LifeBubbles

My LifeBubbles story.

I have spent half a lifetime thinking and dreaming about how to create paradise on Earth. For me, paradise has its roots in memories of paddling barefoot in cold clear fern lined water with fish darting under smooth mossy rocks. Scrambling between prickly canes and up fruit stained ladders picking plump juicy cherries, berries and stone fruits from the fertile creek flats somewhere in Tasmania's Huon Valley. I can still taste the sweet tang of those raspberries, the tart flavour bursts of mulberries, currents, and gooseberries. Still feel the fresh free breezed security of being amongst a laughing mob of extended family and friendship, celebrating the early summer bounty.

Glimpses of paradise like that never leave you. With maturity and experience, childhood memories of paradise are adorned by new more sophisticated understandings of how malleable ecosystems and habitats are to human influence. If your mind is open to critically observe the ways we interact with our environment you naturally cherry pick the connections that are positive and life-enhancing and discard the interactions that are environmentally destructive and degrading.

For over 50 years I have been collating beautiful examples of the ways humans tinker with their sometimes harsh and hostile landscapes and turn them into productive life-sustaining microclimates, lush oases, and comfortable sheltered places. We note the way plants thrive on the leeward side of a windbreak and so construct garden walls to recreate the effect, or we observe how animals shelter from the biting cold by digging a burrow into the warm earth of a sunny slope and then excavate manmade caves into solar facing soft rock or stable earth. We intuitively know we can benefit from mimicking nature.

LifeBubbles is a name I coined to capture this playful experimentation with the landscape and ecosystems to create manmade pockets of paradise - welcoming human habitats.

As I observe the ways we shape our physical environment to make it warm, comfortable and fertile to sustain our temporal needs, I can not help noticing the social dimensions to paradise. As social animals, we have a swag of needs, as wonderfully summarised by the late Marshall Rosenberg in his synthesis of Non-Violent Communication. For us to feel the range of positive human emotions these needs must be satisfied. A true paradise must embrace the needs of a community, not just an individual if it is to bring harmony and connection as well as abundance and sustenance.

Please explore this site, browse and share ideas on designing and creating LifeBubble habitats and connect with our growing community of LifeBubbles enthusiasts.