A bit more history

Petra (Pedi) has been asking for more background on how we've come to make this change of lifestyle. Others may be thinking similar questions so I'll try to summarise how the changes came about as best I can without getting too engrossed and boring. This may be a challenge, and I hope you can forgive any over-indulgence, and if I'm too brief please do ask more - either through comments, or if you prefer email me directly at firstname.lastname.contact@googlemail.com (ie simon.lee.contact@etc). I'll approach this as why, how, and consequences.
Why

• Family - working too hard, seeing my daughter very briefly before going to work, and briefly (and exhaustedly) when I got home was no way to live - I mean what should my priorities be in life? Not work! And then, having a fairly high baseline of constant stress just leaves you feeling unsettled and non-too-pleasant to be around and it's bad for your physical health too. Something had to change.
  
• Work - don't get me wrong - I LOVED my job at Changeworks- it fulfilled me in many many ways and was wholly in line with my personal beliefs - the importance of the environment, of social justice, and the power of collective action.
  
• But my real driver in that job was saving the planet - and I began to give up hope that the planet could be saved. This presented me with two challenges:
  
• Firstly - Integrity - It was becoming difficult to lead an organisation who's mission I was beginning to question. (For the benefit of Changeworkers I should add that I don't think this belittles the work it does, but I do think that Changeworks needs to revisit what it is about and how it will achieve it. You'll understand that I didn't have the heart for this journey so soon after the last one!).
• Secondly, if the planet is stuffed then we need to adapt - how am I going to adapt?
• Adaptation. Climate Change is a disaster on all sorts of levels. The disasters that will affect us all (and sooner than most of us think) are socio-economic. Food and water will become scarce. Coastal areas (where most of us live), will increasingly become flooded. Populations will migrate - away from drought, starvation, floods and political unrest. These will all promote further political instability.
  
• My personal adaptation to this (which may be a bit too quick of the mark but we're thinking of my daughter here too) is to ensure that I live somewhere were the new weather patterns are manageable, away from flood and drought risks, be somewhere were I can grow much of my own food, and be somewhere sparsely populated, with a strong sense of community where hopefully, we can be far away from the worst of the social disruption on the horizon.
• Integrity there's no point in believing in something and not doing anything is there? - Not if it's something as big and as directly personal as climate change.
• Leadership In my own small way I'm showing people that we need to make extreme changes and fast. It's not self-sacrificial in any way but I do know that for some of my friends and acquaintances it is highly symbolic and making them think about climate change than they ever did when I just told them about it. There are great people out there trying to tell us what is happening - for example Jonathan Porritt or George Monbiot. I'd rather do than talk about the need to do.
  
• Help. I could not have made this move without massive commitment and belief from Jussi - but it suited her too - she was bored with her job and she has a deep longing to raise goats. To be honest, she has driven the move on a practical level while I've ranted on on a more (useless!) philosophical level.
• So here we are: I now live a life that warmly includes my immediate family, that is wholly in-line with my personal values, and that will hopefully be robust enough to cope with the changes ahead.

How

• We have some money - but really not much. What we have acquired has accumulated through lucky property purchases and sales. We've never considered 'investment value' when we've bought our homes, but somehow we've always got lucky. Money is extremely tight - which is why we are living on cabbages!
• The rest of the 'how' comes down to blind, naive optimism - to the point of outright stupidity many would say. But whatever happens we are going to enjoy the journey - we both firmly believe that it is better to fail than to regret not trying.
• But the contemplation of the changes was extremely difficult. For me it included all kinds of convolutions around what I wanted in life, and it made me explore many personal demons.
  

Consequences
Petra has mentioned fears over health insurance - we have a national health service, which although it is distinctly creaky - should be able to provide basic care for the foreseeable future.

But pensions are another worry altogether. We are resigned to financial poverty and hope that the welfare state on top of the minimal pension provision we already had will see us through. At the end of the day we don't believe money is all that important (as long as you can afford the basics) - it's about enjoying where you are at and that is down to a state of mind, not a state of bank account. And really - I dont trust capitalism to be able to survive the changes ahead anyway!

We are also likely to be disadvantaging our daughter - with respect to things like university education etc. We don't know how we'll deal with this, hopefully we'll find a way. In the meantime she absolutely loves being here and we hope that the legacy we leave her is more valuable in the future than it might appear to be now. But this aspect of our decision was very hard to grapple with.

And if none of it works out we are both adaptable intelligent people - we'll find someway of getting through - or at least we've promised ourselves to enjoy trying and above all to not regret.

Run for the hills
The title for this blog comes from a comment made by Jonathan Porritt CEO of the excellent Forum for the Future. He was speaking at a conference looking at the corporate response to climate change and he made a throw-away remark along the lines of but unless there's real action very quickly it'll be time for us all to run to the hills. At that time our plans for this life change we're well advanced so I wasn't influenced by what what he said, but I was, somewhat perversely, re-assured.