Introduction
There are a number of threads which led up to the moment that Janet and I decided to do this thing.
The brief story in the prelude is one of them.
Now doubt watching ‘The Good Life’ as a boy and having an almost permanent sense of doom throughout my adolescence also contributed.
But I should also write about how we got to this point, or more accurately, how I got to this point.
For over 20 years, I worked at various jobs but mostly in factories, having some skills of a practical nature.
I bought a flat, then a small bungalow whilst the property market boomed.
I got married and divorced.
Sold up to move to Australia.
Returned and could no longer afford a house in the UK.
I have been a supporter of Greenpeace ever since waking up one beautiful morning around the late 1980’s and in a moment of clarity, understood that the Worlds forests needed saving and the organisation I most admired for their work was Greenpeace.
Whilst through the trials and tribulations of life, I couldn’t always afford to be a financial supporter, I continued to follow their campaigning.
So when I met Janet in Australia, I was interested to hear about the volunteering she had done for them.
On return to England, she often nagged me to join the local group but, one way or another I never got around (plucked up courage) into going along.
Then came a tipping point.
Although such things are never talked about, I got a sense that something was occurring.
Janet lived up in Manchester and I was down in Dorset, so we didn’t get to see that much of each other.
On the day in question, I remember being on break at work and taking a look at the BBC news on the internet,
“Two protesters from environmental pressure group Greenpeace have been arrested at a McDonald's fast food outlet in Manchester city centre.”
This was a protest because MacDonalds had been using chickens fed on Soya from an area of deforested Amazon.
A wave of emotion and worry washed over me, could this be Janet?
A quick search pulled up this headline from the Sun newspaper,
“20 riot cops to nick 2 chickens”, and there were names, yes it was Janet.
Now I’ve always been a very law abiding chap, never been in trouble in any way but suddenly I was aware of a huge amount of respect and love for this person who was willing to do this for a cause she truly believed in and an environment I also wanted to protect.
MacDonalds quickly reacted to the negative publicity and withdrew from their contract with that supplier.
I joined the local group in Dorset and immersed myself in learning about the environmental problems the World is facing.
The more you learn, the more shocking it becomes.
I had done a fair bit of flying over to Germany to look over cheap houses, but this was clearly unfeasible for my conscience now I knew about the damage aircraft emissions caused.
And I set about selling the houses I had already bought over there (run down places were and in fact still are, incredibly cheap in the former DDR).
I threw myself into the world of environmental activism, writing letters, emails, petitions, going on marches, actions and climate camps.
There have been some moderate successes, Kingsnorth Power station, Heathrow 3rd runway and the most progressive climate change bill in Europe. But still emissions increase, still our World faces an uncertain, unpredictable and probably hostile future.
I had felt somewhat hypocritical advocating the desperate need to reduce atmospheric CO2 but still leading a conventional life, using a car, electricity from a power station and buying from supermarkets.
The argument is that you have to be part of the system to influence the system.
And that it is for others to provide the tools for us to reduce our planetary footprint.
This is partly true, you have to use fossil fuel burning transport to get to a demonstration to protest for low carbon infrastructure.
But there is another way, born out of the frustration of lack of progress, the desire for a clear conscience and the urge for self reliance in an increasingly unstable looking world, to be the change you desire.
That we may be pioneering a new path or setting an example to others was more of an afterthought.
Not that we are the pioneers, plenty of people have gone before us, successfully setting themselves or even communities up on low impact, low carbon, one World principles. We are riding on their shirt-tails for sure and learning from their experiences wherever we can. But to our friends and family, we were doing something quite mad, and yet at the same time they would quietly concede that perhaps it was something very sensible.
And as we trawled the internet, traipsed around Wales and sat in auction rooms amid locals, city bankers, blue-rinsed retirees and hippies, glumly watching the ‘ideal’ bit of land slip from our grasp or go way over guide price, we realised we weren’t the only ones heading down this road.
I’ll tell you now, if you have a small woodland, maybe 10 acres of mature broadleaf trees and you want to sell up, have a chat to the farmer next door and negotiate a few acres (2 or 3 will do) off his neighbouring field. Stick an agricultural shed on it and the whole lot will triple in value.
So this is where our search, our life changing project, our story proper, begins.
