My knowledge of New Zealand extends about as far as the beloved Flight of the Concords. So when I met Malcolm Rands, the founder of a New Zealand-based green cleaning company called Ecostore, I did a double-take when I heard he lives in an ecovillage. An eco what? — my exact reaction, I believe. So I chatted with Malcolm, a delightfully charming greeny, about ecovillages and eco-friendly cleaners. How Malcolm wound up with a green cleaning line is about as organic a story as they come. While I'll never live in an ecovillage, I found it fascinating to hear about a green that goes way beyond reusable bags.
What is an ecovillage?
We’re actually a permaculture ecovillage. [The photo above is from Malcolm's ecovillage.] The typical way we get our food is man dominating nature. Your cabbage will grow here right now even if it's not naturally suited for this soil. One of the problems with the planet is we're killing our topsoil. When weeds pop out of the soil, then weeds are what nature is saying should be growing there. Nature doesn’t do anything by accident. You never have to water weeds — they just belong there. If you go buy a packet of beans to grow in your garden, the seeds are the same in Brooklyn as in Africa and New Zealand. You have to cover your garden in fertilizers because the seeds never really belong. With a permaculture system, once you have your garden, some animals,
like chickens and pork-belly pigs in there, then the whole system pumps
out food. You could walk away for 10 years and the land would still be
pumping out food. Permaculture systems look at the health of the soil.
A nuclear family is not a big enough unit to self-sustain. You have to be a part of bigger unit. With the ecovillage, we have 150 acres. We could have each had our own private valley. But we didn’t do that. Instead, we clustered the houses all close together, so there was no farmhouse off by itself. In permaculture, you want gardening and people to be close for it to work. Before we moved to Auckland, we didn’t know the concept of a babysitter or kids going to school in a car by themselves. Things just happen in the ecovillage, because your neighbors are right outside your door.
How did you become so passionate about environmental issues?
I didn't start being a greeny until I was 26. I decided to grow a garden in my backyard. I went to the library and by chance pulled a book off the shelf called "Organic Gardening." Ever since then, I thought why do it any other way? You cannot underestimate the joy of taking some of the food you grow and putting it in your meal. I became obsessed with gardening and bought a house, creating a mini farm with chickens and fruit trees. I always wanted more. I moved up north for a nonprofit job and stayed there for 15 years. The people I met there became the core for the ecovillage.
How did you wind up creating Ecostore cleaners?
Our water was coming from a national park —the purest water you could get. We wanted the water to leave the village as pure as it came in. We thought we were great doing organic gardening. Then we started looking at the water leaving our house. A few of us were outraged by the chemicals allowed to be used in household cleaners. We started Ecostore, because we thought there had to be alternatives.
[I'll be sharing more on Malcolm and green cleaners next week!]
psst don't forget there's a giveaway running through April 15 — comment here for a chance to win a free $105 kit from Fresh Wave!
{green swap photograph by charlotte jenks lewis}
what's green swap? find out more here
