This is the second half of my interview with the bottomless pit of information: Michael O’Connell.
In this final (yet still, very long) section, we talk about the more practical aspects of working in East Timor.
We talk about alternative energy systems, how to run a successful aid program, the best way to train people, newly implemented technology developments, other major problems in Timor, advice for design students, and advice on sustainability philosophy.
Q. Who do you work for, and what do they do? What is your part in that?
A. So, most of the work I do is with a non-profit organisation – Australian based – the Alternative Technology Association. The ATA started in 1980 with a few blokes in a lounge room in Melbourne, who wanted to get together and discuss –(funnily enough) alternative technology. Things like wind power and solar power and living sustainably before it was really fashionable. And the organisation kind of grew out of that, and as it started to get bigger and bigger they created a membership driven association. They created an in-house publication which quickly became popular enough they started publishing it.
Q. So were you in this original group?
A. No, I wasn’t one of the founding members. I didn’t really officially join up until around the late 90s probably. I knew about them, I had found out about them a couple of years earlier and had read some of the magazines, but I didn’t really bother becoming a member until a couple of years after I found out about them. And so, they went from strength to strength.
So, the magazine you can buy by them today is sold at newsagents, and called “Renew”. There’s another newish one called “Sanctuary”, which is a more up-market sustainable housing magazine. The group does a lot of grassroots stuff, they do education and advocacy; they have members’ advice on energy efficiency and how to live sustainably. They’ve run programs on water, they’ve run programs to retrofit houses for lower income people, and they’ve done a lot of project stuff.
The nice thing about ATA is that they’re independent and non for profit. They’re independent from the government. They get funding through memberships. So, they’re funded by project grants – specific grants for different specific projects – and because they’re pretty much self-funded they can be independent, and hence they’re well regarded by government and industry, because they – we – have and independent voice.
Q. So when you have gone to Timor, have you paid your own way?
A. Yes, at first, sometimes… again, it depends whether I go over as a volunteer or if I go over on a work related basis. I’ve done a lot of both. I’ve done a lot of work with the ATA, on projects and as past president and those kinds of things. The International Projects Group are a part of ATA, and they’re the ones that go to Timor. There are different branches of ATA all over Australia under the umbrella, but they basically run themselves, with some rules they have to work by. The IPG is now treated as a special branch.
So it started out with one guy who was really keen on East Timor. He was ‘really dark’ on what the government did back in the 70s, not recognising Timor when Indonesia went in, and so, he wanted to go over there and see what it was like, and see what had happened. So he went over there in 2001, and he was so moved, when he came back he asked us ‘What can we do?’ and there were lots of team members who wanted to do something. Our primary expertise amongst a lot of our members was technology – solar panels and power and that sort of thing. How could we get involved in East Timor? We decided we would contact some ‘friendship groups’ that were around, and contact some other non-government organisations to see if our skills would be useful over there. Out of that grew this whole thing. We’ve been going over there, installing projects since 2003, and I’ve been doing that since 2006.
What we do is, we respond. We talk to local friendship groups and representatives of sister-cities that have ties with the communities. The community identifies a project – let’s say to put solar power in a community centre. So, the friendship group comes to us, and we talk about helping them in the way they want. We do a system design, and we give them a rough indication of what it’s going to cost (just in terms of equipment, we can do it a bit cheaper because we have a donations centre). Then once they’ve got that, they go out and do fundraising. Once they’ve got the funds, we then start the project up – we usually have several projects running at any given time in the year – and then once a year (somewhere around September, in the dry season) we go over with the volunteers and we do installations and training as well.
One of the things we didn’t want to do is be exactly one of the things I said before <part 1 of interview>. We didn’t want to just go in there as a ‘Great White Hope’, get our photos taken with our systems and some smiling people, and leave and then never come back. We wanted to make some lasting impact. And so, we committed (to other people and to ourselves) that we would be there for the long haul – at least 10 years of going back there and doing the sort of works necessary.
Also, we only go in to a community or area if they could make people available to be trained to use the system and repair the system, and to help install it.
Q. So it’s all by nomination of the communities themselves, requesting? You’re not just going in?
A. Yeah. We never go into a community unannounced or uninvited. We always go in in response to a community request. That was one of our key points, we said that we didn’t want to do that. We go up there when we find there’s a real need, when the local people have identified a need, something they want. Then we go there and help them achieve that.
Q. First of all, please just clarify how and what you’re implementing again?
A. We usually implement solar systems and lighting systems. We have three main things that we do. Two main things are those, and there’s another thing that we do occasionally. The three things are: Lighting for houses (solar powered) and larger lighting systems, so community based things like a clinic or community centre or a Suco(sp?) and we’ve done a few police stations, but we usually tend to stick to community based stuff. We’ve also done a few water pumping systems, but the other main thing we do is training. We’ve done a lot of training, which we do in conjunction with the installations, but we’ve also done separate training to train people up in a formal classroom environment to become installers themselves. So, a lot the work we did last year and this year is ‘Train the Trainer’. We’ve developed a TAFE style course, we did one and South Australian TAFE did a building course as well. Both of those are modelled off the TAFE curriculum here to national standards, and that taken up by the training ministry in Timor as a framework for their training education. It was a good feeling when we’d actually managed to do that. In some ways, that was a better contribution than a lot of what we’d previously worked on, because that actually builds up technical expertise and skills.
Q. Is it difficult to train people when there’s such a high amount of illiteracy and things like that?
A. Not really, and it depends on what kind of training you’re doing. We try to tailor the training to fit who we were doing it for. For example: This was ‘Train the trainer’ stuff. So these people have basic literacy and numeracy skills, and some technical skill, and we were training in electrical, specifically in solar power training. But a lot of the other stuff we do out in the villages where we’re installing systems with that for them, we train local people. And they have very little in the way of literacy and numeracy skills, so it’s very much a matter of ‘show and tell’.
We don’t try and explain too much of how it works, but of what the panels do, and explain electricity. To understand what the batteries do, what batteries are, those sorts of things. Then we just show them the basics they need on any displays: ‘this is what the lights look like when it’s working properly, this is how it looks when it’s not working properly’, ‘here’s how to use a screwdriver’, ‘here’s how to use a multimeter’, ‘here’s how to use something else’. It’s all about hands on, very little documentation, if any, and usually if there’s documentation it’s in pictures. There’s a very vocational focus and a very hands on focus, and that works a treat. Again, it’s being culturally sensitive, and sensitive to the existing skill levels that people have.
Q. Do you have knowledge of the energy that goes into the products and how the products are manufactured?
A. In a general sense. We don’t try and do a complete energy audit of the entirety individually, but we know (being a part of the industry) the key players in the group know that pretty much the energy stored the embodied systems is much less than what they’d ever have used themselves in their lifetime. We have been trying to, but haven’t done it yet, is trying to figure out a way of encouraging people to sustainably dispose of parts in the system (particularly batteries) when they come to the end of their useful life. And it’s something we’re struggling with because there’s not a lot of infrastructure regarding their recycling and waste departments, although they’re getting better. At least they have do have citywide rubbish collections now, which they never used to in the past. And there are some smaller recycling systems in place. We have been particularly successful with batteries by letting people know there is some value within those batteries. Once you let people know there is value, they’re more inclined to recycle.
Waste culture, as you said, is something that they’re struggling with, but what I try to tell people is that: ‘It’s not that long ago we were doing the same thing. There was a massively big ad campaign in the 70s and 80s to put rubbish in the rubbish bins. Clean up the streets. Clean up Australia. That kind of thing.’ And as a friend of mine who also goes to Timor pointed out a while ago, we do exactly the same thing. People are complaining ‘all they do is take out big piles [of rubbish] and burn it. It’s disgusting’. We do the same thing, except it’s out of sight. And what we’ve done is exactly the same kind of waste disposal system that they have, except ours is on an industrial scale. What we have is instead people who come out and put it on piles in the street, we have big trucks which pick it and take it to a place we don’t see, and put it in piles over there, so, we’re not that much better at dealing with our waste then they are with theirs. It’s that theirs is just much more visible.
Q. Is any of your product/system able to be repaired or repurposed by the Timorese?
A. The batteries certainly can be recycled. Lights… at the moment, probably not, and the solar panels have a life expectancy of at least 25 to 30 years, so we’re not expecting those to be a problem at all, because for most that’s another 10 to 15 yet.
Q. So overall do you feel like your products are sustainable, and sustainable for Timor?
A. Certainly, and with the added qualifier that nothing is sustainable until you make it sustainable. And it also it depends on your definition and extent of ‘sustainable’.
Q. In the sense that it’s feasible economically and ecologically, and long term, will it last, and is it worthwhile?
A. Again, depending on what measure, and how find sustainability. I’ll give you an idea: The solar panels have four major components in the system. There’s the panels themselves, the batteries, the cables and the electronics (either a controller or regulator or inverter). The regulator should last at least 10 years, the panels should last at least 25 to 30 years and the batteries last 5 to 10 years. The cables last as long as the system lasts, but rats (as rats do) chew through them occasionally. Those things should be able to be recycled. The solar panels are silicon, with a few metals in there, glass and aluminium, so there’s a lot of value in them. The batteries are certainly recyclable, but they are not always recycled. They’re probably the most toxic part of the system because they’re full of lead and other chemicals, and as I said earlier, it’s something that we’re working on, to see what we can do locally to make sure they are recycled at the end of life.
And that’s a big part of another project I’ve been working on with another NGO. Their big proposal is ‘how do we deal with all that electric waste?’, and by the time we have enough of those systems reaching the end of their useful life, I am hopeful that we will have processes in place where those things are recycled as a matter of course. Whether that’s the case or not in another 10 or 15 years, we’ll have to see, but it’s something that is in our thinking and forefront of our minds all the time: ‘How do we re-use, recycle or re-purpose some of these waste items.
Most of the things in a solar panel system, at this stage, I would say are better to be recycled than repurposed, because there aren’t many other things you can do with them. Although having said that, I’ve seen photographs of what would have been – what would be, or could be – a working solar panel concreted into a kitchen as a kitchen bench, because nobody knew what it was. So you had this $16,000 panel, as this beautiful glass top bench, in this little, tiny, mud-brick hut, in the middle of Africa.
Q. You obviously would feel as though your work is important, and it inarguably is. What ways have the projects that you have worked on have impacted the lives of the Timorese? Is it visible or tangible?
A. I’ll give you an example: When Indonesia left, some of the military went through and destroyed everything. So they went through everything. The first time I went to East Timor, I looked around, coming down from the airport. I looked at all the shells of buildings, burnt out husks and things, and the devastation and the conditions that people were living in. And I thought ‘My God! What a mess this place is in! How horrible!’. At the same time, the people who I was with who had been going there since 2002 went ‘Wow! Look at this place! Hasn’t it improved so much?!’ and I went ‘What, you’re joking!’, they said ‘You wouldn’t believe how much better it’s gotten!’. I found myself (in 2009 or 2010, 2011 in particular) having the exact same experience, but on the other side of the fence. New volunteers were coming through and going ‘Oh God, this place is a wreck…’ and I turned around and said ‘Oh wow, look at this, this is wonderful. Look over there! That building has been painted! How wonderful?!’, and they couldn’t believe it. So that’s one aspect of it, you can see the rebuilding and everything.
Another aspect of it is the state of the streets. The first time I got there, there was rubbish everywhere, there was no real civic pride, and people weren’t looking after the streets, and it leant the place an air of desolation, more than what it needed to have. Now, they have crews sweeping the streets, the have rubbish collections, in Dhili in particular. So that’s another aspect, the civic pride coming back into people. The foreshores and a lot of young people getting down there, and you’ve got the facilities for cleaning etc.
Just to put it into context, I’ll explain what I mean. Even though the country’s being electrified, in a good and a bad way, 20% of the people will never, ever see an electric light, because they’re just living in places too remote. Another 20-30% on top of that, it will be 5 to 10 years before they’ll see it. So, there are a significant number of people – hundreds of thousands – who will never see electricity or have power. So for those people, their only option is (because they also earn so little) candles and kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps can be quite expensive, and candles can even be quite expensive, if it’s the only light you have to live by. People go ‘Oh candles, aren’t they wonderful. Romantic dinners, with the music playing and the candle’s burning along’, and that’s great, but if you have to work by candlelight, or do homework by candlelight or read by candlelight, it’s suddenly becomes a different proposition. And funnily enough, candles are expensive there, and they give of hardly any light. You’ll have people in a village, when it comes to 7:30 at night, a lot of people who can’t afford candles and stuff either sit around by wood firelight (which they don’t do often because they have to spend so long getting wood) or you go to bed at 8pm, and get up at 6 the next morning. Can’t study at night time, kids can’t study for school, parents can’t do anything after they’ve tended the animals or the fields. So, just putting in a tiny lighting system – something we include with the solar system – two or three lights in a system, just to provide enough light at night. Which allows the kids to do homework, which also allows the parents to do work after hours, which also allows the community to get together and have a chat, you know? It makes a huge difference, an amazing difference, and in fact it’s cheaper in a lot of cases now to put in solar than to run a kerosene lamp. The money that it costs for a kerosene lamp or candles, you could pay off a small amount of a solar power system like that reasonably quickly.
And the other part that makes a big difference now, is funnily enough, they’re asking for phone chargers, for mobile phones. So now, everybody’s got a mobile phone, because they’ve bypassed the fixed line completely. So everyone wants mobile phones. Most people in the cities have got mobile phones. The problem is that you can’t charge them up, because you’ve got no power! And there are still many areas where there is no reception, by the way. There was one village we were at where you had to walk for 20 minutes up the side of a mountain for reception. In a lot of places there is, and in a lot of places there isn’t… but it’s getting better. You have to either walk down to the nearest village or walk down to the market once a week to find a place or somebody who can charge your phone. So a lot of people have been requesting as well within the solar system and the lighting system, for somewhere that they can charge their phones. In this village lighting scheme we’ve done over 800 houses, in one particular region. We’ve got trained technicians there who will take the equipment and install it now, but we’ve had to modify our equipment to add some phone chargers, because that is what they’ve told us they need.
Another example, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a place called Bhageer (sp?), which is at the base of the second largest mountain, over the east side of the country. And it’s a fairly remote place, fairly large place, and we’ve done some solar panel training there. Just at the end of 2011, we installed a large system which is big enough for 17 laptops for training purposes, for what they have there, a couple of sewing machines, sound system and music gear for the kindergarten, all powered by solar. Now they can train people up – not just in basic office skills – but they can train people up in IT and all kinds of computer related courses, so that they can be ready to go on to higher study, or do things for around the village. The next step is another organisation who is putting in a wireless internet hub, so that they can get reasonable internet access as well.
For those people, it’s going to make a huge difference, and every time people say ‘what you do is a drop in the ocean, why don’t you do something more?’ What I say is, we’ve made a big difference in the lives of many people. One of my favourite stories is of the beach after a storm. The whole foreshore of the beach is covered in starfish, which are starting to shrivel and die. There’s a little kid running up and down the shore throwing starfish into the ocean. One goes in, and the next one, and the next one. And a guy walking down the beach, as the kid gets closer to him, stops and says “What are you doing?!”, and the little kid goes “I’m saving the starfish, so they won’t die!”. The man says, “There are thousands of these things, what possible difference could you make?” and the kid picks up a starfish, flings it back into the ocean, and without skipping a beat says “I made a difference to that one.” And that’s what it’s really about. There are only so many things you can do. You may not be able to do much, but if you can change the lives of one family, or of one person, why not do it? If you can change the life of more people, why not do that? And from a selfish point of view, you get an incredible kind of buzz knowing it.
Q. I can imagine. Other than the success, do you feel like there is something missing from your approach, or how you’re working?
A. Look, there’s always room for improvement, and there’s a case in point from the multimeter story <part 1> is a classic example of us not thinking things through or paying attention to detail, or having appreciation for just how much pre-information is available about what needs to be done. What we’re doing now is a lot different to our approach from a couple of years ago, and I’m sure that in another 5 years will again be different. It’s also different because the culture is changing. East Timor now is not the same as it was 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, because they do have that infrastructure in the major towns, and they do have all those things happening.
We’ve learnt a lot. We’ve learnt to be a lot more hardnosed with what we accept and what we aren’t willing to accept. Even though we had a large focus on training beforehand, we’ve got a much stronger focus on that now. And we’re shifting the way we’re doing things to the extent that we’re doing more and more initial and ongoing training and then stepping back. Our main goal is to – which we’re hopefully moving towards – is to put ourselves out of work. So, to get to a point we’re not needed anymore.
One of the things we’ve been very conscious of, for example, is, in the beginning, right through to 2011, we were the only game in town. There were other organisations around doing similar things, but in terms of the kind of projects we were doing, and bigger projects and community centres and everything, we were one of the very first and few organisations around who were putting in and following up and stuff (because we do go back in, check everything, follow up etc.). But now, we’re building up a lot of expertise within the country, and a lot of expertise in this stuff. There are other organisations doing similar things with different stuff. Mercy Corp, who I worked with earlier this year, is running a course similar to ours, about training up on and maintaining the solar panels, and they’re also setting up a business model to support that. And so, we have to be very careful now that we aren’t accepting projects that should and could be done by local people, because what we now will find (and now we’re aware of it and are changing the way we work to accommodate it) is that we don’t want to start to compete with local businesses. We’ve put all these foundations in so people can start up their own businesses and enterprises. If we start to come in and undercut them because we charge less with our donated equipment, it defeats the whole purpose of going in the first place. So in that sense we have become aware of changing aspects and consciously put it into our planning. And as I said, there will be more things that have changed, but that is the most concrete example I can think of.
Q. Obviously you see this of large importance, but if you had to choose a second and third kind of product to work on in East Timor, to target different problems, what kind of product or system would you work on?
A. The most obvious one for us at ATA would be water, which we’ve done some work on. Water infrastructure (and I actually have a few friends who used to work on water), and for me that’d be the interesting one, because it sort of does partially fit into my skills set, and it’s something I’m interested in.
Another one I’m personally interested in, and I’ve done some of it in the past, is farming and permaculture. I like to think I’ve got a bit of a permaculture garden. I’m not really sure how extensive it truly is, but it’s getting there slowly, and I’ve got a few things going. I’ve got a very strong interest in that area, and that would be another area that I’m personally keen to get into.
Q. So, aside from your personal knowledge field, are there any other big problems that Timor is facing that can’t be addressed by you or ATA? Is there anything that you feel needs to be addressed? We’ve had people mention things like domestic violence, contraception (with the Catholic influence) and health care, and other domains of infrastructure, and things like that?
A. Domestic violence is a big one. Health care is also quite interesting one, so is contraception. I’ve noticed that they have started putting condom machines in hotel rooms in Dhili, so that’s showing a change there. You’d never get away with it in the smaller centres. The average children per woman are about 7, and there is a strong animism on top of the Catholicism. People do understand how pregnancy works, but their beliefs counter it.
Certainly by far, if there’s anything worldwide that you can do, which would slow the population explosion that they’re experiencing (they have the highest population of people under 25, just about, and it’s going crazy, still it’s expected to go from 1.2m to 2.5m within the next two years or sooner), and it’s been proven everywhere around the world, over and over again: if you want to make significant social change, if you really want to reduce population and birth-rates, if you really want to improve health of people and the health of communities, you have to educate women. Full stop. The one thing that you can do that will make more difference than anything else is to educate women. Even in a fairly patriarchal society like East Timor, women do still make decisions about their bodies, about their homes, about food and what food gets served up. Women are in charge of nutrition, a lot of the social aspects there. The men might make the rules, and there are lots of problems with domestic violence, but educating women is still fundamental to making changes. If that is not done, there will be no significant change. Or, we can make changes, but they will be nowhere near as significant as they would be if the women are educated.
And education the first step towards empowerment, and once you have women who are empowered, you can work on equal footing. Timor does have elements of that. Women are in politics, and it’s not like they’re excluded particularly from everything, but to give you an example: One of the women that I had in the training course was (and they were all adults), a 44 year old woman, with a couple of kids, and she was so happy to be at the training course, because her husband had given her permission to attend. So she actually had to ask her husband for permission to attend this course, which we might think is outrageous. I can’t think of many women in Australia who would put up with that rubbish, the reaction would be ‘well I’m going, get over it!’. Not everywhere, there’d be a discussion about looking after the kids when one parent was away, but this was a straight out request for permission. It’s not everywhere; there are some very educated women (in positions of leadership) but not many. So yes, without doubt, that’s the biggest one. And it’s universal, not just East Timor.
The other part is, as I’ve said before, continuing that process of having a proper, well organised and entrenched rule of law; where the law is impartial. Even though people complain about the things that might happen here with our legal system, most people just take on board and appreciate that the law is blind, effectively. So, the law is applied equally to everyone, and there’ll be hell to pay if it’s not. Over there, it’s not like that. There is a lot of backroom dealing.
If those two things happen, it’d make a massive difference.
Q. To end: If you could give someone (a design student) who has never been to Timor any advice on how to approach a design project for the Timorese people, what would it be?
A. If they were going to do it in complete absence and isolation of any firsthand knowledge or real contact, first of all find out as much as you can. Look at pictures, look at photos, read reports, see if you can find documentaries with imagery. Talk to (if you can find them – there are plenty of Timorese communities in Melbourne) a friendship group. Visit friendship groups. Most councils in different regions have an associated friendship group.
Be aware that Timor is not a homogenous country. The people on the coast are different to those in the mountains, in the sense of how they live. Just as an example, to explain how things happen. I met a guy in Acousi (sp?) in a little enclave which is in West Timor, but is part of East Timor. And he said that he taught fishing. He’s been teaching fishing for 40-50 years. He said, without a doubt, that the people in Acousi were the worst people to teach fishing that he had experienced in his whole life, but he understood why. During the Indonesian occupation, and the forcible control they had, they moved everyone from the mountains onto the coast, and everyone from the coast on to the mountains. It destroyed the communities and destroyed their way of life. The people from the mountains had no idea on how to fish, they had never even eaten a fish, because the coast was so far away. The people from the coast, put onto the freezing cold mountains, with animals they’ve never had to worry about, and crops that don’t work on the shore that they have no idea how to harvest. So these two (even though they had the same language, the same base culture) completely different lifestyles, crossed and it completely demised their way of living. We’d have two completely different solutions if we were to implement the same project, two different weather patterns.
So don’t make the assumption that East Timor is all the same. So if you’re going to be doing a project, look at a region. Find out about that region. Find about the weather. Find out about the plants. Find out about what sort of customs they have. They might be the same as other ones, there’s going to be some things that aren’t. You might find that you’re looking at working on the east, where the native language isn’t Tetun. There are four or five main different languages. Theoretically, if you could speak the language, people would be amazed, and you’ll make friends very quickly. But there’s little things like that. So, do as much research as you can.
And, assume nothing. People sometimes go do a project, and it’s not going to be in a main village or main city. And even if it is, always just assume that there’s no support, no proper infrastructure, no nothing.
And don’t think that you can sit there, and invent a project which is going to help anyone, without doing any proper research or talking to anyone. There is so much out there, so many examples of people coming in and imposing a project on a small local community, and you just watch it fall apart. The locals react with ‘What is this, we didn’t ask for this, we don’t want you here. It doesn’t work; when it breaks nobody can fix it. Go’.
And from a technical point of view, sometimes it’s better to design things with simple materials. Sometimes go as low tech as possible to achieve the result. And it’s an interesting thing; I was having a discussion about when you implement a project – particularly a physical implementation of something or a product. There is a discussion, and it’s a really interesting discussion I’ve had with a lot of people. In some ways, it’s better to build or design something that is not as reliable as it could be (not deliberately bad), but something which takes a bit of maintenance, rather than to build something that is inherently low maintenance. If it’s very low maintenance, it won’t break down often, so people will not have the experience of fixing it. It might be high reliability, but if something does break, it’s a high-tech failure with a high-tech solution, which immediately starts to put it out of the reach of local people. And also if it breaks so infrequently, people won’t remember how to fix it when it comes time to fix it. So in some ways you’re better off building something simpler, maybe not quite as robust, but that needs maintenance reasonably often, so that people get used to maintaining it.
So, to give you a broad example, you could put in a tap fitting, for example, that’s got a ceramic washer. They hardly ever break down, but when they do, you need a ceramic washer, and you need to pull the tap apart. It’s not the highest of high tech, but it’s involved, clearances are really small, bits of dirt and grit can get in there, and it takes a long time to fix it up. Because people do it so infrequently, they’ll forget, and the parts are quite expensive. Alternatively, you can put in an old style tap, with a rubber washer. A rubber washer will wear out pretty quickly, but, you can get one almost everywhere. And if it breaks semi-regularly, people will remember how to do it. If it needs to be replaced every half-a-year on half-a-dozen taps, the people can just go, well, it needs a new washer, and fix it, because they’ll remember how. In some ways, that is a better solution than a more durable product.
When you first hear it, intellectually it sort of makes sense, but you still think ‘no! That’s not what I want to do, I want to make it reliable, I want to make it perfect, I want to make it this’, but no, it may not be the best solution in the local context. And that’s the key, finding out the local context.
Q. So would you say, even though we generally interpret sustainability as lasting effect and utility over an extended time frame, it isn’t sometimes as necessary or important as accessibility of maintenance, in context?
A. Yeah, and again, as an example: I remember having this really interesting conversation with the editor of ‘Home Builder’ magazine, and we were just having a chat about the different types of housing out there, and what defines a sustainable house. And he posed “What’s more sustainable: a $300,000 or $400,000 straw bale house, with all this extra stuff brought in from everywhere. OR, a simple, wooden structure, that costs $500, that you have to rebuild every three years?”. How do you say which one is more sustainable? Is it more sustainable because there’s less embodied energy? Is it more sustainable because it didn’t use as many materials? Is it more sustainable because it costs you less than $1000 every five years, opposed to $500,000 over twenty? Is it more sustainable if you could rebuild it out of local materials, because in 3-5 years, you could grow enough wood locally to rebuild it? Should it have a tin roof, should you not have a tin roof? Is a tin roof more sustainable than a thatch roof? How much of our effort should we consider in that equation?
And as soon as you start asking those questions, all of these preconceptions and ideas we have about what should and shouldn’t be sustainable (based on what we’re taught and what we observe in our current environment) start to fall away. And you start to think, ‘Ah, okay. There’s a completely different way at looking at what sustainable actually means’.
People may think that some things are sustainable, and then you look at all the other process behind it that they have to use to make that so-called ‘sustainable’ thing. Should you go out and buy garden implements, or should you just use a stick that you have to get off a branch off a tree in your backyard? Should you steal a stick from someone else’s fence, and how is that not sustainable? If you can use a stick in your backyard, is it better to use that, or go out and buy a shovel, made with industrial production, that will last you 30 years? I don’t know. And how far back do you take that analysis. And, if it takes you 20 hours a week to do the ‘sustainable thing’, when you could pay someone else to do something similar, for only 10 hours of your time a week, and you’re supporting someone’s job, again, which is more sustainable?
There’s so much to it, and the more you delve into it, the more complex it becomes. And the more complex it becomes, the less people want to think about it. So, there’s a balance there too. You have to just ask yourself: ‘For me, now, what is sustainable?’ then, ‘for the community, what is sustainable’, and so on.
That discussion can expand to fill all the time in the universe, but it’s still important that you have an understanding, awareness, and an appreciation, and a perception that that exists. And that there are things that you should and could consider as part of any design project like that.
Accept the fact that you can always do better, but also always accept the fact that you have to draw a line somewhere and say ‘this is where I stop’.
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Thanks to Michael for his informative interview, and the ability to put everything into perspective.
Thanks to the ATA and other NGOs for their fantastic, life changing work for the people of Timor and other developing nations.
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