Distance

Yes, it's been a while since I've updated this blog. It probably would have been cathartic to have been logging my thoughts in this over the past few months but work up until now has just been about keeping my head above water. In a word, it's been unsustainable. I've wanted to plan for the future but I’ve simply been going from day to day.


Distance and perspective is what I've needed, so I went on a short holiday and tried to look at life from a different angle. When I had the chance of a week off at the end of August, I took a ferry from Portsmouth with my girlfriend and travelled across the channel to France. We cycled across Britanny to the centre of Normandy, the destination being an Earthship. An Earthship, for those of you who don't know, is a completely self-sustaining building which is made out of recycled material. Please visit http://web.me.com/kevantrott/Site/Welcome.html for more details.


We enjoyed the holiday a lot and particularly the comfort and solitude that the Earthship offered. Not that the Earthship didn't have its problems, the bedrooms were dark, the toilet had an odd odour, the energy saving light bulbs were very dim and the shower wasn't always warm. However, this didn't detract from the benefits I got from the experience. Sometimes the most important things are the ones that are most difficult to perceive. The Earthship offered peace and a sense that it was safe to be isolated from the rest of the world and yet at the same time I felt very connected to my living environment and my own place in it.


On the last day of our holiday, I opened up the guestbook. Amongst the messages of support and advice there was plenty of criticism. There were complaints about the shower not being hot, the temperature of the rooms, even the hardness of the floor. These things may well have been true but I half expected to find a comment about the water being too wet! This got me thinking about our expectations of green living.


I was lucky enough to speak briefly with one of the owners of the Earthship recently. She told me that they were trying to sell up and that the experience had been quite disheartening, the word she used repeatedly was 'naive'. I wanted to delve deeper into what she meant by 'naive'. Was it the money that was invested in the project? Was it the time that it took to build? Was it their own expectations of what the Earthship would offer?


One Brighton was sold to people as one of the most sustainable developments in the UK. With this title came a great weight of expectation. Living in One Brighton isn’t an end in itself, whilst sustainable energy and minimal waste and healthier living have been designed into the development, these factors don’t automatically generate happiness and unfortunately that’s what people are trying to buy. We are responsible for our own happiness and everybody has a different definition of what that particular word means. Happiness cannot be branded or packaged and it is incredibly difficult to define.


A green lifestyle isn’t a panacea for all of life’s ills. It isn’t even necessarily a happier lifestyle, it is however a more sustainable one. It’s sustainability that we need to define rather than happiness and there has to be a clear distinction between the two. When I worked in the sustainability team in Brighton and Hove City Council, the office would get calls from the public on a wide range of issues, everything from dog mess on the streets to noisy neighbours, areas that were well outside of our remit. Too often people would confuse a barrier to their own happiness with unsustainability.


When we brand a product, a lifestyle or a building development, as being ‘sustainable’, we automatically make ourselves a target for criticism, simply because people have such high expectations. However, it’s difficult to determine when sustainability is actually achieved and in fact it isn't anything that can be achieved if we can't define it. The 10 One Planet Living principles are useful aspirations and guidelines but they aren't definitions of what sustainability actually is. The inclusion of health and happiness as a principle has always made me feel that the development is offering something that is impossible to package and when happiness is used as a selling point it can only leave some people disappointed.


I’m optimistic that someday ‘sustainable living’ will simply be called ‘living’ but in the meantime we are stuck with the reality that we have to sell sustainability to people as if it were a car, a holiday or a brand. An overused quote of Gandhi’s is: “Live simply so that others can simply live” but it’s a good principle to live by in this increasingly commercialised world. We’re responsible for the well-being of a future generation but we’re responsible for our own happiness. Perhaps if we could put more value in our responsibility for each other, even for those yet unknown generations, then maybe we’ll have some appreciation of what true sustainability is. It’s often the things that are the most difficult to perceive that turn out to be the most important.