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Sustainable Living Champion Rhys Taylor

This week’s Green Collar Job Q&A post is with Rhys Taylor. Rhys is self-employed as a researcher, editor, facilitator and project manager, for clients such as local government, crown research agencies and non-government organisations. Part-time paid and partly volunteering, he coordinates the Sustainable Living Education Trust, a charitable trust which provides materials and support to evening class tutors running practical Sustainable Living courses for householders across NZ, which will only become more valuable. A man of many talents as well as other contract work Rhys has co-authored papers on social science aspects of sustainability, published in international journals, and recently chapters in an E-book ‘Hatched’ from public funded contract work with Landcare Research. Rhys also writes a column for The Christchurch Press Good Living supplement on Thursdays, photo-interviews with local people who are changing their lifestyle towards sustainability. (This is his first time as local interviewee instead of interviewer.) Here are his  answers to our questions:

1. What do you do to live more sustainably (with a low impact) in your life?

Try to reduce waste to landfill, enjoy cooking meals from fresh food, bicycle around when here in the city, and we are building a passive-solar, green-roofed ‘high thermal mass’ house on our land in Geraldine. Eventually we will relocate there – meanwhile driving to and fro is a carbon-waster, in the absence of public transport alternatives, although since 2009 our new car uses 30% less petrol than its predecessor.

2. How do you live more sustainably at work?

When in Christchurch I work from a rented flat in Sydenham, as a community educator with Sustainable Living Education Trust and also help businesses and councils using a strategic sustainability framework from The Natural Step. These are both practical, holistic approaches to sustainability.

3. What do you think is the bigget environmental issue we need to deal with in Christchurch/New Zealand?

Need for ground water conservation, and unsustainable polluting land use practices in lowland farming, are the biggest current issues in Canterbury.

4. What makes you smile?

Political satire and Morris dancers (who are some of the happiest people I know)

5. What’s your biggest pet peeve?

Recent loss of democratic representation at Environment Canterbury. It is hard to trust unelected commissioners who replaced councillors, however individually capable and intelligent they may be. This sorry process was a serious undermining of public representation and good governance, which brought protest onto the streets of Christchurch. As a result, I resigned from the Christchurch Area Committee, where I had been one of several advisors to the elected councillors.

6. What is your favourite colour and why?

Greens as seen in NZ native bush – so many different versions of green exist and are most enjoyable when vividly lit by our clean sunshine. Sadly lowland Canterbury has less surviving bush than any other region.

7. Do you have a favourite place and why?

A small island called Ynys Llanddwyn just off Anglesey in North Wales, where I worked and lived as a summer vacation time warden for the Nature Conservancy Council, helping to protect beach-nesting Ringed Plovers and some rare dune orchids. The one-eyed bird-watchers sometimes trampled the orchids and the botanists disturbed the bird nests, which showed me that integration and holistic thinking about human behaviour is crucial to conservation. ‘Communing with nature’ they called it back then – and if you have such experiences early enough in your emotional life, you seek to become a Planet carer instead of a Planet trasher.

You can view some atmospheric pictures from the lighthouse at Llandwyn and Google aerial view here.

8. What is your connection to SIFT?

I first came across SIFT as a supporter of the school students’ weeks at Tiromoana [Untouched World Charitable Trust Programme which SIFT has given a grant to], led by the able freelance environmental educator Jocelyn Papprill.

9. Do you remember your favourite teacher and why they were your favourite?

My favourite secondary teacher, back in Lancashire, UK, was an old-style field naturalist who took us out of the classroom and enthused about nature. I became interested in particular in animal behaviour, which is why psychology and biology both featured in my subsequent choice of degree study (the multidisciplinary Human Sciences BA at Oxford). I’ve looked at Resource Management since then, with a mid-career MSc at Lincoln University. Some good teachers there, too.

10.What do you want to leave behind?

A smaller than average footprint on the natural world, so I am actively tree planting, managing 3 ha of bush restoration on our land and constructing a house which will be durable and energy-efficient in use.  Fortunately, my partner Anne shares these passions and knows it is a lifetime project.

11. What do you think the future will bring?

Troubled times, prompted by a peak in cheap oil production and accelerating climate change, collapses in the financial system and social unrest. Alongside these global trends is a resurgence in many places of community self sufficiency, local economies and a re-skilling for transition.  As an optimist, I am hoping that the latter will prevail. A NZ futures research project with Landcare Research at Lincoln, to which I contributed, found that many New Zealanders hoped for a life which is community-based, collaborative and sustainable, whilst anticipating a trend towards a future which is unsustainable and socially competitive. (Four Futures book out of print, but PDF free here.)

12.Who is someone you really admire and why?

Lizzie Gillespie from Dunedin, now mostly in the UK, who produced The Age of Stupid documentary-drama last year with her film director colleague Franny Armstrong, and went on to launch 10:10 globally. This is a campaign to encourage everyone to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% starting now, in 2010, by practical actions at home, work and school (without waiting for international agreements, but still urging success in those). I volunteered to bring 1010 to NZ and am recruiting a team of volunteers to help. More information here.

13. What is happening outside your window right now?

It’s raining, which is welcomed by gardeners and farmers here on the dry east of New Zealand.

14.What is your favourite breakfast?

I like occasional cooked breakfasts, perhaps before a day out walking, but don’t get many of those, so it is usually a home assembled mix of organic grains and fruits plus apple juice.  Does that make me a bearded muesli-eater?  Good job then that my toes don’t like sandals!

15.What is the best piece of advice you can give us?

Keep learning new skills through life, especially ones useful for everyday such as sewing, cooking, preserving, carpentry, mechanical repairs, and especially gardening. I’m helping Louise at the Christchurch Botanic gardens run quarterly public workshop sessions on vegetable growing in 2010 – there’s lots of interest from people who are starting their first vege garden. They have realised that home grown is tasty, healthy, fun, provides exercise and will still be there if the supermarket closes. You might say ‘awareness is growing’!