‘People like you?
‘Yes, because when you push these things forward, society moves a little bit towards that. In any movement, you have people who are on the extreme edge of it (that’s why we have the phrase “the cutting edge”) and they are making the first inroads. It takes time for mainstream society to catch up, or to care, but in just nudging them a little bit, we’re doing a useful job.’
She tells me a story about a ‘nature playgroup’ she started last year. ‘We have all these kids come to our farm and play in nature,’ she says. ‘The first session was getting the kids building a fire. I was explaining about kindling and I said, “What are some of the things you can use?” One said, “Cardboard!” Another chose a magazine. A tiny girl said, “Oh you could get some sticks,” and then this little boy said, “Or you could light a candle under the curtains.” There are lots of ways to start a fire. You don’t have to send the whole house up in smoke.’ I frown and she says, ‘You can go off-grid in smaller ways, in spirit if you like. You can switch to a good green energy supplier.’
‘Lucy, that’s hardly the same, is it? That’s not redesigning society.’
Truth is, I feel a bit disappointed.
‘Off-grid,’ she says, ‘is a mindset.’