The reality of the fuel crisis has meant we are taking our international charity sailing plans off the agenda for the foreseeable future, to instead focus on immediate and local needs.
A necessary pivot
You can expect to see an increased focus on how our frugal, low-impact living minimises our costs and our dependence on an increasingly strained global supply chain. We will share more practical advice on how we manage to live well without a car or regular visits to the grocery store.
Our blog posts are broken into four major categories: Give, Live, Move and Reflect. I set out below what you might expect to find in each of these categories, now that we’re adding a more practical focus.
Give
You will see how we are engaging in our local community and continue to find high level information on our support for effective charities working in some of the poorest places in the world. We will also engage directly with some of those communities.
It’s likely many of our audience are feeling the pinch from increased fuel prices. There is also an impending escalation of cost of all goods. We personally want to continue supporting high impact charities since the recipients are likely to be affected far worse than we are in Australia. On the other hand we understand that encouraging other people to give may not land particularly well at a time when their own costs have increased.
We aim to find a balance in validating the very real experience of increased costs and cost pressure in Australia and highlighting the opportunities that we have to continue to save money and make time for things that are most important to us.
Click here for blog posts in this category.
Live
We’ll take a deeper dive into food foraging, growing and preparing. This concludes some practical guidance on getting started with dumpster diving as well as sharing our experience with guerilla gardening. Maximising the productivity of our own garden at home in subtropical Brisbane, saving seeds and propogating perennials will complement this. We will also look at food preservation and recipes to use the foods most suited to our climate and locale.
Will also look closer at how we’re spending our money and where our major savings are, living as we do. Emelie has been experimenting with avoiding shampoo. This builds on our lifelong process of shaking off the cultural patterns of consumption we inherited. It is also part of improving the efficiency and yield of our garden, by making the greywater more suitable.
We will continue to share details of some of our repair projects and other improvised solutions for getting stuff done around home. We will continue to show that it’s not necessary to spend a fortune, or have everything perfect, in order to enjoy life and nice things.
We’ll look at some of the specifics of our home and how it helps us to live as we do. This will include both architectural features and the services and appliances we have added or modified to facilitate our lifestyle.
Click here for blog posts in this category.
Move
This is a category where you’ll find more information on getting started with practical cycling. Topics may include route finding, cycling with children and heavy things and basic maintenance. There’s certainly a psychological elements to active travel which we want to acknowledge as well. We hope that by sharing our experience authentically, others can see that while active travel is not always easy at first, but gets easier with practice.
We will look at the practicalities and our own experience with hitchhiking and online ride sharing. I hope to provide some real world examples of effective carpooling, if we can make that happen beyond our immediate friend group.
Long distance rail and bus travel as well as local public transport feature in our everyday life. We may write about this where relevance or of value to audience.
Click here for blog posts in this category.
Reflect
This remains a category to share our philosophical thoughts and learnings on our lifestyle, the global predicament and the inspiration that we find from others who are living similar, or perhaps more extreme versions, of a low-impact or frugal lifestyle.
We also provide analysis of different lifestyle and policy choices and where this may lead us as individuals.
Click here for blog posts in this category.
Living More with Less on other platforms
While we post here two to four times per month to avoid clogging our subscribers’ inboxes, we are creating and sharing content on FaceBook, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and TikTok once or twice most weeks. A few of the short videos went viral over the past couple of months, attracting more than a million views across platforms. If you prefer your content in video form or want to participate in active-topic specific communities, I encourage you to check out the respective platforms.
Below are some of the more popular videos. Note much larger view numbers on Facebook and TikTok:
We have also featured in Yahoo News on dumpster diving and recently interviewed for Nine MSN on our overall lifestyle, as well as a couple of radio programs, which you can find as podcasts on the Resources page.
A new contributor
Finally, I’d like to introduce Catherine as a contributor to Living More with Less. We met Cat at a Deep Adaptation event at the start of 2024 and immediately recognised a kindred spirit. Cat has devoted her life to making the world a better place, with a particular focus on reducing animal suffering. She is an amazing researcher and active participant and organiser in several communities. Cat excels in connecting the dots across many disciplines and maintains an astonishing collection of notes and resources. I look forward to reading and sharing some of her great work.