Escape the 9 to 5

Escape the 9 to 5

The majority of my life I have been a 9 to 5 er.

There's been a few periods of breaking this, working in bars, or other odd jobs but on the most part it's been start at 9, finish at 5, Monday to Friday, job done.

I've never enjoyed this, mind you. Anyone who knows me will no doubt have heard me rant about my lack of understanding for why society settled upon such a rigid, 5 day working week. It has never made any sense to me. Why do we allocate 5 out of 7 of our days as working ones? Shouldn't it be the other way around? We surely did not go through 3.8 billion years of evolution just to work all the time? That would be about the dumbest....sorry I'm ranting again.

So as I was saying, I've never really been the biggest advocate for 9 to 5. I looked at the working hours of the rest of nature and saw no-one clocking a 9 to 5 day. All other animals and plants adapt to the seasons. Humans are the only ones who plough on regardless. 9 to 5 come rain, shine, winter or summer. It all just seems very unnatural.

But despite my complaints I have, up until now, put up with this broken system. But this year I have finally attempted to look for an alternative to this lifestyle. I am pleased to say I am no longer a 9 to 5 er.

It was surprisingly much easier than I thought. I had avoided asking my employer about reducing my work load and working freelance for ages. In my mind there was no way they would allow me to do it, but when I asked and explained why I wanted to, they said yes. It was that simple. With the new found freedom I was able to look for new opportunities which led me to organise my own night at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival and I'm now helping to organise another Mountain Festival later in the summer. It's work that I enjoy and that is more inline with my values, encouraging and inspiring people to spend time outside enjoying nature.

The main benefit to this is not the work, however, it is the time I have won back. The freedom of owning your own time is invaluable. It is the one thing no-one can make more of. The ability to look out of the window in the morning and decide what I want to do with my day is really all I have ever wanted to achieve. I have got confused in the past and thought that making lots of money would provide this freedom but in reality it is all about owning your time. Sure, we need money to provide a certain level of security, but once that is achieved, then it should all be about earning more time.

It's early days still and there's still things I'm adjusting too. There are days of self doubt where I question if I will have enough money, or if it would be more sensible to take holiday pay, pensions and security. But for now I am going to enjoy the journey a little more and worry about the destination a little less.

The reason I am telling you this isn't to brag, it is to say that even though I had been thinking of doing this for a few years I always thought it would be too difficult to achieve. One thing I had never done however was taken action on it. This post is purely to emphasise that if you don't ask you don't get. If it is something you would like to try to, why not just ask your employer today, whats the worst that could happen?

Josh

What can nature teach us about our waste?

What can nature teach us about our waste?

If you have ever taken a walk in a forest, wood or fully natural ecosystem, then you may have noticed a significant difference between humans and the rest of the natural world.

We are the only ones who create waste.

No other animal or plant on the entire planet creates unusable, non-recyclable waste except for us. Take that forest you may have strolled through for example. Researchers have shown* that a healthy forest ecosystem recycles around 98% of all of its nutrients with only 2% leaving the forest each year through animals and water run off. 98% is an unbelievable level of self sufficiency. Especially when, if you look at the bigger picture, that 2% that escapes will only be used up by another ecosystem outside of the forest. So on a larger scale the natural world is in fact 100% sustainable. Well, that is until we arrived...

The average person in North America creates the following amounts of waste:

A day = 2kg (4.3lbs)

A week = 14kg (30lbs)

A year = 730kg (1,569lbs)

It's safe to say that we are a long way off the rest of the natural world. Even the most sustainable and environmentally conscious cities at present are only aiming to achieve about a third of what nature can.

Where nature recycles and reuses materials and nutrients again and again. We create waste that is on the most part unusable.  At its worst it is landfilled and takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of years to break down. At best it is recycled, requiring fossil fuels to transport and process, loses its quality and ultimately ends up on the landfill after a few uses. We are the odd ones out. It's a secret gang that us humans left a while back. While nature adopted a closed loop system we adopted a one way system.

The sad thing in all this is that we actually haven't been fully kicked out of this nature gang. Good old Mother Nature is a forgiving soul and is still trying to accommodate us despite our repeated abuse of her home. She is also secretly a bit OCD and likes to keep a clean place. So while we are operating on our one way system she repeatedly tries to tidy up after us and create a closed loop system. She still tries to process our waste in the same way she would with a leaf, or decomposing animal because that's what she does best. The only problem is she hasn't realised the nutrients we are adding aren't beneficial to any of us. That's why our plastic waste is now being discovered in our food chain and the chemicals we spray on our crops are starting to affect our health. Nature is simply breaking it all down and adding it back into the system. We're like the crappy guests at a diner party, when everyone else spends ages cooking organic, healthy food, turn up with a McDonalds.

So what does all this teach us? It teaches us that simply because we can't see the immediate result of our actions it doesn't mean they don't have consequences. It also teaches us that the solutions are really quite simple. All we need to do is stop adding toxic, unnatural items to the loop, and start using organic items that nature can process and use again and again without it damaging the larger ecosystem.

How can we achieve this? With each action you take simply ask yourself, "Will this benefit or damage our closed loop system?" If everyone starts to play their part and contribute to the system with healthy and beneficial actions we can start to create a much more vibrant system for all of us.

Josh

*Gaia's Garden - Toby Hemenway

Fuel for the Fire - Is monoculture farming the answer?

Before I started this journey to learn more about my food and its impact on both the environment's and my own health I was completely unaware what monoculture farming was. Monoculture farming is, unfortunately, what you think of when you picture a modern day farm, large fields spreading as far as the eye can see, all filled with the same crop. The majority of the food you buy from the supermarket is produced this way. It never occurred to me that nature doesn't organise things this way. I saw fresh food growing and assumed it was a good thing. But when you look at forests, prairies, or any areas where nature is the lead designer, there is always diversity, never monoculture. So how do we manage to convince nature to decorate against her wishes?

This short video from Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton explains some of the ways we have manipulated nature to fit this monoculture system of "farming" and the issues caused.

[su_youtube url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzrXcIvExE0"]

Is there more to spending time outside than exercise and fresh air?

54% of humans live in urban environments, a number that is set to continue and steadily increase. There are a lot of benefits to living in the city and arguments both for and against it from an environmental stand point. Whatever your beliefs in this area one key problem that arises from city living is the lack of the natural world. Everything in the city is man made. Concrete roads and pavements, plastered walls and ceilings, cars and buses, the list is endless. Even the areas that appear natural often aren’t, mowed grass, weeded flower beds, and neatly lined up trees. If Mother Nature had her way there would be some serious renovations. Every living thing on this planet has evolved to be at the point it is right now. Plants, insects, mammals whatever the species they have all slowly morphed and changed to survive to their specific circumstances.  Humans are no different. We are the direct outcome of our own surroundings. We have been evolving for approximately 200,000 years to fit our surroundings which for the majority or our existence was the natural world. Foraging, hunting, exploring, finding shelter, working with nature rather than against it, that is what we have come from. It is only in the last small portion of our existence that we have started moving away from that lifestyle to live in our man made cities.

On the surface it seems to be working , we are surviving, the population is increasing, cities are growing. But what impact is our disconnection from nature having on our evolution? It is too early to say for certain how this is affecting us but we have been able to see how the modern, changing world has affected other species with shorter life spans. The Peppered Moth, for example, pre industrial revolution, was made up of two variations, 98% of the species was white and black and 2% was fully black. Since the industrial revolution this changed dramatically and the black moths thrived to represent as much as 95% of the species. The theory behind this was that at the peak of the industrial revolution we were burning a lot of coal, which in turn polluted the landscape making everything darker from the soot. The lighter coloured moths lost their advantage from camouflage and the black moths gained an advantage.

The two variations of Peppered Moths shows the way the species adapted to their changing landscape. Credits: Images by Olaf Leillinger

How does this tie in with us having the odd adventure? Because when we are out in wild places, looking up at the stars, cooking on a fire, pushing our bodies physically and mentally we are connecting to our evolutionary past. If you have spent time in the mountains then you have experienced that connection to nature on a much deeper level than is possible in the city. Your senses and intuition are magnified.

“Is that cloud on the horizon a potential storm?”

“Is this snow stable?”

“How much daylight do I have left?

Every decision you make is about reading the environment and adapting. The more time we spend in these places the more we allow those traits to surface and survive. This is what we have evolved from and that is why it feels so right to be doing it. We aren’t designed to be sat indoors 8 hours a day at our desks, working on computers….at least not yet, so lets keep it that way!

This article was first written as a guest post for Project Cordillera a social enterprise that aims to transform adventure travel and contribute to meaningful, positive tourism by building connections between adventurers and the places they go. Find out more at www.projectcordillera.org

Every expert started a beginner

Every expert started a beginner

My name is Josh and I have an addiction. I am addicted to Ted Talks.

I should come clean, while Ted Talks is the real good shit, The Do Lectures, Podcasts, Blogs, all provide a suitable fix. In desperate moments I've even resorted to the odd Vlog (although these mostly leave me with a feeling of loathing for both myself and, overwhelmingly, the vlogger).

I can't get enough of hearing the stories of people who chose to do things a little differently. Business men and women, farmers, inventors, athletes, extreme sports stars, musicians, chefs, it rarely matters who they are, what I find fascinating is why they took a different path, what led them to do it and how they became such an expert in the first place.

It's the last piece that intrigues me the most. How did all these people who are leaders in their particular fields get to that point? How did they get so much experience and confidence to start?

The answer is they didn't.

What I've slowly realised is that every one of these experts was at one point in their lives as clueless as I.

This will probably come as no surprise to you (no, not that I'm clueless!) However, it has taken me the better part of my life to fully appreciate this. Every single person that I look up to as an expert, genius, or pioneer, at one point in their life was a self doubting amateur, stumbling around, trying to figure it all out.

Problem is, this realisation is both a gift and a curse.

It means that my excuses have all suddenly disappeared. No longer can I avoid trying to reach the heights of others simply because they had an unfair advantage over me as they were born more talented/gifted/fearless. Because it turns out they weren't. They faced the same second guessing, they faced the same fears, and they had to spend the same time learning. In reality, there seems to be only two things they have done differently:

1. They found something they enjoyed doing.
2. They started.

This is one of the epiphanies that led to me starting this website. I realised that not one of these inspiring people ever disliked what they did, in fact, the one thing they all have in common is that they love what they are successful at.

I enjoyed spending time living a lifestyle more connected to nature. I also followed a lot of blogs and envied the authors' ability to have their own platform to share ideas with the world. I had only just started learning about sustainability, growing my own food and permaculture, had no concept where the hell you're supposed to put a comma,(is that right?) or even how to write properly. But, I realised if I wait until I am an expert in these areas, then I will never become an expert.

I am not saying I will become an expert, there is a very high chance I have peaked already. What I do know, however, is that simply by starting something that interests me then I am, at least a little, more experienced than the guy who sat down to write the first blog post on here.

If you have a long term goal but feel that you don't have any of the expertise or talent to reach it, THIS IS NORMAL. It's actually probably a good thing because it means you're not over confident. All you really need to do is start and then simply not stop. You may fail along the way but there's no harm in that. At best you'll unlock some hidden talent you never knew was there and become an expert, at the very least you'll become more of an expert than you are now.

And if you enjoy what you are doing in the process then who really cares what the outcome is anyway?