Residential Sustainable Communities

I am a retired 68 year old living in Kensington Johannesburg, divorced but with a partner who lectures at the University of Limpopo and visits me when she can.

I was intending to move into a retirement facility in about my mid 70s and on enquiring about availability of accommodation therein I found that in a retirement facility near me there was a twenty year long waiting list for cottages. Their shortest waiting list, first floor one bedroom flats, was three years long. It would seem long waiting lists for retirement facilities are currently the norm. One of the reasons for this of course is that people are living between 10 to 15 years longer than they used to forty or more years ago. This set me thinking. Perhaps this situation actually provides an opportunity for a new life after retitrement. Are there retirees out there who would be interested in working together to form a residential community, I wondered. Hence this blog.

For many years I have been very concerned about the destruction that humankind is wreaking upon our natural environment. As my knowledge of the steadily increasing destruction expanded I became more and more despondent about any kind of long term future for humankind. Over the Easter weekend I spent a fair amount of time surfing the web looking at environmental web sites and I became even more despondent because the bulk of the information contained in them seemed to be predicated on fixing particular issues that arose from what I saw as the real problem which is the West's total way of living which is completely unsustainable and which the rest of humankind seems hell bent on following.

Unless humankind changes to living in a completely sustainable manner our species, and many other species along with us, are doomed. Unfortunately in this matter of changing the way we live, which can be compared to trying to turn a huge ocean liner around, we, as a species, might not make the needed changes fast enough. In this case, which is a definite possibility, what is to be done?

It seems to me that those of us who are aware of this problem are in a similar position to that of Noah before the flood and like Noah it is incumbent upon us to create Arks or pockets of completely sustainable living which mght, just might, God willing, survive the looming environmental catastrophe should it befall humankind. Such Arks will of necessity be comprised of small communities and the more of them that there are the greater our species chances of survival.

This is where the idea of residential communities of retirees came in, residential communities of reirees doing what it takes to live sustainably so that they can serve as exmplars to others seeking to also adopt sustainable life styles.

As I am a long tgime spiritual practioner having been a Quaker since 1963, an Iyengar Yoga practitioner since 1985 and a Vajaryana Buddhist since 1987 my vision is of a residential community of financially independent spiritual practitioners who are also environmental activists. Anybody who is interested or wants to discuss this concept is more than welcome to contact me either by email or telephonically at 011 616 4204.