Rob Jarman, the National Trust’s Head of Sustainability looks at the modern lifestyle compared with that of his great-great aunt and how we are all living beyond our means.
My great-great aunt was described in the 1901 census, aged 75, as a ‘widow living on own means’. Her husband was just a blacksmith on Tyneside until he died when she was 64. Her independence of the workhouse was due to years of frugality and of setting a little aside for a rainy day. Most of us are on course for a very different epitaph from hers, and I, for one, am certainly living beyond my means.
© NTPL / Nick Meers
One Planet Living is a movement seeking to change this so that everyone can enjoy a high quality of life, within the carrying capacity of this one planet of ours. A typical UK dweller consumes resources at a scale requiring three planet Earths to sustain. Research shows that if we all lived like North Americans, we’d need five Earths!
The question that we must address now is how can we ensure our overall use of natural resources is reduced to that which our Earth can support? That is the challenge the Trust is facing up to. We are in a good position to find practical and positive solutions, not least because we can draw on the legacy of those at Trust properties who had inspiring ideas to live on their own means.
Learning from the Trust
© NTPL / Robert Morris
Take Trust sites such as Rosedene, the epitome of the 1840s socialist movement to free working people from early industrial urbanisation by giving them five acres where they could build a simple dwelling and live healthily off their trade and the produce from their land. Then dwell on the Victorian mantra emblazoned across the great kitchen range at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire – ‘Waste not, want not’ – that simply says it all.
And look what we can learn from innovative characters such as Lord Armstrong at Cragside in Northumberland – the first house in the world with electric lighting. He stated at the time that coal was being used ‘wastefully and extravagantly’. The need to use resources wisely is also evident in the old devices designed to capture water – from garden butts to large tanks under gardens and in the roofs of many Trust properties.
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Learning from our ancestors
© NTPL / David Sellman
We can also look to our grandparents to inspire us. I think back to how the contemporaries of that great-aunt of mine had to choose products so carefully for durability and ease of maintenance, mending instead of throwing away, buying the right amount of food at the right time to avoid waste and growing as much of their own food as possible.
We’re finding, just as they did, that some of the most easy and effective things to do are simply good housekeeping. Not only will good housekeeping save money, it will also have a positive effect on our environmental bank balance. Some solutions do require innovation and investment to save energy and money in the longer term, however there are lots of proven echnologies to green our homes – a positive reminder to celebrate the inventors and inventiveness of this generation.
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Looking to the future
© NTPL / Joe Cornish
The Trust’s Gibson Mill is a good example of how we have blended new and old devices to restore an 18th-century mill to a community centre and walkers’ café that are self-sufficient, running off the solar, wood power and spring water on the site.
The menu served in the café is designed to use local, seasonal food. When developing the project a few years ago, even ‘green’ people were saying that oil or Calor gas would be needed to keep the place running, but we have stuck to our zero-fossil fuels and ultra-low-energy principles, even down to the manually operated lift for our less-able visitors.
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