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[2021] The word ‘green’, like ‘natural’ and other such words has acquired a baggage. It is now associated, in many circles, to the notion of renewable ‘green energy’.  Consequently, the expression ‘Green Jobs’ now refers to jobs in the green energy industry – that is, factory, clerical, and commercial jobs for the green energy industry, all indoors.

When young people talk about ‘green jobs’ in the context of finding their place in society, they mean that they wish for
• jobs that give them a chance to work outdoors,
• with plants, animals, or people,
• and if possible in nature, rather than urban parks, zoos or gardens.

A large number of teenagers dream of this, as I did, but are directed instead to urban jobs that sustain the  society rather than human biological needs. For young people, increasing numbers of adults affected by syndromes (for whom the urban environment is toxic), and particularly for women from menopause on, such outdoors activity rewarded enough to meet both societal neeed for bought food and shelter – a roof over one’s headand -, and also biological health needs, is nearly impossible to find. Green industry jobs are plenty and multiplying, but Green-Hands Jobs are reducing to nearly non-existence.

The issue is therefore to either create and make available large numbers of outdoors green-hands jobs, or to meet the individual needs along with those of society in another way, through ‘Green-Hands work’ outdoors, with plants or animals or landscapes, not people or factories.

Being ‘green’ can also mean making and using low-tech technology, thus reducing one’s footprint on the planet, as in making a DYI solar cooker – a basic option.

The Solar Cooker – a basic option among many

[2010] A solar cooker is a very simple mechanical implement (not a machine) that can be home made cheaply and is used to harvest heat directly from the sun to cook food in a pot. A solar cooker functions more like an oven than a stove and the slower cooking destroys less of the nutrients in the foods. Using one reduces the use of fuels and the cost of buying them and producing them (or the labour of going to get wood).  It can be made for about $20. The solar cooker is a ‘basic’ option. Here are some photos from internet:

1- Development (low deployment and ingenuity)

The simple ingenuity of this  mechanical implement itself offers many benefits: cheap, easy to make, providing energy free from the sun, can be used by eco-friendly people in western developed countries or those below the poverty line and in third world countries to restore a better ability to live with less disease (better access to foods and water and germ free foods), less death of young children, and less labour for women. See  the article:
Balancing the scales: reduction of inequities through the use of solar box cookers,  by Bill Sperber, at the website:  http://solarcooking.org/balance.htm

Not neglecting the ‘green-hands’ basic activities

[2010] Development strategies, even ‘sustainable’*, tend to only enable yet more ‘wind up’ resources use, human ‘economic’ activities that are wasting, entrain yet more into fitness sports (many of them straining for the body’s health), complex forms of health management or biohacking, and extreme practices. Reducing need for resources of all kinds, including those to service high-energy needs for the modern high-activity, can be done by supporting physical soundness of body and soil/lands. This is the most basic and least costly way of doing it.  

Free-roaming physical activity in un-crowded natural settings   

We could enable more physical activity that permits not only de-stressing and not just feeling good or better, but unwinding completely. Free-roaming physical activity in un-crowded natural settings that reduce sensory stimulation, social and mental activities, and allow spontaneity are more beneficial for the ability to simply stay healthy, instead of relying on medical management. They do not require managed amusement facilities, and cost nothing. For example:
-children’s play-exploration in grounds left wild or restored to wild status (the attraction is much less in places altered by human activity)
-beach and non-motorised water activities
-walking
-rock climbing (plenty of rock faces, no clubs going out or teaching except in Brisbane) or kayacking
-bush camping (can be in non-sensitive state forest or outback-style properties in Western areas, not only in ecologically sensitive national parks; not commercial camp sites or even organised – but ‘camp out in the bush’, yet some accessible by car.

Many of these activities are valued culturally and in the media,  mostly as fashionable holiday, luxurious retreat, eco-tourism, adventure sports week-ends, extreme survival skill, or sponsored professional sports and media-driven ventures, often extreme. Few do these things on an ongoing basis, yet this was the traditional laid back view of life.

Many people seem to want these ‘wind-down’ options, as lifestyle or as holiday: it seems that few (except may be those bent on development in various forms) would fight adding this approach to current strategies. Why not revalue them culturally, not through media hype or glossy brochures (that give little actual precise information) or spiritual rationalisations, but by making them simply accessible on a daily basis, by leaving sufficient natural settings for free physical activities within inhabited areas. Why not make the ‘basic options’ also an economically viable way of ‘making a living’ that can restore bodies and lands, as well as human dignity (as paid jobs rather than exploiting volunteering). Why can ‘living’ rather than ‘surviving’ not also be ‘making a living’?

Green-hands outdoors, hands-on work, according to many children’s hearts

I have often heard children say they would love to work outdoors, to have a career working with animals, but adults tell them there are few jobs in zoos or as ecologist, and the field is very competitive. They are told about:
-national parks (in good part work with people: information, education, and law enforcement to contain people; even foresters complain of too much time in the office),
-farming and nurseries (now a not so peaceful, mechanised activity, a business activity that requires marketing savvy, risk management, and a lot of indoor work on a computer),
-fund/awareness raising for wildlife (campaigning with people, dealing with selfish survival attitudes, with money, and paper wasted in brochures, rather than nature and animals),
-outdoors tourism, entertainment, and sports (cultural rather than natural activities),
-science (mostly lab rats that are sacrificed to our great inventive intelligence for biotechnology, rather than useful biological knowledge of anatomy, physiology, ecological needs), or fieldwork involving depressing normative statistics to monitor extinctions and systemic thinking to justify our actions, in place of direct, independent observation; and these require pushing one’s education rather than using one’s instinctive knacks: the profession of ‘naturalist’ no longer exists: it has become a local club pass-time activity!).
Why do so many choose these or turn to construction jobs? They are the closest to a physical, hands-on outdoors job that is paid: not green, but at least outdoors rather than locked up in buildings or mining machines, and with some physical aspect, to a degree.

Children are not told they could also be wildlife carers, handling animals on a daily basis, probably because wildlife caring is not a paid job: institutions rely on volunteers (just as they do for people caring, for the most part),  assuming that their needs are already met. Why is wildlife caring (actually working with animals, hands-on) valued so little that it remains volunteer work and not a career possibility? A number of us, adults, used to say the same as children, but we have been pushed off track, we have had to train for a marketable job, selling oneself or one’s time for money, and we compensate in particular with holiday, travel, and pets (that we do not treat that well, which flood our ecosystems to become pests, and which require material and medical care and use up large amounts of industrial resources to feed them, conveniently for us rather than for their health).

How many outdoors jobs will be recreated by the knowledge/trade/industry/tourism/farming industry spheres  to allow the new generations access to working with animals or plants, and access to working in nature through their daily ‘workforce’ lives? Instead, we make it nearly impossible… and we wonder why they get fat.

How could we restore the presence of wildlife large enough and safe enough to satisfy this ‘lost paradise’ desire? Our ecosystems, even large state forests and national parks mostly contain small wildlife, including birds – we  have driven out the larger animals. Below are some ideas for ‘green hands’ jobs.

Examples of green-hands jobs

We could create the hands-on green jobs that many desire instead of conventional city-bound jobs, or the ‘green jobs’ that mean factories for energy production, by employing people to: maintain public soil paths around suburbs, maintain forest tracks, work in communal gardens and nurseries, tend to fruit trees and bushes that could be planted in streets and food gardens, for revegetation, restore richer environments and ecosystems, to train hands-on gardeners in making their garden wildlife-, eco-, and food-friendly, to teach children by working in school gardens and outdoor classes, to work on biodiversity corridors, give in-situ ecology and horticultural advice to individuals or families (not just to developers and land owners), to transmit knowledge about local native edible plants, to be live-in ‘land carers’ (see below), to work as wildlife carers or rescuers, etc.

There are many ways to give back to children and adults direct access to wild animals and nature, as a part of their professional lives. But this requires models that do not devalue them economically, and instead turn them into financially ‘valued’ jobs, valued as much as ecology consulting and landscape design (knowledge industry), or nursery work and tree lopping (trades and services).

Land carer: Enabling basic options with an unusual live-in job

There is another option, less conventional. One problem for many countries is to restore lands damaged by agriculture or industry or building, as future resource for food, and forests for biodiversity. But who is to do it? The ‘Land for wildlife’ program in Australia is a good solution, but it is available only to private land owners and is aimed at animals rather than soils or people. Grants and requirements imposed to developers to ensure reduced ecologic impact come at expense, and do not restore anything. The ‘Landcare’ volunteer groups work well too, but the system relies on community volunteering, unpaid work, and therefore assumes that these volunteers have some other source of income. There is another option, more basic, which also involves sharing land use more equitably.

Driving around the country, one sees fertile, arable land that is marginal to forests and appears unused. Individuals could tend these undeveloped or previously used parcels, living there without owning the lands, to take on the long-term task of restoring their ecosystem to the capacity of providing food and shelter for wildlife, but also wild food and shelter for humans.

The palaeo-anthropology notion of ‘wild garden’ in distant past was a human behaviour toward land; this could be a useful guiding concept. In the same way as we have wildlife carers, medical helpers, social workers, we could have a ‘green hand’ job of ‘land carer’. Some jobs require on-site living: this is one of them. Why not make some pieces of land their projects — their jobs? This is in line with ‘the slow way’, another popular expression linked to transition and sustainability, similar to ‘wind-down’. This option could combine with and not be exclusive of any of the costly work of professionals or intellectual work. It is a different approach.

There are people who wish to live this way, taking the time to live mostly outdoors, observing, living and working with their hands outside. Some do not mind whether they own or not the land they live on, as long as they are free to do things in their own way, with a long term security not under constant reorganisation or displacement risk from institutional or business pressures. Why not encourage this desire by giving ecological advice to guide their activity or even training, without constraining directiveness, so that intuitive or instinctive ways can be enhanced by some degree of technical, practical knowledge? Such people living on parcels of land could create a form of sparsely populated settlement, based on principles of recycling, on-site energy production, and individual economy of subsistence. A ‘land carer’ might build a well-placed cabin with little ecological footprint, as opposed to a larger house with fenced garden and concreted areas, away from other buildings, to maintain peacefulness. This could occur more spontaneously, and with more variation and ingenuity, than within the constraints imposed by urban planning or real estate developers, and could meet better a diversity of needs, but reduced needs (compared to normal needs). The basic option of ‘land carer’ job can spread some population over much wider areas, and improve degraded soils, health, and biodiversity, while still participating in the economy, albeit not necessarily in the ways of accountants (see below). We can make this option a real opportunity for people who want it, a valid lifestyle and contribution to society, without imposing it to those who do not wish it.

The risk of squatting is an urban practice, connected to the civilised societal system, which only tolerates living on un-owned land, once people reach destitution. In country areas, ‘feral’ living, is a term attached to young people who feel they cannot fit into a world of walls and rooves, and little sunshine or fresh air. Fewer would reach this stage of destitution if the basic option proposed was allowed, validated, and given an economic role. The ‘land carer’ job is not a commune either: no shared land ownership, no community ‘processes’, and the point is to allow populating sparsely enough to reduce socio-cultural human pressures, as well as ecology ‘human pressure’ and urban footprint. It is not a free lunch, an ‘anything goes’: the topologic properties (geometric properties, not real estate) mentioned elsewhere can serve to monitor the activities and this self-organised option.

 ‘Work’: paid job or not?

This new job would not have to necessarily attract conventional salary. There could be a panoply of arrangements: volunteering, flexible paid work, and trade in kind (as the ‘Woofers’ organisation practices). Land use, right to build, rates, and taxes could be fairly exchanged for land care, restoring ecosystems, and other activities, according to a person’s capacity and inclination: selling surplus of produced food, seedlings, or energy to the community, wildlife caring. The activities listed above as ‘green hand’ jobs can also be part time source for a small income.  Could this not lead to creating more of the kinds of hands-on green jobs that a proportion of children and adults desire, offering a new but dignified lifestyle possibility, while participating in the long-term concerns of the community?

Where?

In the same way as both animals and humans cannot pass fences to walk, people cannot trespass them either to live a simple life in nature that requires little energy, money or resources. Doing this has been made impossible for many, and worsened by the recent financial crisis. There is no unfenced land available without having to own it at out-of-reach cost, or having to pay high rent or rates (even when one does not need a large house or when a property uses no municipal services). Communal lands, forests and parks, do not allow living there. In the past, people would move to mountains, beaches, or deserts, but this is no longer possible: no land is owned by no one and available. Yet the ‘return to nature’ is known to be a simple and easy option: to recover from exhaustion  (health retreat), agitation (young people ‘at risk’) or depression (away from stress); to restore one’s reserves after ‘having to keep up’ (e.g. the cancer carer break); to bring back troubled youngsters from the brink and on track, etc. This basic access to a lifestyle of peace and quiet has become a practical impossibility, especially for people who simply cannot ‘keep up’ without suffering broad damage. They end up displaying the behaviours deemed unacceptable in society, and from which they personally suffer, simply because they are forced to keep up, yet are not enabled to simply change environmnent. This lifestyle is inaccessible both as a short term recovery strategy, or as long term quiet living conditions, if people do not have means to pay for retreats or buy land defended by fences – and usually their ability to ‘earn a living’ rather than scratch to just survive is deeply impaired. The option of becoming a land carer would make the simple life finally practicable again, without demanding great policy changes, and could save the community much ‘burden of care’ for people in near-constant crisis states due to ‘trying to keep up’. It would also present a solution to the large amount of collective work and time required to restore lands and soil.

This would also re-ground human intelligence in its early ingenuity in improving ecosystems to support human physical life.

Councils, governments, and institutions have unused ‘reserve’ lands that could be spared development, and be restored instead, at little cost with this option. Some land owners might share a parcel willingly, if soil and ecosystems benefit, and possibly with some kind of community compensation.

Who would want such a land carer job?

A similar type of job has become [2021] available to first-nation people: becoming a national park ranger or protector of wildlife in this setting. But this should not be reserved exclusively to first-nation, assuming that any other human being likes city or farm life and does not need to live in nature. Many marginalised individuals (rather than families) are in this position of needing nature but not having access to societal resources to buy land : peole with ‘cognitive difference’ (e.g. from autism to giftedness) who do ot fit in normal society require nature for health maintenance; many others with conditions that limit socio-professional activity, single parents wishing to ground their children in bodily health and nature, many single mothers after raising their children, menopausal women alone who can no longer keep up with the societal ‘speed of life’, men whose career and possessions have fallen apart and too old to easily win a job, retired people not too old for gardening and who do not own their home (some live in caravans), unconventional individuals, aborigines, immigrants from country areas in less developed nations,  etc., and a growing number of people who can no longer afford rental or mortgage and wish for a quieter life. There are far more such people than is generally realised by those who think ‘we need cities’ and create them for everyone else. This population that needs nature to live may find ways to endure surviving in the material ‘real world’ and suffer in silence, without community help, for a long time, until things spiral out of hand, and nature becomes the only way to stop the chaos. When they become incapacitated, medically or socio-professionally, there is nothing a doctor or other helper can do to prevent them from becoming a ‘burden of care’ for society in one form or another (and health businesses find this an ‘opportunity’). This is a collective marginalisation effect that is spreading (marginalisation is a ‘surface phenomenon’; a margin is an ‘edge’, in topologic terminology, a position at limits). Some of them do want such an option of live-in green-hands activity. Desiring a better future, seeking security, or wanting to meet one’s needs, does not actually necessarily mean wanting a conventional urban or farming job, or all the luxuries of civilisation (yet not give them all up either). This option could also help face the ageing population problem, both by reducing the dependency cause by not being able to ‘earn a living’ any more (as if they are already dead!), and the number of ill elderly requiring ‘homes’ and medical care, which is less needed for an active body-brain. This ‘burden of care’ could be progressively replaced by a more workable life for all these marginalised people, who would then function well, healthier for longer, without being ‘pushed to the edge’ or reduced to destitution and being ‘collateral damage’ of economic Advancement. They would be happier because their knowledge and practical skills would still be useful, because some isolated geographic location is pleasant when peace is needed, compared to social isolation and feeling devalued and useless in the midst of a crowded world, locked into a small home in a suburvan street.

Enabling basic options to ‘restore capital’, natural and human

Would this new ‘land carer’ job not be more decent and preferable to homelessness, feral or squatting behaviour punishable by courts, and an alarmingly increasing number of people as ‘burden of care’ (medical care, aged homes, unemployed and unable to rent a home, etc.)? Making this ‘land carer’ job a part of lifestyle and societal choice in Western countries would reduce the marginalisation, regional displacement, and exclusion of even more people by the new developments, as keeps happening.

Recognising this lifestyle as a valid necessity for some (including medical), could provide a more dignified alternative to ‘either keep up or be a pensioner’ for those damaged by the fast life. Acknowledging this as a legitimate human need could prevent many problems arising. (Although lost in modern Western cultures, it used to be recognised and an aspect of society.) This ‘land carer’ job would also be going towards honouring aboriginal views about land ownership, and spiritual notions of land stewardship, as well as ecological sustainability. Not all people can or will have access to the luxuries of development, so why not heed the call of those who do not wish for them?

This very basic lifestyle can very well exist in parallel to normal life and modern settlement patterns, which the majority seem to want. Different roles. Making this option an actual and practical possibility is a way of making use of the ‘basic’ options, for those who want them, but also to ensure the community’s future resources as a whole, for the long term. This collective need was built into customary laws in the European past. Can we not spare some land from ‘development’ and take care of it this way? It only takes a creative will to share the land in new ways and to remember that not everything can be measured with money (including people’s usefulness). This option just needs enabling rather than much fund raising or regulation, just an inventive new use for unused land and unused people. Basic options mostly just require some inventive imagination to do things in other ways than to ‘keep up’, by using what we have, in a way that improves rather than degrades what we have – including health.

Theorists point out our unresolved fundamental problems, which play out in local communities. They include the unforeseen but always occurring counter-productive effects of critical responses and survival behaviours, of boundary making and breaking, and of developments taken too far  through re-development (deployment to a higher order). The topologic modelling proposed points out geometrically the basic options as a means to avoid the consequences of what it describes as ‘re-development’, properties of higher deployment. The land carer job is one such option to avoid this and at the same time avoid this also for human health. Using this neglected human capital to restore the threatened ‘natural capital’, could only help the entire community ‘live within its means’.

[online 2010]

Frustration with disappearing access to nature

Here are some websites that demonstrate the growing frustration with the progressive loss of access to nature. The infinite increases in laws and regulations concerning its ‘services rendered’ to humans and its recreational ‘use’, as well as the disappearance of land freely accessible, due to land lording and land hoarding by organisations public and private, for future development or just for wealth, mean that its is now becoming a rare and expensive luxury to remain healthy by taking breaks from the busy life to go bush or simply take a walk in quiet conditions.

http://truecamping.com.au/

http://ozcamps.net/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=2

Australia’s Best Camp Sites, RV and Caravan Parks

The spreading behaviours of controlling, planning, organizing, manicuring, exploiting nature, and out-lawing the simple life of the body in small, basic shelters in nature, are directly correlated with the increase in survival behaviour, both collectively and individually, which includes making limiting barriers and unlimited spreading behaviours. These behaviours have become counter-productive for human, animal, and ecosystem health, and our societies, developed or developing, are fast returning, for  a growing majority, to the fundamental problems of finding safety, and adequate shelter, food, and even wat[online 2010]er ! They now impair what we were taught they were created to help.

[online 2010]