Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Fourth Letter from Far South
John Cameron
This essay is one of a series of “occasional letters” that retired environmental educator John Cameron will be writing from his home on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state to the south of mainland Australia. For earlier letters, see EAP, winter & fall 2008 & spring 2009. The bird woodcuts are by Vicki King, Cameron’s life partner; portrayed are a pied oystercatcher, scarlet robin, yellow-tailed black cockatoo, and masked owl. Jcameronvking@optusnet.com.au. © 2010 John Cameron. Images © 2010 Vicki King.
Although the nearest human neighbors on Bruny Island are a kilometer away, wallabies, echidnas, and dozens of bird species come right up to our house. Living in such a situation, Vicki and I often think about “treading more lightly on the Earth,” both as a personal question and as a broader social issue.
As two recent radio talks illustrate, current debate on the politics and psychology of sustainability is polarized. Discussing her recent Getting a Grip, Frances Moore Lappe, involved with global food and ecological questions since the publication of her best-selling Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, argued that current forms of representative democracy rob people of a sense of contributing to the common good and lead to a depleted sense of self [1]. The consumer society, she claimed, is based on a “mentality of lack,” in which one can never have enough, whereas in reality people in Western countries already have all they need and more. Participating in a living democracy would enable people to live richer and more fulfilling lives while contributing to a more just and sustainable world.
In sharp contrast, Austin Williams, a London-based architect and author of Enemies of Progress: Dangers of Sustainability, provoked controversy when he presented a vigorous challenge to “sustainability orthodoxy” on radio a few days later [2]. He described most environmental advocates as risk-averse, moralistic, parochial, obsessed with a philosophy of limitation, living in a state of dread, lacking creativity and aspiration, and having no sense of exhilaration in life. He championed the invigorating, innovative spirit of the modern city that could deal with any of the real challenges of human development. He urged listeners to aspire to a life without limitation and reject the false choice between quality of life and quantity of consumption.
Beyond my general interest in these conflicting viewpoints, I was fascinated by the stark differences over the relationship between sustainable living and psychological well-being [3]. Is the “mentality of lack” embedded in the consumer society or in the minds of sustainability advocates? Is sustainability a matter of choice or necessity, and does it compromise or contribute to a sense of richness and abundance? How do these matters play out in daily life?
*******
I’ve been considering such questions in relation to our experience when we moved into our modest house by the edge of Blackstone Bay three years ago. The only power source installed by the previous owner was a car battery connected to two small solar panels, which generated just enough electricity for two low-energy light bulbs for an hour in the evening. Clearly, we needed more to live here full time. Faced with the choice between having power lines strung over our land and paying electricity bills for the rest of our lives, or generating our own electricity through a larger solar-energy system, we opted for the latter.
In retrospect, we were two naďve enthusiasts who took on a more sustainable lifestyle in a remote setting without connections to power, water, or sewage. We were ill-prepared for the complexities that ensued. It seems timely to explore our experiences when the need to reduce our collective carbon footprint because of global warming becomes pressing for everyone. There are many moral exhortations in the media to “do the right thing for the environment,” but phenomenological analyses of what it is really like to undertake a more lower-impact way of living are less common.
For a year after we bought our place on Bruny, we were still living in a suburban house in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. In preparation for our move, we contacted a Tasmanian solar energy company I will call “Simply Solar.” To calculate how many solar panels we would need, we first had to prepare our household “power profile,” an effort that was immediately eye-opening and humbling. We looked at the small metal plates underneath every appliance we thought we might want in our new home to find how many watts they consumed. I had no idea that there was such a difference in wattage between a blender and an electric toaster, for example, or between a tape deck and a stereo receiver. With each item, we asked ourselves the question: Do we really need this? Right away, many appliances, such as toasters and electric heaters, ruled themselves out as too energy-profligate.
Our next challenge was to estimate the number of hours per week we would use each appliance. How many hours would we have the computer on? How many electric lights would we use and for how long? To even begin to make these estimates, we had to pay much closer attention to how we lived. We kept a diary of our daily energy use, which was uncomfortably revealing in terms of how many electrical appliances two relatively “green-minded” people were actually using. Then we had to project how much our lifestyle and electricity consumption would change in our new, “simple” life.
Much more aware of our own use of electricity, we now noticed how many appliances friends and neighbors used. There are none so zealous as the newly converted, and we tried to keep our comments to ourselves as we saw houses lit up like fairy castles, televisions blaring with no one watching, leaf blowers being used rather than rakes. We were astounded at how much energy consumption was advertised as being a wonderful thing: “Super powerful, super suction” 3000-watt vacuum cleaners, massive 2500-watt hairdryers that “dry your hair even faster,” and power tools of every description.
*******
As the next step in the process, Simply Solar installed solar panels, inverter, regulator, and a massive bank of batteries to meet our projected needs [4]. Since the total cost was only slightly more than electric power poles stretched across our paddocks, we were very happy with the arrangement. We would be generating all our energy needs from the sun, with low maintenance, and no more electricity bills. When a man from the electric power company arrived a few months later to read our meter, we delightedly and rather smugly told him there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, matters did not remain so simple.
There was indeed little maintenance to be done. Twice a year at each equinox, the inclination of the panels needed adjusting and the specific gravities of the batteries needed regular checking. But there was a new language to learn. The digital read-out on the solar energy regulator was in amp hours per day (AH). Although I could measure the AH coming into the system, I couldn’t calculate how many AH we were consuming. Autumn progressed, and the battery specific gravities started to decline, indicating that the system was no longer fully charged. I became worried. Even the last-resort use of a back-up, petrol-driven generator didn’t seem to arrest the decline as the grey days of winter settled in.
As I was struggling with a new language, I was also wrestling with inner demons. Behind my wry self-description of being “technically challenged” lay a psychologically slippery slope. I quickly had to overcome my fear of approaching any unfamiliar machine without an expert by my side, since all the “experts” were in Hobart and reluctant to make the ferry journey to Bruny. Technical instructions by phone in regard to our declining batteries often left me puzzled and, at worst, in confused desperation.
I re-experienced boyhood anxieties about my lack of practical aptitude and common sense. Rather than patiently explain how to construct or repair things, my father tended to tell me gruffly to “use my head” and to “grow up.” Caught in these childhood echoes, I was slow to realize that our solar-energy problem was not my technical incompetence so much as Simply Solar’s gross over-estimation of how much power, in the long Tasmanian winter, our panels would generate. When a different technical team finally paid us a visit, they recommended we install a wind generator and replace the seriously underpowered back-up generator and charger left us by the previous owners. Meanwhile, to let our batteries recover, we shut off our low-energy refrigerator and prevailed upon neighbors to store food in their freezer.
*******
We found the idea of installing a wind generator appealing. Wind is a strong part of our life on Bruny, with frequent sea breezes, hearty winds, and occasional gales from the Southern Ocean. Using another natural element to generate power without significant environmental impact was fine, as long as it wasn’t noisy and didn’t harm the birds. A visit to a wind turbine in operation on the mainland satisfied us on both counts, and we placed our order.
By the time these additions to our alternative energy system were installed, our original budget for alternative energy had almost doubled. Still, it was striking to see how our attitude to windy days shifted. Vicki had previously found strong winds unpleasant but, now that we knew the wind was charging our batteries, it wasn’t so bothersome. It became an informative part of daily life—a quick glance at the generator blades told me the direction and strength of the wind. One spring afternoon I was striding down toward the house with a bracing Channel wind blowing straight in my face and the sun glinting off the water into my eyes. I exulted in the strength of the elements and lengthened my stride. “It’s a high-energy day today,” I declared to Vicki, and we enjoyed the new layer of meaning that term now had for us.
The next winter, we found that Simply Solar’s predictions that “we should be okay now” weren’t entirely correct. The battery charge still declined, though more slowly. For three months, we had to use our back-up generator more often than expected. Our wind generator is rated at about the same one-kilowatt capacity as our combined solar panels, but that rating is at an average wind speed of 30 miles per hour.
Even a breezy place like ours, however, doesn’t have such constant, high winds. Visitors frequently marvel at our whirling wind generator, apparently generating great quantities of electricity. In reality, to generate large amounts of power, the blades must rotate faster than the eye can see. In fact, the solar panels sitting unobtrusively on the roof do most of the work.
Over the past year, we have only produced twelve percent of our power from wind, though it does have the additional benefit of acting as a “trickle charger”—in other words, replacing small amounts of battery power overnight. In short, it is wise to stand outside and measure average wind speed throughout the year before deciding whether to buy a wind generator, but this is one of the many things that alternative power companies don’t always tell potential customers.
*******
Appearance and reality also diverge when it comes to storage batteries. When Simply Solar brought in twelve huge batteries, each nearly three feet tall, I was impressed. Only after our first disastrous winter was I able to persuade a technician to explain the situation:
“Think of it this way: Those batteries fully charged hold about 1000 AH. What’s your average daily usage?”
“Oh, between 50 and 60 AH, depending.”
“Okay. Now, you want to keep them at least eighty-percent charged for long-term battery health, so that gives you about 200 AH leeway.”
“But that’s only a four-day supply!”
“Yep,” he smiled. “People think there’s months of storage in these batteries because they’re so big. Of course, there’s always some little bit coming in even on a calm cloudy day, but you get the point. You’d need a large room full of batteries to keep the average house going through winter down here.”
I blanched when I thought of the extra cost. Suddenly, it all seemed so much more precarious—a safe-energy storage capacity measured in days rather than months. A year later, though, we have relaxed now that we know more about how the system works. We haven’t bought a roomful of batteries but, rather, have learned what we can and cannot do. While large-scale utility power appears to be more reliable, it now looks equally precarious in a different way, since most of Australia’s electricity is generated by coal and contributes to destabilizing the Earth’s climate.
*******
Working within the amount of power and water we can generate and collect now feels less like a restriction and more like an opportunity. Coupled with living on an island where there is no store and having a fixed income now that I have “retired,” this discipline of “making do” is steadily permeating all aspects of our lives—what we use, what we wear, what we grow and eat, what we re-use and recycle.
Vicki has been more steadfast than I have. One morning she noticed some discarded chicken wire by the side of a local road. “Oh, that’ll be good for fencing our veggie bed, let’s pick it up.”
I looked doubtfully at the tangle in the grass. “What, that?” I asked. “It’s a mess and full of weeds. If we’re going to do something, let’s do it right and get some new wire from the hardware store. We’re not that poor.”
“That’s not the point. This wire’s here, it’s littering the side of the road and we can use it.”
“Oh, OK.” Still grumbling, I straightened out the jumble of mesh, pulled the weeds out, rolled it up and put it in the back of the station wagon. Over lunch, I pursued the topic, saying that I didn’t want to get into a poverty mentality, constantly restricting ourselves unnecessarily so that our lives shrank. I wanted an abundance mentality and a rich life together. Vicki argued for the value and pleasures of frugality, saying she wasn’t talking about self-denial and doing without what we really needed.
I scavenged some old metal posts from a fallen fence on our land and attached the chicken wire. We’d heard that floppy overhanging wire on the top of a fence discourages hungry, climbing possums, so I used some discarded, thicker fencing wire to construct an outward curve. Given my childhood experiences, I had no confidence in my ability to improvise, tinker, and construct things, yet that was precisely what I was being called upon to do because of our isolated situation and low-tech approach. Our “possum-proof” fence worked and Vicki has been lavish in her praise, which has helped reduce my habitual feelings of incompetence. My mantra has become “this is another learning experience.” One of the things we are learning is to recognize and rely upon each other’s strengths. Vicki is quicker on the uptake, more intuitive, and more far-sighted, whereas I am more deliberate, perseverant, and thorough.
The vegetable garden has been one of our greatest sources of joy. Although Vicki had created a magnificent flower garden in England, neither of us had grown vegetables before. Vicki researched and designed the garden from scratch, making raised beds from driftwood we filled with seaweed, and hay and horse manure from our neighbors. Within months this base was breaking down into a rich soil and we were harvesting our own food. I get inordinate pleasure from collecting the salad greens and herbs before lunch. I have the abundance I wanted, too. There are bushel baskets full of our tomatoes and apples. As I write, our neighbor’s pears and quinces line our kitchen walls. We are eating more seasonal produce, accepting what is given in each season’s bounty, and having less of what is not locally provided.
We are enjoying doing everything we can to recycle and reduce our carbon footprint. Nearly all our clothes come from second-hand stores. Vicki is delighted when she finds something useful from the “fifty-cent rack.” Not only are these perfectly good clothes a tiny fraction of the cost of new apparel, but they don’t consume resources to produce or do they clog up landfills in the way they would if they had been discarded. Our only water supply is the rainwater we collect in tanks from our roof, and we have learned to restrict our usage in dry times and still have enough to water the many young native trees we have planted. We have a composting toilet that uses no water.
Our move to a more sustainable life has clearly involved a substitution of physical labor for fossil-fuel energy. I mash garbanzo beans by hand rather than put them into a blender to make hummus. I cart hay, manure, and seaweed rather than apply commercial fertilizer to the garden. I feel more vitality and well-being than ever before, but it has had consequences for my 57-year-old body. If I go to the paddocks (a subject for a future letter), I put on my “velcro armor” of back brace, elbow strap, and knee braces. I’ve had to pay more attention to my own physical sustainability and, as with our energy situation, it requires much more awareness and self-knowledge. After we both suffered injuries, we had to learn from a physiotherapist how to lift and move things properly. She described the progression from a state of unconscious incompetence (being unaware of lifting badly) to conscious competence (only lifting well when we remember to pay attention) to unconscious competence (the body’s lifting correctly of its own accord). Since my preferred learning style is not “learning by doing,” I have yet to experience the third stage.
*******
What can be said of our journey into sustainability from a phenomenological point of view? The first observation is that for most people in the Western world, electricity has become part of the lifeworld, the taken-for-granted quality of everyday life that is of central interest to phenomenologists. Flick the switch and the light comes on. It’s automatic. Now that we generate our own power on site, however, consuming and producing electricity has become a subject of regular conversation and awareness. I hadn’t expected that the light would be shone, on one hand, on my own attitudes and fears of technical inadequacy; and, on the other hand, on the psychology of learning. No longer taking electricity for granted has involved coming face-to-face with some demons I thought had been subdued—feelings of helplessness, isolation and incompetence, and my desires for comfort and security.
The experience of reducing our ecological footprint has brought home to me the inseparability of person and world that Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world. There are many aspects of this process of connecting what had previously seemed to be separate. For example, when we lived in the Blue Mountains, there was no relationship between local weather conditions and the amount of power available to our household. Now, my body responds to the vigorous embrace of gusting winds and blazing sun at the same time our solar panels and wind turbine are charging the batteries for the house. Turning on the tap now connects us to our seasonal rainfall, and we can no longer blithely assume that there will be water available whenever we want it. The soundscape of our world has changed, the house reverberates to the strong rush of the wind and the particularity of bird calls, not the noise of television beamed in from afar. We have made more connection with our physicality as human animals—the way we move in physical work, the food we grow and eat, our waste. As we experience our own material and mental fragility more acutely, we see the vulnerability of our land to local threats of drought, erosion, invasive species, and the global threat of climate change.
********
The barriers to sustainability for us have been as much psychological as technological. The idealism and enthusiasm with which we set out was accompanied by a sense of self-righteousness, despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise. This has given way to a more sober assessment of our limitations in the face of far greater physical and psychological challenges than we had anticipated. While I experience great pleasure and joy from our life here, I still go through periods of resistance to the discipline of living within our ecological means, followed by acceptance, even pleasure, in “making do.” I’m coming to appreciate that what we are given by this place each day and what we have now is enough.
I admit that on occasion I have been the sort of self-righteous and fearful environmental advocate that Austin Williams decries. My worry about our developing a “poverty mentality” is reminiscent of his critique, but though he calls for a life without limitation, I’ve come to see his viewpoint as more limited than Frances Moore Lappe’s. Despite succumbing at times to the “mentality of lack,” I’ve learned much about genuine abundance through reducing our ecological footprint. Deeper connectivity with our immediate world as a lived experience, not just as an attractive concept, has brought a greater vitality and sense of “well-being-in-the-world.”
As regards choice and necessity, it is possible that this generation could choose to ignore the challenge that climate change presents and thereby condemn more species to extinction and deprive future generations of the choices that we take for granted. The alternative is to make a choice at a deeper level and embrace at least the moral necessity of what must be done. This raises a new set of questions about how the task can be undertaken with the innovative, invigorating spirit that Williams champions, particularly in the cities where most people live. Surely it isn’t necessary to move to a remote location to learn the hard lessons that we have: Ecological limits aren’t the enemy of creativity and well-being but can be their source.
Acceptance of what is given and the limitations that come with it can bring a deep, almost paradoxical, gratitude. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthies-sen encounters a crippled lama in remote Nepal:
I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because of his legs, may never leave again… Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and the dancing sheep, and cries “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!” [5]
*******
Making do with less is more, for us at least. More enriching, more fulfilling, more enlivening. Opportunities abound for us to live even more resourcefully and resiliently with what we are given. I was looking for abundance in the wrong place when I argued with Vicki about the chicken wire. It’s not about the things we can afford, much less our material consumption. Rather, it’s about opening my eyes and heart to the richness of what I am given each day in this place co-inhabited by such remarkable beings as herons and sea eagles. The real poverty is to see myself surrounded by internal limitations and external restrictions rather than by fresh opportunities to learn and to flourish.
Collectively, we must learn to live within our ecological means. We have enough. Isn’t that wonderful? Especially when we have no meaningful choice!
Notes
1. F. Moore Lappe, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity ad Courage in a World Gone Mad (Cambridge, MA: Small Planet Media, 2008).
2. A. Williams, The Enemies of Progress: Dangers of Sustainability (London: Imprint Books, 2008).
3. The difference can perhaps partially be attributed to the context within which the two speakers work. Frances Moore Lappe, Director of the Small Planet Institute, has primarily been working in Third World countries on food and development issues, while Austin Williams works principally in the City of London as the Director of the Future Cities Project.
4. To be specific, we have six 160-watt solar panels and twelve deep-cycle storage batteries.
5. P. Matthiessen, 1978. The Snow Leopard (London: Penguin), p. 246.