Lucky Last  - Going from Hippie to Hip!

Editor of Green magazine Tamsin O’Neill talks with Michael Short in The Zone for The Age (6 September 2010):

Magazine editor and environmentalist Tamsin O’Neill is on a crusade – but not telling people what to think. She is as much educator as editor. The co-founder and editorial chief of green magazine manages to combine poise and passion as she uses her TV interview in The Zone to promulgate a case for radical change in something as fundamental to our lives as the very way we create and use our homes.

Sustainability has gone from hippie to hip. The magazine Green has been both a cause and an effect.

“Right from the beginning, our aim was to make sustainability sexy.” That aesthetic and intellectual allure is not limited to architecture. Quite a chunk of the publication is devoted to design.” Read More

Has the Great Australian Dream been sullied by a Great Australian Delusion?

Have we, understandably but unwittingly, undermined the value and potential pleasure of home ownership by making the classical error of putting quantity ahead of quality?

Have we, at a suburban level at least, already become victims, rather than lucky-country beneficiaries, of the belief that bigger is better?

Are the multitudes of McMansions, as they have become known, spreading daily around Australia’s major and satellite cities, a mistake we are making en masse?

Tamsin O’Neill is as much educator as editor. The co-founder and editorial chief of green magazine manages to combine poise and passion as she uses her TV interview in The Zone to promulgate a case for radical change in something as fundamental to our lives as the very way we create and use our homes.

It comes from the core. She was raised in a family of architects who grew their own vegetables, had chooks  and a house in the bush. O’Neill’s love of the environment and of architecture are natural partners. That marriage has given birth to ideas that have found a seductive, instructive voice through green.

So, here’s the case, or part thereof, against those McMansions that are enveloping our urban fringes in a  ceramic patchwork quilt: “The problem with these big houses is not just the scale of them but the amount of energy they use and the amount of waste that goes into landfill while they’re being built and the longevity of them,” says the former photographer.

“A lot of it is about status and the idea that bigger is better is something I would really like to see change … helping (people) who want to own a big house to understand that maybe they can have a house that’s not as big but is just as conformable and you could probably fit two houses on a block that they’ve got their house on and still be incredibly comfortable and save money on energy and save money overall.”

So, a foundation of O’Neill’s argument is that better quality and structural longevity is actually going to save the home builder money. A typical example is a recent story on the cover of the magazine: “Thinking small – a minimalist house on a city river”, about an innovative building in Brisbane.

Another cornerstone is that she is not elitist – although she is fully aware she might be misunderstood.

On the contrary, it’s about connection and community – even meaning. It’s almost, really, about back-to-basics and the elegance of simplicity.

“I do find it very sad to drive through some suburbs and not see any children in the street, and I think that we have lost that kind of openness and connectedness to the street and to your neighbours [that] is such an important thing.

“Houses need to be designed to facilitate that, but also, on the other end of the scale, I do see there’s a real resurgence in community activities, such as farmers’ markets. People are getting out there and engaging with the local community. I see a lot of that. We’ve got a bit of both happening.

“I’m hoping this is a trend, that this will spread, this idea that for your soul you really need to communicate with your neighbours and your community and, to have a fuller life, that’s a really important thing.”

Life has been full for O’Neill, who, with husband Tom Bodycomb, set up green despite initially thinking suggestions she launch a magazine were ridiculous.

But some people have activism in their genes. Combine that with an entrepreneurial itch, a hole in the market and a partner who shares your vision and you have a propitious constellation of circumstances. The conception of green magazine was immaculate; its birth, well … laboured.

“There are so many magazines. It’s crazy. Why would you start a magazine? We all know how difficult it is to sustain a magazine. But there came a point where the whole green thing was really gathering momentum and I have a mentor who suggested to me one day that there wasn’t enough information out there for people who wanted to build houses environmentally, and that was it.”

Launched in mid 2007 as a quarterly, it is now a bi-monthly magazine of about 120 pages, as well as a website. Circulation has reached 25,000 copies, with an estimated readership of more than 100,000.

Start-ups are trying, but the family survived – and now thrives. Probably has something to do with the children banning their parents from talking business at the dinner table. And with the separate offices they use. Skype can help, it seems, maintain partnerships that are at once personal and professional.

“The first year was very hard. Lots of very early mornings and very late nights, and at that point Tom was working full-time on another job, and so the computer and a cup of tea came into the bed at five o’clock in the morning.

“We did a lot of work before the kids got up. And then he did a lot of work at night. So, it was very difficult time. Probably the most difficult thing I’ve done.”

It might have been a struggle to create, but the magazine’s future appears blessed, given the now-mainstream desire to live in a more harmonious way with the environment.

Sustainability has gone from hippie to hip. green has been both a cause and an effect.

“Right from the beginning, our aim was to make sustainability sexy.” That aesthetic and intellectual allure is not limited to architecture. Quite a chunk of the publication is devoted to design.

“It’s the clever stuff that I love. People doing amazing things with recycled materials that are very beautiful.

“Our upfront section is a showcase of product design, and that in particular is an amazing resource for people for designing products around a recycled whatever – old plates and cups and old brooms – anything that sits around doing nothing and there are too many of. Finding solutions for that type of rubbish that look great and are stylish.”

But some rubbish is beyond redemption. And here, too, O’Neill really wants to provoke and lead change. She’s not only declared death to McMansions. It’s death to “crap furniture”, too.\

And here, again, it might sound like she’s trying to impose or proscribe. But she’s not, she’s seeking to inspire – and to save us some money and the planet some resources.

Now, before all those IKEA fans out there get offended, O’Neill’s definition of “crap furniture” does NOT include that operation.

“IKEA furniture is not that bad and I think if you pick and chose carefully you can buy things that will last a bit longer and then you can take them to the op shop and people will probably buy them and they’ll get used again, which is a great thing. I’m all into second-hand furniture – I love it.”

What she hates is the waste caused by cheap and nasty furniture that’s not designed to last.

“You go into an op shop these days and it’s just absolutely overflowing with furniture that’s kind of half-broken and really not very usable. And that is fundamentally the problem.

“Years and years ago, everybody saved up to buy a nice dining room table or some nice chairs. That really is fundamentally what sustainability is about.

“If people went out and spent more on a table and some nice chairs that would last them a lot longer, they wouldn’t have to go out and buy them again.

“And they wouldn’t end up in op shops, and they wouldn’t end up in landfill.”

As we contemplate all the public policy issues associated with population growth – as well as our housing affordability issues – it’s the private choices opened up to us by people such as Tamsin O’Neill upon which we might construct not only a more sustainable future, but a happier one.

Source: www.theage.com.au