LAZY RURAL MUSIC NZ may be a small country, but in the wider world, what we do, use and consume affects lives everywhere. So I'm on a mission to see how we're treating our backyards both here and further afield. What are we doing to be cleaner and greener? What do we need to change? And what does the future hold? So join me, Te Radar, as I go global. Don't worry, I'll plant plenty of trees to offset the travel. Now, where's my passport? Copyright Able 2014 GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC I think what I love the most about the South Island is the colour. It really is a land of brown, with your yellow-browns, your brown-browns, your orange-browns, your red-browns, your green-browns. I think probably my favourite is the rust-brown, weathered by the elements. I imagine that's what would happen to me if I lived down here. I'd get a bit rusty. I'd blend into the tussock, I imagine. You'd probably lose me. They've blended a little tussock on to the roof of the Psychology building at Otago University. It's an example of modern design incorporating the best of nature ` a green roof that takes the outdoors upstairs. It produces oxygen, filters water and provides a home where things can live in the concrete jungle. ARCHIVE: The city would seem to be the one place where nature stands no chance. But NZ's cities are not large, and a great effort's been made in the last few years to soften the impact of crowds and concrete. VIBRANT MUSIC PLAYS People need somewhere to relax, enjoy the sun and watch others pass by. CLOCK WINDS 'For centuries, design has been all about conquering and concreting nature. 'But in a future with fewer resources and greater environmental challenges, 'greener designs are sure to rise.' It strikes me that in many ways designing a house is similar to baking a scone. Everyone has their own way of doing things. However, it always begins with mixing a number of different ingredients, getting your hands dirty, and, generally, you need a lot of dough. Eventually, though, things take shape, and the finished products can certainly differ wildly, from the daringly trendy to the comfortably traditional. What's the fastest food in the world? Scone. (CACKLES) Scone. (SNIGGERS) Nature was the original green designer, so it makes sense to borrow an idea or two. I'm hauling my caboose to Otaki to meet an architect who's been collaborating with nature for decades. Fritz Eisenhofer and his wife Helen's unique home has tons of soil for a roof, a lagoon and a lounge, and a pile of rocks for an air-conditioning unit. If we were anywhere around here, looking back there, we would have no idea that there is what is quite an enormous house under there. Yeah. Was it a nerve-racking moment with the digger there and you were piling soil up on it? When the big digger was up there, we went quickly inside to check on cracks. But it was all right. I wouldn't have thought that would've been the safest place to have been, underneath it. BOTH CHUCKLE BOTH CHUCKLE Anyhow, it was all right, which just shows you how strong it is. People would immediately think this a big space to heat, but you feel as if you're in a bit of a subtropical paradise. We don't worry about it, because... We don't worry about it, because... We have the energy storage. We don't worry about it, because... We have the energy storage. ...the storage, yeah. Which is just some rocks. Which is just some rocks. Yeah. Which is just some rocks. Yeah. ALL CHUCKLE ALOUD The heat is collected in the centre here behind glass. A fan pushes it down into the rock store. The rocks' thermal properties help regulate the temperature, providing a natural heat store working in tandem with the earth insulation covering the house. A lot of people today struggle for indoor-outdoor flow. You've, sort of, defeated that by having the outdoors flow indoors. You've, sort of, defeated that by having the outdoors flow indoors. (CHUCKLES) Yes. Can you swim all year round? Can you swim all year round? Yes, but it's cold. Every day, I jump in. It wakes me up, and then it's` I'm awake again, you know? It feels... like we're, sort of, standing in the future, you know? When you see science fiction movies and things like that, people live in a dome, and their environment is contained inside it. Yeah. Yeah. And it feels like we're in that at the moment. You could say, you know, we live in the past like in a cave. Yeah. Yeah. ALL LAUGH HEARTILY I tell you what ` this is the nicest cave I've ever been in. If` If the hobbits had had a little bit more natural light, I` I don't` I don't reckon they would have gone on all those annoying journeys. (LAUGHS) I'm off on a journey of my own to America's still reasonably wild west. Here, a group of eco architects are at the forefront of green design. In Taos, bottles, cans and tyres are being used as materials to build what they call Earthships ` self-sustaining houses in the middle of the desert. Hi, Ron. How are you doing? Good. How are you? Good. How are you? Very good, thank you. It's a hive of activity here today. Yes. We have 33 students here from all over the world to learn how to build sustainable, off-the-grid, autonomous housing. Right. Right. And what we're trying to do is show 'em every detail, dirt to doorknob. Wow. If I'm here to learn, I should probably start doing something. Wow. If I'm here to learn, I should probably start doing something. Let's do it. So, you wanna stay low and use your hips a little bit. You've gotta bang the heck out of these tyres. Start to see the side will pop up. Right there. Pop! It's very physical. I was under the impression that you just shovelled some dirt in there. You'll get used to it, if it's not super hot. But you'd end up super hot if you're doing all this pounding. I mean, look at you. We will never be able to use up the amount of tyres that are being produced already every year in the United States. And there's no more affordable way to build a home. The cost of a sledgehammer, a shovel, a free tyre and the dirt on your job site ` you're building a home. They're a distinctive aesthetic look, the Earthships, with that Mad Max element to it. With all these solar panels and all this glass for solar gain, the exotic finishes with bottle work, people can do anything they what. We're not under any restrictions. I don't think that anybody can be as enthusiastic as an American. They do enthusiasm really well. And Ron is a great example of that. You just get caught up in his fervour, his zeal. And here he is, enthusiastic Ron, enthusing people to go out there and pound all day a lot of clay into a tyre to create a very simple home. Somewhere along the way, I think we've lost the simplicity of the concept of what a house is for. Do we need four bedrooms and 400m2 and two en suites and a guest toilet and unlimited indoor-outdoor flow to a pizza oven that's surrounded by the Jacuzzi, with a whole lot of... rather tedious native grasses planted around it? You know, really? Here in Taos, I'm looking to the future by learning a skill from the past. Today, Ron will try to instruct me on the intricacies of plastering mud to a wall. These adobe-and-trash survival pods are touted as ideal buildings for emergency housing in disaster zones. Immediately you can notice how cool it is in here. It's like coming into a nice cool cave. You're tapped into the earth's constant temperature of 58 degrees. So as close to the earth as you can get. Exactly. It's in and of the earth. And we're using the by-product. We're using trash from society to make things affordable and cleaning up the environment as well. The tyres are a huge part of why this building is performing like it does. My job, I suspect, is to cover some of them with some adobe. My job, I suspect, is to cover some of them with some adobe. This is what we call buttering it. I'm icing the cake. That's two ways of applying it. I got my hawk there, and I'm applying it. You've clearly done this before. You've clearly done this before. Yeah. This is not my first rodeo. You've clearly done this before. Yeah. This is not my first rodeo. (CHUCKLES) Wanna try it? Wanna try it? I'll give it a go. Wanna try it? I'll give it a go. All right. And don't worry about dropping it. It's not gonna cost you any money. Yeah, pick it back up, reuse it. OK, so you're gonna butter. You wanna get` OK, so you're gonna butter. You wanna get` Oh! The other application is just... basically bunging it on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I just slap that on there. Yeah, exactly. So I just slap that on there. Yep. That is not exactly... (LAUGHS) It's the other way. Oh, it's the other way? Oh, it's the other way? Reverse that technique. Oh, it's the other way? Reverse that technique. Oh. It goes on the trowel. Ah. Ah. It all goes on to the trowel... Goes on to the trowel, then it goes on. Yep. What you're doing right now reminds me of when kids are eating spaghetti. There's, like, more on their shirt, on their face than actually in their stomach. The brains behind the designs ` renegade architect Michael Reynolds. In the early '70s, the news was talking about garbage being thrown all over the streets and highways, cans and bottles. And so I got into using them to build with to try and clean up. The very first thing was a house made of beer cans in 1971. Then one thing led to another, and I got into the tyres and the thermal mass and the energy crisis, and we ended up here with absolutely sustainable, autonomous buildings. The environment in here is so radically different from out there. They almost seem, to me, to be like space stations. The Earthship is kind of like a mini biosphere. If we can create an Amazon jungle within this harsh environment, it just shows us that these concepts can give humans whatever they need without the need of nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, sucking up water from the earth, fracking for gas. fracking for gas. Is there any idea you've had where you've gone, 'Actually, that's` that's too crazy'? No. No. Yeah? (CHUCKLES) No. Yeah? (CHUCKLES) Nothing's too crazy. I mean, the building you were just in with Ron, it has a bucket-flush toilet. It has a solar-bag shower. It has a power system that's just enough to charge your cell phone and give you a couple of lights, and we're on a pump for your bucket flush. It is ultra simple, ultra no-maintenance and very economical. I'm saying that that is a way of the future that's going to have to be, and` and a lot of people are saying, 'Well, that's getting out there a little too far, Reynolds.' Well, what I'm saying is talk to me in five years and tell me if it's too far. It's not too far. It's survival. Old materials are also being resurrected here in Lima, Peru. The work of design team RIKA is sold at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which still surprises designer Ricardo. At home, everybody's got an old broom. But not everyone thinks, 'I'm gonna put some wheels on it and turn it into a pen holder.' That's good design. That's good design. (CHUCKLES) The first moment, I didn't thought about this. So I only think about the toy. Then we realised that it has another function to hold pencils or whatever you want. That's great. And now that sells in the MoMA in New York. Yeah. I hope that it sells good. Yeah. I hope that it sells good. I think it will. When you first started designing, you know, with things like an old broom and recycled cardboard, what did all of your design colleagues say? They started saying that is not design. They think that design need to start from the paper and drawing, and then to the production. I don't start by drawing. I start looking at the object, and then finding some new function. So that is also a design process. I guess the argument is maybe you're just recycling rather than designing. Actually, we do not recycle. We recover materials. Tyres, it's not recycled tyres. It's recovered rubber from the tyre. We didn't chop the tyre, and then mix and make a new material. We use the rubber in the same way they use to make the tyre. So we don't recycle nothing. The eco design is, kind of, recover everything ` recover traditions, recover material, recover techniques, low-tech process. Do you think this is the future of design, taking objects, recovering them and reusing them differently? Maybe a thousand years. (CHUCKLES) But not now, because we still have oil to turn into plastic, all the materials. But there will be the time when the oils is end, so we will start to recover all the plastic that we left underground, and we'll try to transform that in` in new ways of` of materials. Do you ever see a day where, maybe, some of this stuff is made in a big factory with machines, pressing it all out? pressing it all out? What if this sells very good that they need a million? Yeah. What happens then? Do you go to the new broom factory? And then the brooms are not ever used as brooms? You take a broom and put it in your factory and make one of those. And then they will lose the spirit. And then they will lose the spirit. Yeah. And then they will lose the spirit. Yeah. Yeah. In San Francisco, America's most environmentally aware city, they're already mining rubbish. At the Refuse Transfer Station, Waste Processes Recology run an artists-in-residence programme. The only materials the artists have to create with are what other people have already tossed out. I'm joining Beau to help harvest materials on his daily scavenge. You could come in every day, and you just never know. Some days, no one's showing up. Some days, you can't run around fast enough, trying to get all the things that interest you. These have all come from old clothing, military surplus, workwear, boots. This was, like, a pair of cowboy boots and Navajo rug. And this one was a woman's fur coat. I guess Rita was the owner of the coat at one time. I wonder what Rita's doing now. Probably not much. I wonder what Rita's doing now. Probably not much. BOTH CHUCKLE Is there a perception that art created at a rubbish dump might be a bit, kind of, rubbish? That's my biggest worry. The trash should be the afterthought, you know? They're coming in, and they're thinking, 'OK, this is gonna be, like, trash art.' And then they see it, and they're, like, 'No, I'm just looking at art. Oh, yeah, it is trash.' It should influence how you think about environmentally. Are you more careful with what you throw away? Oh, sure. I mean, it's` it's brought out the worst. I can't throw anything away any more, because, uh,... because everything's got this potential. And now the house is a disaster, and I've got no place to put anything. 'Karrie is the other artist in residence.' Is there a snob factor, you know, people think you're working at a tip, or is there a cred to it? I think in the Bay area there is definite credibility to be here, and my artist friends are incredibly jealous. So what are you making? So what are you making? I'm making a large installation of melted glass, and I wanted it to, kind of, represent melting ice. Cos it's very beautiful. Cos it's very beautiful. Thank you. Have you ever worked with glass before? Have you ever worked with glass before? No, I have not. What inspired that? Um, the sheer delight people take with breaking glass in the public disposal area and the massive quantities of it. It must be terrifically exciting. You know, every load that comes in has got new treasure in it. You're a bit, sort of, like an archaeologist, a bit like an anthropologist. And the maps? The maps, I think, are from the '50s, early '60s. They're from places that will be greatly affected by global warming when the seawater rises, so I thought it was kind of serendipitous that this piece is about that, and these are the geographies that I found. Recology has also altered the geography outdoors. They've created a park to showcase work from previous artists. Here, even the ground is recycled. These paths are the remains of the city's infamous motorway system, destroyed by the 1989 earthquake. Green design can be pleasing to the eye, the pocket and the palate, which is why I'm back in Central Otago. Behind me is Mt Difficulty itself. It was given its name when musterers bringing sheep from Oamaru, taking them into Queenstown, were hindered and couldn't get the sheep over the hill. They called it Mt Difficulty. Ended up taking the sheep all the way around the Crown Range to Wanaka, back down to Queenstown, adding three more weeks to the journey. I imagine the sheep were fairly lean. Would have gone very well with a Pinot Noir had they been making it here at the time. Mt Difficulty Winery now produces a perky Pinot, using nature to not only grow their grapes but also to mature the wine. Winemaker Matt is taking me to see their new cellar, which should make a good drop, thanks to its living roof. Wine naturally in Europe etc sits within caves and within really temperature-moderated buildings. And we wanted to recreate that, sort of, cave-like atmosphere and performance. So thermal performance was high on the hit list of what we wanted to be able to achieve. Was that difficult to work out? Engineers scratching their heads, 'I dunno how cold that's gonna get'? Lots of question marks around thermal performance. You have thermal modelling ` energy companies looking at how it would work. It's amazing in some ways that here is a technology that's as old, essentially, as human habitation. Yet we're having to go to quite high-tech modelling to figure out how exactly it works. The question is ` does it justify itself from the monetary point of view? How much capital goes in versus running costs? There's definitely running-costs benefit. One of our big things is waste water. We use a lot of water to make wine ` in the order of 3 litres or 4 litres of water to make one litre of wine. One of the things we really wanted to do was to be much better custodians of that water and actually reuse it, rather than just dispose of it. What temperature does it sit at downstairs? What temperature does it sit at downstairs? Ideally for the wine, 13 degrees. Can you taste the difference? Can you taste the difference? Well, we're hoping to. I mean, that whole thing about it being nice and stable, that does result in the wine developing in a really nice way. So we are hoping that whole cave-like environment helps the wines mature nice and slowly. If I was going to be put somewhere to age, I'd quite like it to be in a temperature like this. (CHUCKLES) Do we have a timber in NZ that has any of the similar qualities to, say, French oak? There was quite a big barrel-making industry in NZ, making barrels for shipping seal skins and things back to the motherland. So there was a lot of barrels made in NZ, but all of those timbers ` rimu, totara, kauri ` have a real pine resin, sort of, quality. And you throw pine resin in Pinot, and you end up with Retsina, not something` Piny-flavoured Pinot is not what you want. Piny-flavoured Pinot is not what you want. No, no, I don't want that. No. My favourite barrel story involves some whalers back in the whaling days. One of them died in Dunedin, so they took the body in a barrel of rum to bury in Sydney, and when they got there, well, the body was still in the barrel of rum, but the rum was gone. It had been drunk by thirsty sailors on the voyage over. the ship, or they had been told and they didn't care. Regardless, a very famous barrel story. (GRUNTS) Ow. 'Nature is a spectacular designer, and those designs can be harnessed at an industrial level. 'When Wairakei Thermal Power Station was built in the late '50s, it was considered state of the art. 'Now, 55 years later, it is so again, 'thanks to a new water feature.' We're not driving cars from 1958, yet we're still using the same power plant. That is value for money. There's a wonderful quote in an old newspaper article from 1958 about this ` 'Power, like hope, springs eternal,' which I guess in many ways sums up a geothermal field. So, under here is, what, tens of millions of dollars' worth of infrastructure? There is, yeah. Just a few metres under the surface. Not much of a visual bang for your buck. There's not much to see, is there? There's not much to see, is there? What is under there? There's not much to see, is there? What is under there? Lots and lots of pipes, basically. 370-odd kilometres of pipe, and bacteria grow inside the pipes. They actually eat hydrogen sulphide. Right. Right. So the smelly rotten-egg smell around geothermal areas... And that's simply to stop hydrogen sulphide from going into the river and making it somewhat icky. < Historically, it's gone back out into the river, but the fish, the invertebrates don't like the hydrogen sulphide, a toxin. < This is to treat that and takes out 90% of the hydrogen sulphide. So, you've got 378km of glorified spouting buried underground that you're zooping the water through, and there's a colony of bacteria going about its business even as we speak. There would have been people suggesting some very elaborate and complicated machinery or chemistry to solve this problem. or chemistry to solve this problem. Mm-hm. Exactly, yeah. All sorts of weird and wonderful ideas came out of the woodwork, but, um, in the end, the simple one won out. What a triumph of nature, cos there we are, harnessing nature to create electricity, one of the great triumphs of the modern age, and then in order to solve a problem, we've gone back to nature and just allowed it to do what nature does. we've gone back to nature and just allowed it to do what nature does. Yeah, exactly. 'It's often said that the key to good design lies in that old maxim ` less is more. 'But in this day and age, it's also about doing more with less. Well, more or less. 'Working with nature is certainly easier than working against it. 'It's especially useful when staying in your tent and you want to cook your tea. 'You just have to dunk your teabag.' Cooking that in there is the closest that I'll ever get to, basically, dropping food into a volcano. It doesn't get any simpler than that ` heat and eat. Thanks, Earth. You're neat. Pretty corny. That is some good corn. You can almost taste the minerals on that. JAUNTY COUNTRY MUSIC Next week, I'm on the hunt for natural solutions. I visit a guy on the West Coast trying to keep his bees buzzing naturally, travel to Cuba to see bees in their biosphere and meet some NZers who believe fungus could be the key to chemical-free farming and that pine bark might help us live longer, smarter lives.