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Mo bum on bi s at
Since bursting into the limelight and onto the
pages of OG in 2006 with her book The Good
Life, Linda Cockburn has gone even deeper in
her pursuit of a low-carbon life.Our family has come a long way. Sustainability
means something different than it once did, and
we now live in Tasmania. Travel is no longer an
option. The game of musical chairs is over – yet the
roads are still full of cars, the sky full of planes.
I no longer believe solar panels and wind turbines
are the answer, they’re just a slightly longer route
to extinction and more short-term thinking.
The answers lie in finally seeing what nature
always knew – store it in the soil (regenerative
agriculture), store it in trees, farm it from the
oceans with seaweed, and convert every bit of
waste into biochar. All this while dramatically
reducing what we consume and adopting
alternative economic and social models.
Never has there been such a radical need for
change and there aren’t enough bums on bike seats.
Will we manage to get them there before it’s too
late? Is it already too late? I dream of bell curves.
How can I accept not just human extinction, but an
entire planet of non-human inhabitants? I can’t.
So we turn up for protests, grow our own food
and heirloom seed for others to grow theirs too.
We live as simply as we can. I preach from the
social media pulpit to an audience often already
converted and look for answers to questions we
should have answered 100 years ago.From Vogu to Organic Ga d n
Jessamy Miller writes our regular poultry column but there
is much more to this inner-city, sustainable-living dynamo.I’m very passionate about living a sustainable life, particularly
if it involves sitting under the lemon tree with a glass of
home-brewed kombucha, watching the chooks dig the
vegie garden for me.
Truthfully, I have not always felt a lust for the lentil
lifestyle. My parents started the magazine Grass Roots in
1973, and I grew up on a self-sufficient farm. We were busy
growing food using organic methods while many others
were embracing greed in the 1980s.
As a teen rebel, I immediately moved to the city to make
my own life, preferably a glamorous one, with a flushing loo.
But I couldn’t help myself; planting vegies in pots, mending
clothes, dreaming of chickens. I soon ditched Vogue and
replaced it with Organic Gardener mag; far more appealing,
as well as productive, positive and based on best practice.
Inspired, I set up my urban vegie patch, hit up my parents
for purebred chooks and worked at creating a sustainable
oasis in an urban setting.
For the past six years I have loved sharing my articles
on chooks and low waste living with readers of OG, and
being informed by other writers and doers in its pages. It’s
a community I (and my family) are proud to belong to and
which I believe is making a real impact. By planting more,
being organic, growing our own food, and reusing our
rubbish, we will change our world.celebrating