An Ordinary Mantra

It’s now months since we finished the challenge and yet in every day it is with us in someway.  Oddly we have received a flurry of belated interest from North American media, websites etc (to be fair it takes a carrier pigeon a heck of a long time to fly that far) and we are still enjoying speaking engagements for interested groups.  Apart from that though, we have been pretty quiet.  Keep saying every week that we should blog.

Actually there have been a few outstanding items on our list of things to do – like develop our rubbish free consulting business, which we announced at our party to be an important aspect of our future direction; and launch the replacement website, www.rubbishfree.com.  Perhaps if we had beavered away we could by now be entrenched in some sort of rubbish free wonderland, but instead we have been…. thinking. Rethinking. As we have been getting into life after Rubbish Free Year (capitals intended) we have been noticing that there is a certain expectation from ourselves and from the public that rubbish is our thing.  Its the thing we are passionate about avoiding and its the thing that we are experts on… But those of you who have followed us will know that this is not what we set out to achieve.  We were ordinary people without any special knowledge or inclination who were waking up to the idea that it might be timely to start looking at the way we live.  The way we lived was ‘normal’ in the western context and yet we were amassing information that this ‘normal life’ was not sustainable. Deciding to live rubbish free for a year came about because it was finite and tangible and needed no expert information.  Prior to this decision we had felt overwhelmed and confused by the task of living sustainably within an unsustainable system and had only managed to compost, bike to work and buy the odd fair trade brown thing (coffee, tea, chocolate etc.).

So we could get off the bus, so to speak, at Rubbishville and make it our home, our microcosm. We could foster the Rubbish Expert thing – experts on domestic waste disposal, industrial waste, recycling systems, packaging solutions and so on.  But what we have remembered is that Matthew and I are in the middle of a working out what living sustainably looks like for us.   I have just redone the Earth Day Quiz.  I love that quiz! It asks you all these questions about your lifestyle and then spits out this statistic that says, ‘if everyone lived like you this is how many planets we would need to sustain everyone’.  I don’t know why I love it so much, some sick fascination?  Anyway my figure is 2.1.  If everyone lived like me we would need about two planet Earths.  If you are going to do it and are kiwis like us then you’ll run into the problem of not being able to select your country.  I just chose Victoria, Australia because I thought the climate and context would be most similar.  The quiz highlights areas such as food, transportation and housing and helps you to see where you particularly suck (resources and energy).  This is where Matthew and I want to focus.  We want to keep learning.  Keep being the trainees, the plebs.  I think this is why anyone was ever interested in what we were doing anyway.

Being rubbish free is great and we love the skills we learnt during our challenge.  But we think the most important aspect of our rubbish free year is that we no longer feel overwhelmed with the task of trying to live sustainably.  We are now ready to ask the question that was once too big, too vague and too discouraging: Is it possible for ordinary people like us to be sustainable?  Now I know that ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’ are such subjective words they are almost rendered meaningless, so let me clarify what I mean.  Is it possible to live in suburbia, go off to work everyday, watch TV, not like gardening, drive a car and be sustainable? Or does sustainable mean living communally in the country in a mud brick house with 20 saintly vegetarians.  Maybe it does!?  We are going to try to find out.  We will be blogging regularly again from now on with the intent of exploring the relationship between an ordinary western lifestyle  and  sustainability.  Here’s a photo of me sailing on Lake Tekapo recently, can we be sustainable and continue to drive such a long way just for fun? Hope so