Michael Green

Writer and producer

Greensburg, Kansas

In Architecture and building, Community development, Environment on

On 4 May 2007, a tornado nearly three kilometres wide ripped through Greensburg, in Kansas, USA. It levelled the town and killed 11 people. The townsfolk decided to build back sustainably, with all city buildings to meet the highest level of the US Green Building Council’s rating system. Their blueprint for recovery was all green, taking in public buildings, infrastructure, housing and the downtown business area.

Last year, Greensburg mayor Bob Dixson visited Australia. He spoke to the Green Building Council of Australia, and also to the people of Flowerdale, who lost much of their town during the Black Saturday fires.

MG: What was your message to people in Flowerdale?

BD: The number one thing is to know that there is hope and you will recover. The other thing is sometimes you have to be real patient – we want things to happen faster than they do. Sometimes you have to plan and do the best you can without getting in such a rush that you find out later mistakes are made.

Over 95 per cent of the buildings in Greensburg were totally destroyed and that’s a lot like in the Flowerdale area, so there was a real kindred spirit between us because of the smaller town atmosphere and the sense of community.

MG: How did you come up with Greensburg’s long-term community recovery plan?

BD: Planning started the first week after the storm. The community had no place to meet so we met under a big circus tent and we did everything there; we had meetings, we ate together, we had church services together. And part of the planning process then was to come up with a sustainable long-term recovery plan. It was facilitated by government agencies, but we were the ones who had the input in what we wanted the community to look like. It’s a living document and we need to revisit it regularly.

We’ll be totally sustainable. We’ll have a community wind farm that will generate electricity for our town and it will be big enough to [connect to] our fellow communities that belong to the power pool. It’s kind of a cliché, but it’s a wind-wind situation.

MG: It’s a big change from the way the town was before. How did it come to be so environmentally focussed?

BD: We knew what we were doing was for future generations. We needed to make sure we built back for the 21st century, not for the way it was beforehand. It was about being good stewards of those resources we’ve been blessed with, and about seeing how our ancestors handled it when they pioneered our area. They utilised the resources they had available; no more, no less. And they understood that if you took care of the land, it took care of you. So really the concepts of being green have been around for generations. It’s just that we have such modern technology now to take advantage of those environmentally friendly and energy-saving green initiatives.

MG: What message do you have for communities, towns or cities that haven’t suffered such a disaster?

BD: One thing we’re really proud of is we’re the first community in the United States to have totally LED street lights. That’s a saving of 43 per cent on our energy and when you figure energy and maintenance combined, it’s a 70 per cent saving. It reduces our carbon footprint by 40 tonnes of CO2 per year. If Melbourne went to LED street lights, it could cut its emissions tremendously. Any community can implement things – you just have to do it.

MG: Has the Greensburg community changed since the tornado?

BD: It reinforced the values of our community. It mattered not your economic status in the community, you lost everything. So the only thing you had left was not your possessions, not your vehicle and not your home; all we had left were our relationships with each other. And we found out they were there all along.

Several young couples have moved to the community who have no ties to the area and that’s because of the excitement and the sense of renewal and rebirth. In the midst of it all we’re seeing interest from all over the world. To me, it’s beyond the disaster and building sustainably. People see hope in Greensburg right now; hope that you could come back from a disaster. We have been blessed with a tremendous opportunity, but we also understand we have a tremendous responsibility to share with the world anything we’ve learned, because as far as sustainability goes, we are all the new pioneers of the 21st century. We live in the most exciting times in the history of this planet, because we have an opportunity right now to truly make a difference in where we’re headed.

Book review: The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel

In The Big Issue on

In his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel exposed the roots of a global food system that fattens one billion people while another 800 million go hungry.

This time around he’s skipped the entrée and devoured the big cheese: capitalism. Or more specifically, the idea that the price of something is a good indicator of its value (see the global financial crisis). Prices, he argues, are blind to ecological and social ills and “at best, only give a blurry sense of priorities and possibilities”.

Patel, an academic, activist and former employee of the World Bank, offers up a lively, easy-to-read critique of free market economics and corporate power. And where other recent critics failed to promote meaningful change (ahem, Kevin Rudd), he doesn’t shy away from the radical consequences of acknowledging that markets don’t sell magic happiness beans.

With examples drawn from Chile to Pakistan, Patel promotes a society sweetened by small-scale cooperation and infused with active local democracy. Whether you’re puzzled by economics or worried about the future, The Value of Nothing makes bracing and inspiring reading.

Four-and-a-half stars

Q & A with Michael Shuman

In Community development, Social justice on

Earlier this year I interviewed American economist, lawyer and writer Michael Shuman. He’s the author of two books on re-localisation, Going local and The small-mart revolution and a founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Shuman writes about the economic benefits of buying from locally owned businesses, arguing that the money you spend has a much bigger economic multiplier effect. That is, it circulates more quickly and more often, and in doing so, it creates more jobs, income and wealth.

As an example, he refers to a 2003 study in Austin, Texas, where economists analysed the impact of a proposed Borders bookstore against two local bookstores. They found that $100 spent at Borders would circulate $13 in the local community, while $100 at the local stores would circulate $45.

When we spoke, he began by telling me that the localisation message is spreading fast.

MS: I’m very struck by the similarity of the consciousness about various crises that are hitting the world – in finance, peak oil and climate change – and equally struck by the similarity of the solutions that people are developing at the community level. Frankly, everywhere I go there are profound and growing localisation movements.

MG: What’s the main thrust of your message?

MS: First of all, every time you spend your money you are voting for the kind of economic future you want. And if you vote with your money more conscientiously for local businesses with high quality local goods and services, there are a whole bunch of wonderful things that can happen to your economy. If you don’t vote that way, you’re economy is going to become hollower and shallower, and your prosperity is going to be imperilled. And I think it’s even truer for investment, because right now we have an investment system where everyone under-invests in local business. I think if we can change that, we can dramatically increase the number of local businesses and prosperity will flow from that. The two critically important decisions to think about are your purchasing and how you invest your super.

MG: What do you mean by ‘local’?

MS: I define local as the smallest jurisdiction in which you live that has real political, economic or legal power. So if you live in Melbourne, the city would be the relevant area. If you lived in a remote rural region, you might think of a larger area. It’s necessarily a flexible term, but the point that I like to emphasise is that local ownership means that the people who own the business live in the immediate jurisdiction in which it operates.

MG: You wrote The small-mart revolution in 2007, arguing that small, local businesses contribute more to long-term economic prosperity and community wellbeing. The world seems to have changed a lot since then – has your thinking changed?

MS: In the book I lay out a dozen trends in the global economy that were accelerating localisation. All of the trends have moved faster than I anticipated. For example, I never expected oil to hit $150 a barrel so quickly. It didn’t stay there very long, but it won’t before we get there again. Also, when I wrote the book, I felt that the conventional understanding about the financial system would make it very difficult to convince people to move into local stock quickly. But the financial crisis has so changed people’s perceptions about the risks inherent in the current system that it has really opened their minds to localisation in a huge way. I think the shift in global consciousness is profound and has moved much more quickly than I thought it would.

MG: You write that smart localisation is about being self-reliant and exporting – not about limiting global trade. So are you saying the ideas we have about scarcity aren’t accurate, and there’s actually great scope for growth?

MS: That’s right. It’s not a new argument – for example, look at the writing of Frances Moore Lappé with Food First, thirty years ago. She made the argument that the planet has more than enough food to feed people, but our distribution systems are corrupt. As the years have gone by she has increasingly talked about the importance of local food systems that feed populations first and foremost, and then we build trading systems for more exotic foods on top of that. And I think that’s true in all kinds of goods out there.

It’s not to say there aren’t shortages or profound challenges in moving communities that are in very high levels of poverty into a place where they can be active participants in the global economy. But in my work in the US I’ve seen that the poorest economies are the ones that are most predisposed to try new approaches because they have been most readily left behind by the mainstream economy. And when you’ve got little or nothing and you change your approach, a little of something that’s better can actually generate a lot quickly.

MG: But in the short term, if I’m spending more money locally, then someone else will be missing out.

MS: I agree with that – for example, the argument is that in the US we import bananas from Guatemala so if we figure out ways of producing bananas in hydroponic greenhouses, the peasants who are producing those bananas in Guatemala are going to lose out. I think the weakness of the argument is that the peasant receives such a tiny fraction of the value-added of that banana – probably a fraction of one per cent – that it turns out to be an enormously inefficient mode of helping that peasant. And so both the promise that trade-as-usual helps the poor, and notion of the harm that comes from changing traditional trade, both of those things are a lot smaller than people assume.

But there is a short-term cost and there’s a transition in that. What I would add is that it is in the interests of communities to share their best practices for free with other communities worldwide. We should all become part of a kind of open-sourced world of information about the technology, business finance and public policies that support localisation. Every community that takes this seriously should try to share what’s working and what isn’t.

MG: But isn’t localisation a trend that will inherently disadvantage developing countries – if wealthy countries become more self-reliant, won’t that punish developing-country commodity producers?

MS: I think there is something to that argument, but again, it’s clear that the kind of development policies we’ve undertaken have been a dismal failure for most of the world. In the places where they have been successful, like the Asian tigers and China, they’ve come with grotesque costs to the environment, human rights, labour rights and equity. I just really feel that creating models of community self-reliance around basics and sharing them internationally is going to be much more important to poor communities than any of these other strategies.

MG: Is it implicit that a localised economy will produce a more egalitarian society?

MS: In the United States there is a sociology literature on this. Basically, communities that are largely made up of small businesses have higher measures of social equality and, in some cases, even lower levels of welfare dependency. I think part of the reason is that in a community of small businesses where there’s a lot of local commerce, it’s a relationship-based economy. That is, both the employer-employee and consumer-seller relationships are rooted in people who know each other. If you know each other you have to act more responsibly because you can’t just pick up leave and hide what you’ve done.

Lives in the balance

In Culture, The Big Issue on

Young people still want to join the circus, even if they don’t always have to run away from home to do it. In Australia, one school is dedicated to training aspiring balancers, clowns, jugglers and trapeze artists.

It is just before lunchtime at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. The 2009 showcase performance is just weeks away. In a stuffy rehearsal room, 14 final-year students listen carefully as the show’s directors give staging instructions for part of the act. The details are precise. Circus is a serious business.

Meanwhile, one of the muscular young men, Aidyn Heyes, bends nonchalantly into a handstand. He stays there, waggling his legs for a while, then shifts from two hands to just one. Minutes later, on his feet again, he amuses a classmate by putting a milk crate on his head.

“We’re all the kind of people who try to get everyone else to look at them,” Heyes says later. His speciality is balancing on his hands.

The institute – the only school of its kind in Australia – opened in 1999, and accepted its first bachelor students two years later. Each year it accepts 24 performers from the scores more who audition.

The students train five days a week, from nine to five, and miss out on the long holidays granted by normal universities. Even so, with the showcase performance approaching, Heyes says preparation time is short. “A lot of the stuff we do in our acts pushes our limits as far as they’ll go. Even though we rehearse and rehearse, no one ever feels like they have enough practice time.”

Heyes grew up in Rosebud on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and spent his spare time surfing and doing yoga. “Ever since I was young I could always jump up into a handstand and stay there,” he says, constantly stretching and shifting his limbs as he talks. “I’d chill out a few hours a day just doing handstands at home because I enjoyed it.”

Like other circus artists, the 22-year-old uses and experiences his body in ways that gravity-adhering members of the community could scarcely ever comprehend. “When you hit the balance properly, especially with one-arm handstands, it feels like something else is holding you there,” he says. “It feels light, like you’re floating in water.”

The showcase performance is the final step before the students try to enter the real circus world. Some aspire to joining international companies, hotels or cruise ships; others, to making a living from corporate gigs, events or busking. Heyes plans to set himself up as a freelance circus performer, mixing work and travel.

For now, however, he must train and focus for the show. “Hand balancing, like juggling and tightwire, requires single-point concentration,” he says. “When you’re performing, you’ve just got to block everything else out.”

Published in The Big Issue, to accompany a photo essay by Christina Simons.

Towns in Transition

In Community development, Environment, The Big Issue on

Concern about the environment and climate has led people in communities across the globe to take matters into their own hands – and to enjoy themselves while they’re at it.

One blazing hot Saturday morning – the day that will later become known as Black Saturday – a dozen locals gather around the wooden bench in Mark Kilinski’s kitchen, in the Geelong suburb of Bell Post Hill. Under his instruction, they’re filling and shaping pierogi, Polish dumplings.

Everybody is talking or laughing, or doing both at once. It’s pure peaches-and-cream: people are making friends, their conversations almost too good-natured to be true. “It’s much more fun to cook together, isn’t it?” marvels Anne, who lives just across the road. “That’s the thing about community,” chimes Dee, a wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked librarian from the local school.

The activity has been organised by Transition Bell, a group of locals dedicated to transforming postcode 3215 to deal with the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil [see below]. They want to re-make their suburb into a food-producing, low-energy, low-emission, tight-knit neighbourhood.

For well over a year, the group has been an official member of the thriving international Transition Network. The first transition town – Totnes, in Devon, England – was launched in late 2006. Now there are over 200 worldwide. In Australia, there are 18 official transition initiatives and dozens more preparing to sign on.

The movement took-off last year, following the publication of The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the Totnes project. Interest now extends well beyond the English-speaking world, to continental Europe, South America, Asia and South Africa.

An updated Australian and New Zealand edition of the book came out in March. Subtitled ‘Creating local sustainable communities beyond oil dependency’, it details a grassroots approach to sustainability, in which each group strives for change, aiming to live better with less.

Naresh Giangrande, another founder of the Totnes transition town, visited Australia recently as part of a six-country speaking and training tour. “Two years ago, if somebody had told me that I would be in Australia on a worldwide tour teaching people about transition towns I would have said to them, ‘You’re crazy, it will never happen that quickly’,” he says.

In Totnes, residents have started a slew of projects, from community gardens and a local food directory, to business swap meets and eco-makeovers. They’ve even created their own currency, the Totnes Pound, which can only be used in the town.

Giangrande says the biggest achievement so far has been to build broad support among the town’s 8000 residents, rather than just among the usual suspects. Given the gravity of the problem, he argues, it’s crucial to engage people from all walks of life.

“The fundamental message is that our system is unsustainable. It’s not really a question of should-we-or-shouldn’t-we [change]. We’re going to have to,” Giangrande says. “We’re not going to have any choice once peak oil and the effects of climate change become apparent. We’re going to have to make do with fewer resources and with less energy.

“It’s not just a bit of tinkering at the edges; we need to completely rethink just about every system that we depend on for life – for the food we eat, for the clothes we wear, for the buildings we live and work in, and for our transport.”

Despite the daunting change he envisages, Giangrande sees cause for both optimism and joy. “We’ve created the present system and we can create something else. Let’s harness the collective genius of our communities to create something even better than what we have now.

“For many people the environment is very scary because if you take a close look at it you realise that we’re in quite a deep hole. Transition is one of the few things that comes with a message of hope. We all can be involved and a whole bunch of small actions by people all over the world add up to something rather big and rather wonderful,” he says.

***

The Sunshine Coast was the first Australian community to become a part of the transition movement and, at about 300,000, the group caters to an unusually large population. For over two years, Sonya Wallace and others have been preparing an Energy Descent Action Plan to present to the Sunshine Coast council. It will be a blueprint for a regional makeover, from households “all the way up to legislative change, transport systems and all the big picture stuff that you can’t do as an individual or as a community.”

Beneath the broad Sunshine Coast group, small transition towns are sprouting. Wallace lives in Eudlo. Among other initiatives, her 850-strong community is starting a food coop, a seed bank and informal car-pooling, and running backyard permablitzes. “We’re trying to get people to talk to their neighbours and build some community resilience,” she says.

In mid-November, a storm walloped Brisbane’s northern suburbs, causing severe floods, structural damage to thousands of homes and even a Prime Ministerial visit. Amid the devastation, however, came an unexpected sense of community. “As this massive storm went through, people came out of their houses and started talking to their neighbours. They’d never spoken to their neighbours before,” Wallace says. “It generated street parties.”

A similar, though more dramatic story emerged following Black Saturday. In The Monthly, author Richard Flanagan wrote of his visit to Kinglake: “Beyond us the police teams were turning over tin, turning up more and more dead, yet everywhere I looked I saw only the living helping the living, people holding people, people giving to people. At the end of an era of greed, at a time when all around are crises beyond understanding and seemingly without end, here, in the heart of our apocalypse, I had not been ready for the shock of such goodness.”

Scientists predict that the climatic changes wrought by global warming will lead to more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts, fires and floods. For Wallace, the transition project is partly about preparation. “We’re trying to get people to work together before a crisis hits, because then it’s a bit too late to work out who the workers are and who has the skills.”

Back in the Bell Post Hill kitchen, before the hot sky fills with smoke, Transition Bell’s founder, Andrew Lucas, is adamant that his group’s activities be enjoyable. “It is a really inclusive thing, not just a sustainability group filled with environmentalists. [The transition towns idea] doesn’t tend to alienate people because you’re talking about what we can do to look after each other. That sort of thing is missing in communities at the moment.”

The Bell area has a long-standing mix of residents from different backgrounds, especially Eastern Europe. Lucas says there’s an enormous amount of practical knowledge behind closed doors – like the recipe for pierogi. Among other things, he hopes neighbours will share their cooking, preserving and gardening know-how.

“We declared that this postcode will be the fruit tree capital of Geelong – pretty hilarious, because it’s not like we have anyone competing,” Lucas says. “There’s another postcode, Transition South Barwon, and they’re talking about becoming the shiitake mushroom capital.”

Last year, at Transition Bell’s request, a local nursery offered a 50 per cent discount. Residents cleared their stock in one weekend. Lucas wants to organise more bulk eco-buying deals with nearby businesses. “You can get people motivated to take action, you get much better discounts and you’re putting money back into local businesses as well, so it’s a win-win,” he says.

All up, today’s neighbours-cum-pastry-cooks make about 300 dumplings in just a few hours. Conversation whisks through organic gardening, household efficiency and renewable energy, as well as future activities for the community.

But as always, the proof is in the eating. Janine, a first time attendee, sits at the table, her plate already empty. “Delicious,” she says sweetly. “We want some more.”

Transition, peak oil and climate change

The transition concept is pushed along by twin threats: peak oil and climate change. Peak oil refers to the point in time when global oil production reaches its maximum rate, and afterwards, begins to fall. There is no agreement on its timing, but many observers argue that supply has passed its peak, or will soon do so.

In The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins writes that “the end of what we might call the Age of Cheap Oil (which lasted from 1859 until the present) is near at hand, and … for a society utterly dependent on it, this means enormous change.” Both peak oil and climate change, he continues, “are symptoms of a society hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels and the lifestyles they make possible.”

 Can I borrow a cup of sugar?

Saying hello to your neighbours is the new black. Here are some complementary getting-to-know-you schemes:

Started in Melbourne last year, The Sharehood is an ingenious website that, together with a simple letterbox drop, will help you to not only meet the family across the road, but also borrow their circular saw.

A basic training program in eco-living, Sustainability Street can work in your street, school or local sports club. It has been run in over 200 places across Australia since 2002.

A permablitz is a working bee with a veggie twist. Volunteers from a network of permaculture gardeners and your neighbours (if you can convince them) come to your house and work with you to transform your garden into an organic food producing Eden.

Sustainable House Day

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

On Sustainable House Day, Sunday September 13, eco-conscious stickybeaks can learn from the people who know best. Visit two Melbourne homes open for inspection.

Lorraine Hughes has shown over 1300 people through her two-bedroom sustainable home in Knoxfield. “I’m into education,” she explains. “I just invite people, left, right and centre.”

She’s got it down to a well-practiced art, complete with information boards and pamphlets. The diminutive and dedicated 73-year-old begins her tour across the road, looking back at her home. “The house says ‘Solar, solar, solar, solar’, right?”

Right. The cream-coloured house has a long north-facing aspect, and it’s sprouting solar power. There are thickets of photovoltaic panels on the roof – some gathered towards the back and others standing proudly at the front like sails in the wind. There’s also a solar hot water system and two solar ventilation units.

“I’ve got a 4.5 kilowatt (solar PV) system and it will be providing clean green energy long after I’m dead and buried,” Ms Hughes says.

She built the house – designed by Andreas Sederof from Sunpower Design – for her retirement in 2001. “I wanted to downsize, stay local and build a house in suburbia,” she says. “My aim was to be as sustainable as possible on a small block that looked the same as everybody else’s.”

The home is self-sufficient in water and, over the course of a year, produces electricity well in excess of its needs. The building materials and finishes were chosen for their low embodied energy, wherever possible.

After discussing the technical details of solar power, Ms Hughes heads back over the road, around the front fence – made from radial cut timber, to minimise waste – and through her gate to the waterworks.

She has an enormous 27,240-litre rainwater tank, which captures the runoff from all her gutters. Further around the back, past the citrus trees, her greywater treatment system collects wastewater from the washing machine, showers and bathroom basins. The peat-treated outflow is used in the garden and toilets.

Ms Hughes’s interest in sustainable living began in her childhood – her parents planted veggie patches and fruit trees and kept farmyard animals wherever they lived. “I travelled in my youth too,” she says. “I worked in third world countries, so I’ve seen life from a different perspective. There’s nothing new about living sustainably.”

She also has a full grasp of the latest technology. After years of going to talks and short courses, she studied energy auditing and sustainable building design for a year at Swinburne TAFE. “I enjoyed it up to the hilt. I hadn’t been back to school for over 50 years,” she says.

Inside her home, there are all kinds of details to take in, from the smart solar passive design, cross-ventilation, double glazed windows, clever blinds, and eco-friendly fittings and finishes.

Ms Hughes has spent years attending to every detail, but she wants to illuminate, not intimidate, her visitors.  “You don’t have to do what I’ve done. I always tell people: if you’ve got an existing house, concentrate on one room at a time. Do the things that you can – insulate, seal your gaps,” she says. “And the most important part of all is the person living in the house.”

***

A tour of Cameron and Karin Munro’s house in Malvern begins in the small front yard. Mr Monro scratches at a patch of red stones to reveal a shiny metal plate. “The downpipes all feed into a stormwater exit that just runs underneath our feet,” he says.

From there, the water is diverted and pumped to a tank at the back of the house, which feeds the laundry and toilets. The saving has helped the Monros cut their consumption down to just 45 litres each per day, less than a third of the state government target.

The couple bought their neat, late 19th century weatherboard cottage in 2007, after moving to Australia from Europe. Ms Monro, from Sweden, had shivery memories of accommodation down under. “I spent a year in South Australia as an exchange student,” she says. “Temperature-wise, the winter was nowhere near northern Europe, but I’ve never been as cold as I was then, because there was no heating except a wood stove at one end of the house.”

Mr Monro, an Australian engineer and transport planner, had also become accustomed to smarter housing design. “Sweden has an extreme climate and they’ve built houses to match it,” he says. “The Australian climate is also extreme, but I think we’ve lost our way in building for it.”

So the couple decided to blanket their house in insulation – they doubled the batts in the roof and injected expanding foam in their walls. The tour’s next stop, at the weatherboard side wall, provides the evidence. It’s dotted with patched-up holes where the foam was squirted in between studs.

It’s slightly spotty inside too, on the ceiling, where the Monros have removed 21 power-hungry halogen downlights. In their lounge area alone, their lighting energy use has tumbled from 250 to 15 watts.

The extra efficiency has helped them to consume only about as much electricity as they generate with their 1 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system. “I think solar PV is brilliant,” Mr Monro says. “You just get it installed and do nothing – that can’t be beat. There’s no greasing, noise or any ongoing maintenance costs. It just sits there and ticks away.”

Double-glazing proved the biggest expense. They replaced nearly all the window units in the house. “The new windows are incredibly expensive but incredibly good,” he says. “They cut down the noise as well as improve the thermal performance. You feel it walking around the house.”

All up, Mr Monro estimates they’ve spent between $35,000 and $40,000, of which the windows took up about two-thirds. “It’s not a financial thing because the economics currently just don’t stack up,” Mr Monro says. “It’s really an ethical thing about our futures and that of our baby, Sophia.”

“And also about the quality of living and comfort,” Ms Monro adds. “The house is so much nicer now.”

She’s got a cosy message for people who visit their home. “It is possible to retrofit an existing house. You don’t have to buy a new house or demolish and build again. You can reduce what you’ve got and make a big difference.”

Sustainable House Day will be held on September 13, 2009, from 10am to 4pm. Across the country, 170 homeowners are participating. In Victoria, there will be 45 homes open to visitors, all for free.

Primate fear

In Environment, Social justice on

 

The orangutan population may be dangerously low, but conservationist Dr Willie Smits has made a place for hope.

What should you do if an army colonel comes home while you’re confiscating his orangutan? For Dr Willie Smits, the Dutch-born founder of Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS), the unexpected clash became a near-death experience.

“He pulled his gun, chk chk, on my chest…‘I’m going to kill you here and now’.” Smits recalls as he jabs at the spot the weapon hit him. “But you still have to be able to remain quiet, look him in the eyes and say ‘Colonel, you know the punishment for having an orangutan and…for shooting a man. You take your pick’.”

This frightening encounter is just a glimpse of the 52-year-old’s intense commitment to the survival of the orangutans, our closest and most intelligent primate relatives.

Smits visited Australia in 2008 to promote his co-authored book, Thinkers of the Jungle. His dedication to the red apes vibrates through every sentence he utters. “I want to show what marvellous beings orangutans are,” he says. “They are so altruistic and really, they are the better humans. So it’s a genocide that is taking place.”

With over 200 staff across four different sites in Borneo, BOS is the world’s largest primate protection organisation. Smits, who holds a doctorate in forestry, works “20 hours a day, seven days a week,” nurturing those in his rescue centres and campaigning against the illegal logging and animal traders that threaten them.

There are only about 57,000 wild orangutans left in Indonesia and Malaysia. At the current rate of decline, BOS believes that the primates could be wiped out by 2015. “If we cannot even save orangutans, then what hope is there left for the rest of the world?” Smits asks.

Smits is tall and broad. His brown eyes flare and his voice simmers with rage as he speaks about the clearing of forests to satisfy overseas demand for timber and palm oil – now an ingredient in everything from ice cream and chocolate, to toothpaste and pet food. He’s outraged and bewildered by consumer apathy in western countries. “I don’t think anyone who understands the injustice that is happening to the orangutans and the local people could sit still and do nothing. I cannot imagine that.”

His own path to action came by chance. One evening in 1989, while working as an advisor to the Indonesian forestry minister, he saw a sick orangutan baby thrown on a rubbish heap in Balikpapan, a coastal town on Borneo. He decided to look after it and from that moment on, more and more red apes were delivered into his care. Two years later, running out of room at his home, he established BOS.

Despite the passing years, the first orangutan remains the most special to him. He called the baby Uce, after the sound of her heavy, strained breathing. When it came time for her release in 1992, she refused to go. Smits consoled the ape and offered her a leaf as a parting gift.

In 1998, he saw Uce again. “I really thought I’d lost her in the forest fires, but then we found her and she had a baby,” he says, his anger vanishing as he recalls their reunion. “She took me to a Licuala palm and she bit off a leaf and gave that to me. That was the same leaf, the same species I gave to her. She knew I would understand that she was saying thank you after all these years,” he says.

That’s just one example of the intelligence and culture that Smits says he sees everyday, from fishing and tool use, to self-absorbed preening before a mirror. As he flicks through the photos in his book, he points with pride at his primate friends, his voice now brimming with care and admiration. “Orangutans put flowers in the edges of their nest. They have aesthetic feelings. And how they love to look at themselves in pictures,” he says, laughing. “They start posing.

Despite the dire outlook for the species’ survival, Smits still has room for optimism. He is inspired by the early success of BOS’s nature park, Samboja Lestari. There, the organisation is re-vegetating cleared land to provide a habitat for 2000 orangutans.

Local families farm sugar palms in the land surrounding the reserve. They earn a sustainable income and protect the inner ring from fire and illegal forestry. “You can actually do something that creates jobs and still creates safe havens for nature. So it doesn’t need to be all gloom and doom,” he says.

Besides, Smits says, what makes it all worthwhile is that his favourite ape, Uce, is now pregnant for the third time and her first baby is “a truly wild-born, independent orangutan”. He only sees her every few years. “I’m waiting for the next chance to go see her, but the love will still be there.”

The biggest catch

In Culture, Environment, The Big Issue on

Every year, fishermen and worshippers flood a faraway island in Bangladesh. Photographer Rodney Dekker went there to record traditions that may soon go under.

Most of the year, Dublar Char is nearly uninhabited. The remote island lies at the southern end of the Sundarbans, a vast tidal mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Then, from mid-October to mid-February, thousands of fishermen sweep in from around Bangladesh. Hindu pilgrims come in their thousands too, for Rash Mela, an annual three-day festival with a 200-year history.

Last year, photographer Rodney Dekker joined the influx. “There were fishing boats everywhere. They are all connected and people walk over each boat to get to the land,” he says. The fishermen dry their catch on the broad beach, then bag and ship the fish to markets in the capital, Dhaka.

With the festival on, the island was vibrant. “There was dancing and singing, and people were worshipping clustered around a little temple,” Dekker says. “There was lots of energy and atmosphere.”

Situated in the fertile Ganges Delta, Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most densely populated and lowest-lying countries on earth. Exposed to rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers and increased cyclone frequency, the country’s people are critically vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A Bangladeshi rights organisation, Equity and Justice Rights Group, estimates that 30 million people on the southern coastline are already facing its consequences.

That’s the reason for Dekker’s journey. “Dublar Island will be one of the first places in Bangladesh to be affected by sea level rise and this culture will be lost as a result,” he says.

The 34-year-old photographer is a former environmental scientist. In Australia, he has shot series on droughts, floods and bushfires. “My photographic interests come from my interest in environmental problems,” he says. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to show people what is happening in the world as a result of climate change.”

In November 2007, Dublar Island was lashed by Cyclone Sidr. Development organisation Save the Children estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people died in the storm. “It was the most severe cyclone on record in the Bay of Bengal,” Dekker says. “Cyclones are becoming more intense and frequent and the timing is different now. One of the fishermen I interviewed and photographed on Dublar Island was wondering why cyclones are coming in winter. He doesn’t know.”

The fisherman’s prospects aren’t good. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 22 million people in Bangladesh will become climate refugees by 2050.

But it’s industrialised countries, including Australia, who are responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions. “The poorer countries are the ones who will feel the effects [of climate change] the most, and we’re the cause of it,” Dekker says.

Rodney Dekker travelled to Bangladesh with the help of a grant from the SEARCH Foundation. You can view an eyewitness account of his journey on the Oxfam website.

The Sharehood

In Community development on

Published in Adbusters #85, Thought Control in Economics

Debbie from two streets away is offering to teach cartwheels and handstands. She wants to plant a herb garden, starting with mint. I’m dying to cartwheel. I’ve wanted to learn for years. I imagine myself standing at the end of a clear supermarket aisle, and then cartwheeling all the way down – a life-affirming act in a lifeless store. I’m growing enough mint and other herbs to share.

Debbie and I are made to trade. But we would never have met if my next-door neighbour and I hadn’t started a Sharehood. We leafleted all the houses a few streets around ours, invited them to a community BBQ and directed them to the website, www.thesharehood.org.

The Sharehood was started by Theo Kitchener, a Melbourne web developer and activist, in 2008. “It’s all about sharing skills and resources within your neighbourhood,” he says. In his hood, neighbours are already trading garden produce for worm juice, babysitting each other’s kids, fixing cars, sharing compost heaps and chatting over tea.

The website helps neighbours meet face-to-face. It allows logged-in members to see profiles of other members who live within 400 metres. People post events, list things they can share and things they need. The site has its own trading system, a radical local currency to reward those who give to others. Everyone’s details are private.

We’re just starting out, but interest is high. There’s a supermarket not far away from where I live. Maybe when I can cartwheel and our Sharehood is strong, I’ll visit one last time and find a clear aisle. 

Book review: The Riverbones, by Andrew Westoll

In The Big Issue on

After finishing university, Andrew Westoll studied monkeys in Suriname. Five years later, he returned to the tiny South American nation – this time as a writer.

In The Riverbones, the young Canadian careens from one disturbing encounter to the next, boozing his way through jungles and seedy towns on a search for personal meaning and cultural understanding. While he’s at it, he illuminates the country’s brutal colonial exploitation, as well as its ongoing crises in health, governance and environmental management.

In the book’s defining quest, Westoll seeks a glimpse of okopipi, an endangered electric-blue frog. The Suriname government, attempting to protect the frog’s fragile habitat from tourism, denies him a travel permit.

But he doesn’t give up. At best, he’s pursuing a romantic folly; at worst, he’s just another moneyed westerner extracting his bounty from the jungle (much like the multinational mining corporations he criticises).

Even still, Westoll is a rollicking storyteller who knows his subject back to front. The Riverbones is an unsettling evocation of all that’s rotting and thriving in Suriname, and it resonates far beyond the rainforest. 

Four stars