New Zealand Celsias

For over three decades, Robert and Brenda Vale have been actively researching impacts of human living. While their core focus has been on sustainable and low-impact buildings, in recent years both have taken a strong interest in behaviour and the way people live.  We caught up with the Vales to discuss the couple’s research that has lead to their latest work, a book called Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.

“After working in the architectural area for some time, we were strongly aware that impacts are not just about the building itself—but where you put them,” Robert says. “The emissions of people commuting to the building are greater than the emissions of the building operations.  We got interested in the fact that the building was not the whole impact, and curious about that bigger picture.”

Since the 1970s, the Vales have had many forays and lifestyle shifts. Back in England, they pioneered a self-sufficient property near Cambridge, England and also built called the “Autonomous House” near Nottingham. It was an all-new house which needed no heating (but never got colder than 16 degrees C indoors), collected all its water from the rain on the roof, turned the sewage into compost for the garden, and made its power from grid-connected photovoltaics (the first in the UK).  From low energy use to resident food sources from cows and chickens, the Vales experimented with sustainable living. 

With a recent stint at Landcare Research, Robert extensively studied neighbourhoods and came to understand how neighbourhood behaviour can affect the impacts people have on their environment.  Whereas retrofitting a building can be a costly endeavor, changing people’s behaviour by comparison costs very little, and can have a large effect on the resulting environmental impact, or footprint. What the Vales also came to focus on was land. 

“Land is fixed,” Robert says, “we can’t easily make more land. We’re very conscious of that because when Brenda and I were students back in the late sixties, the world population was 3 billion. Now it’s nearly 7 billion and growing. The lifestyle we have at present retreats further into the past in terms of what others can enjoy globally. Right now, the whole world’s population could probably live at a standard like 1850s Europe. What we have in the way of resources now needs to be shared between more and more people—we each have less and less.” 

It’s this restriction on available land that should in many ways inform our decisions around what we do, what we buy, and how we live. Ultimately, our global population of 7 billion+ people has no more habitable land to annex, nor other areas to exploit for resources.  Concerns about oil are of particular concern in the years ahead and have already caused much global conflict. While many alternatives to oil exist, there is no “one size fits all” solution, and many times oil’s alternatives are not weighed with proper consideration. 

“Going 10,000 km (6214 miles) a year in a car powered by biofuel you grow takes 1 ha (2.47 acres) of land,” says Robert. “You can travel the same distance by horse and use less land area.” While it might be said that both the horse and the biofuel car could be considered carbon neutral, that’s not the only factor at play. “Just because we can make something carbon neutral, doesn’t mean that it’s the best option to choose. By contrast to the biofuel vs. horse example, a six square meter (64.58 sq ft) area will give you the same performance using an electric car and renewable energy source,” he says. 

Incredibly well researched, Time to Eat the Dog? gives readers the opportunity to take apart the issues and weigh the tradeoffs, and arrive at truly informed decisions. Recently in popular culture, “green” has made significant headway. While it’s true that many small choices add up to bigger changes, there’s always the concern that the changes people make won’t be big enough or swift enough to solve the problems at hand. 

“These issues are both serious and difficult. There are so many wussy sustainability books out there.  It’s a bit more complex than grocery bags and light bulbs,” Robert says. 

“‘We the people’ as it were, have the potential to turn it around,” Brenda says. “We’re not forced to buy things. By buying things, we’re literally purchasing our future. It doesn’t just mean taking a cloth bag into the supermarket, but still driving an SUV; it means more fundamental shifts in our behaviour. Many of the changes people are prepared to make are largely cosmetic.” 

In the end, our world will be making many decisions for us. Many resources we take for granted will run out, or become unrecoverable. “The Australian research organization CSIRO did some recent updating to the 'Limits to Growth' that were originally put forward in the 1970s. The original research model predicted the collapse of civilization by 2050. CSIRO updated this with data from 1975 onward and found this trend to be entirely on track,” Brenda says. “We’re sleepwalking towards a disaster. Our entire system is based on finite resources, especially oil.”

“Denial of this situation is absolute at every level. I think that the fundamental problem is the relationship between democracy and capitalism. Both preach that everyone can, and should, be entitled to have more. With those two factors in play there will never be sustainability,” Robert says. “We’re not sure what other system would work, but these two will definitely not get us out of the problems we’re facing. Yet, these are the two big systems that are largely approved of and encouraged worldwide.”

“You tell everyone you can have more in democracy, anyone standing on a platform talking about conservation will not get elected—that’s not what people want to hear.  In politics, you won’t even get in unless you promise people more.  People think they can have more, but it can be green-- that they can effectively have their green cake and eat it too.  The reality is that world just doesn’t have the resources to operate that way.” 

With political cycles worldwide focusing on 3 or 4 year terms, it’s difficult to plan for issues of a longer term nature.  “Politicians need to make sure, for their own survival, that the future will be similar to the past.  The reality is that the future needs to be drastically different than the past if we are to survive,” Robert says.  

You’d think politicians would be thinking about this, but politics is very short term focused: the next 30 years don’t matter as much as the next 3 or 4. Many in New Zealand and beyond are coming to terms that the solutions are entirely up to them, that keeping a good living standard will mean a deliberate, considered approach. Robert offers some useful advice.

“It’s about awareness. Think small in every possible way, less stuff and more time, more enjoyment. Quality over quantity. It’s not like working 60 hours a week is making people desperately happy. We could be more fulfilled with day to day things rather than chasing money. We’ve been wrongly taught to equate happiness with objects,” he says. 

“Do as much as you can for yourself: vegetable gardens, keeping chooks, having a small house, being able to walk to work, all those kind of things. Manage with as little as possible, do a lot more service things rather than things that cost money or resources,” he says. Rounding out that list would be building stronger bonds with friends, family, and neighbors in the larger community to create resiliency.    

Robert and Brenda Vale are research fellows at the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. They are authors of numerous books, and won the United Nations Global 500 Award for Environmental Achievement in 1994.

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