PIGFACE TOUR PICTURES:

SET 14.

Home made fibreglass canoes. The neighbourhood centre would have several of these for anyone to use.

Ornamental garden pots nmade on the lathes.

Keep an eye open for uninvited visitors to the Tea House.

This old launch will be made into a pirate ship.

This is a model of a normal neighbourhood, a dormitory suburb with much space taken by the car, a supermarket with parking space (top right), petrol station (near top left), derelect

factory (bottom centre), and no useful trees in the park (top centre right). The next model shows how we can transform this space.

Most of the roads have been dug up and converted to commons. The petrol station has been changed into a community workshop. The derelect factory is a small market garden. The supermarket is a small factory, meaning people living around here can get to work on foot or bike. Where the roads were there are now community orchards, a swimming pool, woodlots, greenhouses and animal pens. The park has fruit and nut trees , a pond with fish, and running bamboo confined on the island. The supermarket parking lot is now a fish factory, containing ponds, and its roof is a garden. A corner shop remains ,(orange roof top left) and only a few roads are needed. W e could redevelop your neighbourhood to be highly self-sufficient without bulldozers or capital; all it would need is eager community working bees plus shovels! What is not visible in the models is all the time, energy, skill and good will that is latent in your neighbourhood now...isolated, watching TV 3+ hours a day. It could be harnessed up to perform miracles. Some people could live in the new neighbourhoods almost without having to work for money, living very simply and making their community contribution (i.e., paying their taxes) through the working bees.

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This is the end of our standard explanatory tour. Our main aims have been to show that consumer-capitalist growth-obsessed society is not sustainable, not just, does not deliver a good quality of life even to rich people, and is headed for breakdown...and to show that there is an alternative. We thinkThe Simpler Way defuses the big global problems, mainly because it dramatically reduces the consumption of resources, and that it can provide a high quality of life for all people. It would be easily built if enough people wanted to do that.

Many small groups around the world are now groping in this direction, especially within the Global Ecovillage Movement, and the Transition Towns movement.

For a discussion of the transition strategy concerned people should be getting involved in, see The Transition Process.

The themes dealt with at Pigface Point are discussed at length in the book, The Transition to a Sustanable and Just World, Envirobook, Sydney, by Ted Trainer. A summary of the argument is available.