by Chris Turner

My wife and daughter and I decided to include in our itinerary a few
days' stay at Crystal Waters, one of the oldest and most renowned
ecovillages on the planet. Crystal Waters serves as a sort of living
lab for the "permaculture" design philosophy of Max Lindegger.
Founded on a broad patch of denuded hillside about 90 kilometers
northwest of Brisbane in the mid-1980s, Crystal Waters today is a
lush, semi-agrarian township of about 200 souls that sprawls across
640 acres of thick forest and deep valley. The populace delightedly
shares the land with grazing wallabies and kangaroos, deadly venomous
snakes and an increasing abundance of indigenous plants, trees and
birds.

Crystal Waters was, on the surface, a stellar example of classic
conservation in action – a human settlement so finely tuned to its
natural setting that it verged on William McDonough's lofty design
goal of becoming a restorative enterprise. The ecovillage was
actually improving the biodiversity of the valley in which it was
situated. What's more, Crystal Waters was a charming place, achingly
beautiful like a series of postcards of Edenic perfection and
populated by bright, friendly and engaged citizens. The sky filled
each night with a billion stars, and in the first light of dawn the
wallabies came out onto the green lawn next to the little guest cabin
where we were staying to graze on the wet grass. It made you kind of
wish you lived in a place like this, a place so pretty and pristine,
so committed to the earth's health that dogs had been banned to keep
them from chasing away the valley's rightful inhabitants.

I couldn't help but feeling, though, that whatever future Crystal
Waters pointed to was already all but lost. It was geared to a
conservation model that still hasn't been fully recalibrated for the
realities of the Anthropocene Era, and it was difficult to see many
core lessons it might offer to The Outquisition.

There was, for example, the tricky fact that the place was all but
unreachable except by private automobile, and that the nearest
purveyor of even rudimentary supplies was half an hour away at
highway speeds. (Crystal Waters has a small cafι at its community
center, but it keeps sporadic hours and is in any case no kind of
general store.) We were there for the 20th anniversary party, and we
were a little surprised to find that even the pizza dough being fed
into the community center's nifty handmade cob oven was store-bought
prefab stuff, as was every topping piled upon it. And of course there
was the omnipresent 800-lb. Anthropocene gorilla of the earth's
population, seven billion strong and ratcheting steadily upward and
already long past a number the earth could hope to carry if we all
lived in semi-agrarian townships.

Not long after arriving, my wife and I met a young couple with a
daughter about the same age as ours, and they invited us to their
Crystal Waters homestead for dinner. They'd just bought the place,
selling a dream home in suburban Brisbane close enough to the ocean
they could hear the waves. He was a media rep for a national organic
agriculture organization, and they worked together on an organic food
delivery service. They were still half in love with their Brisbane
lives, and you could feel the ache of their decision even as they
delighted in the details of their new abode –the verdant vegetable
garden, the little pond down the hill, the passive solar design.

To hear them tell it, the harsh realities of the global climate and
energy crises had finally left them with no choice – wherever
sustainability was, they reckoned it was emphatically not in
Brisbane's sprawling suburbs. They were after something closer to
self-sufficiency. They'd kept chickens even in Brisbane, and they'd
brought their brood of roosters and hens out to Crystal Waters. They
had one too many roosters now, though, and they'd been agonizing over
the inevitable necessity of its demise. Neither of them had yet found
the stomach for the ax and chopping block.

It struck me that neither needed to. Their goal, shrouded as it was
in practicality and undeniable virtue, was misaligned on some
fundamental level. The village butcher is an institution that
predates not just the curvilinear suburban avenue but the internal
combustion engine. It exists in part because not all of us are cut
out for killing our own dinners. Self-sufficiency of the sort my new
Crystal Waters friends were chasing in fact predates agriculture, and
it might well predate what we regard as humanity. We have always
lived together – there is no precedent in human history for the self-
sufficient nuclear family – and we have always divvied up the
community's tasks to some degree. I wonder if even among our hunter-
gatherer ancestors there were some who'd preferred to just fire the
initial shot and others who excelled at seizing the fallen beast and
delivering the fatal blow, others who found skinning and carving and
cooking more to their liking.

A few days later, we were guests in another home – a classic postwar
bungalow in suburban Brisbane. Australia is nearly a decade into its
worst drought in at least a century, and water conservation has
become routine in much of the country. In this Brisbane bungalow, the
showers stalls had little hourglasses the size of AAA batteries
suctioned to the tile. As I recall, they were freebies – I never
learned from which level of government – and the idea was that you
flipped the hourglass as you started your shower. It gave you a
visual cue when you'd reached your recommended four-minute limit.

The shower hourglass was one tiny but ubiquitous example of how
Brisbane was slowly learning to adapt to the new realities of the
Anthropocene. I have to wonder whether it isn't a more valuable tool
for The Outquisition than keeping a chicken coop, than anything
devised in a rural ecovillage. I mean no disrespect to our Crystal
Waters hosts, nor to the idea of permaculture. I just wonder whether
the truly sustainable ecovillages that fuel The Outquisition won't
look more like suburban Brisbane than like a pre-industrial Eden.

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