Step by step suburban sustainability
Chickens feeding
61356
Energy; Water; Waste
"
Approaching the revamp of our lifestyle one step at a time, has made the journey both manageable and rewarding.
"
Both Sarah and Simon come from an environmental background and variously work to promote sustainable agriculture through research, stakeholder engagement and application, and policy. Whilst their jobs focus on sustainable food production, their passion for healthy, nutritious and environmentally sound food production also permeates their home life.
's story
We both come from an academic background that covers environmental and agricultural sciences, so have a pretty good understanding of the importance of living within our biophysical means. The addition of a son to our family a number of years ago, only strengthened our resolve to ensure that we minimised our impact on this world for future generations. The challenge, as we saw it, lay in crafting the sum of our daily actions into a bigger lifestyle picture that sought to close energy and nutrient loops where possible, and reduce our external consumption in practical ways.
's recommendations
Probably the most significant single action that has helped us on this path has been Sarah's attendance on a permaculture design course run by John Champagne. The course helped us design a plan for our home and garden (and more broadly, our lifestyle) that addressed our needs and values. At the end of the course, Sarah left with a plan drawing of our house and garden that contained around 30 ideas for transforming our energy-demanding suburban home, into a more sustainable unit. These ideas included the rotation of chickens around our garden, skylights to reduce daytime electricity consumption and the use of the cool air under our house for passive air conditioning. Critically, the plan is evolving as we refine our ideas and draw on new information. Being able to work our way through the individual (yet complementary) array of ideas on our plan means that we can tackle tasks as our time and finances allow. But importantly we can see the bigger picture of a more sustainable lifestyle, and how these individual components synergistically fit together. For us, the permaculture course offered a way to configure a myriad of ideas for sustainable living into a single vision - and importantly provide us with a plan for achieving it!
