Your Year to Be Bold - Lyndall was featured in a story in Prevention Magazine.
Lyndall Parris, 60, “I am building my dream: an eco-village.”
Like many Sydneysiders, Lyndall Parris watches her water use, saves her kitchen scraps for backyard composting and dutifully wheels her recycling bin onto the street. She meets up with friends when she has time, laments the lack of community inherent in urban life and has long desired a simpler way of being. But unlike many others, Parris is daring to make her desires a reality.
“There was no original seed,” she says of her dream, “just a slow welling up of interest and enthusiasm. I started with a vision, a mission statement and a few rough drawings of an easier, more sustainable way to live.” As Parris’s ideas resonated with groups and individuals, word spread, and the Sydney Coastal Ecovillage project (www.scev.org) blossomed. She took off around the world to research other alternativecommunity models, grafting ideas onto her own.
A mother of three, an ex-teacher and an accountant, Parris isn’t an environmental revolutionary or baby boomer looking to live out the mung-bean ideals of the 1960s. “I don’t even like getting dirt under my nails!” she exclaims. “I want something stylish; something that offers a healthy lifestyle, a community of like-minded people and an economically sustainable opportunity to be gentle on our earth.” Parris’s vision is attracting a wide pool of supporters: from artists and horticulturalists to musicians and engineers.
“You won’t have to do Sustainability 101 to live in the village,” she adds. “The processes will just happen: the grey water will be recycled, the produce will be fresh, the homes will face north.” The endeavour has certainly thrown Parris her share of emotional and logistical curveballs. When her development partner had to dip out due to the ravages of the GFC, she was “knocked for six” but learned some valuable lessons: “Everything I’d known until now was fairly predictable,” she says. “This journey is totally unpredictable. So I’m learning to relinquish control, relax, breathe and let day-to-day synchronistic happenings be my guide. I follow opportunities through uncharted and unexpected waters! It may be a small project in the scheme of things—a drop in the global bucket—but, with luck, one that’s rippling with possibilities. Sometimes I wake during the night, hoping it’s morning so I can get up to do what’s required for the eco-village. This project is the one my heart has been working towards my whole life.”