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=> Mexican Palapas change Professor's Life and Outlook

Mexican Palapas change Professor's Life and Outlook
Posted by Jeff (Guest) - Sunday, June 18 2006, 6:21:17 (CEST)
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Stop the world, I'm getting off!
23:46pm 16th June 2006

Civilisation as we know it will collapse in 35 years, says university scientist Dylan Evans. His solution? To set up a commune and live in tents with 200 strangers in the Highlands. So, how is he coping so far?

Huddled over a spinning wheel in a candle-lit Mongolian-style yurt in a windswept corner of Scotland is a 39-year-old university lecturer with gold-rimmed glasses and a beatific smile.

Eminent scientist Dylan Evans is preparing himself for the end of the world as we know it. He is convinced this will be around 2040. And he could not be happier.

Dylan has terminated his long-term relationship, sold his house and given away all his possessions save his books, his car and his cat. Next month he leaves his £30,000 post at Bristol’s University of West England, where he is an expert in robotics, to decamp full-time to this primitive tent.

He has turned his back on everything he once held dear, and, with 200 like-minded souls, is preparing to embrace a caveman existence. Dylan has spent his entire academic career pushing the boundaries of science. So this is a dramatic decision.

He fears our high-tech civilisation will collapse — perhaps in less than 40 years — due to climate change, spiralling oil prices and civil unrest. Millions will die of famine and disease and in violent disputes.

On a more cheerful note, he also believes that the few fortunate survivors will find true happiness. Freed from careers, televisions, microwaves and every other labour-saving luxury, they will revel in a primitive lifestyle that is nothing short of paradise.

To try it out, Dylan is opening a commune which he’s dubbed Utopia. It will run for 18 months, and he is welcoming fellow survivalists, who will start arriving next March.

So far, they include a former RAF training officer, a mother of five, a middle-aged hippy and a human rights lawyer, as well as Dylan’s new girlfriend and her two children.

They will sleep in single-sex dormitories, grow their own crops, bake their own bread and slaughter their own pigs and sheep. Water will be drawn from a nearby stream and heat will be provided by solar panels.

Electricity will be severely rationed. A spinning wheel and an ancient Singer sewing machine will be used to make clothes to keep out the bitter chill. Evenings will be spent around a wood-heated stove in the communal yurt swopping stories and singing.

And, if living with a group gets too oppressive, each member can use a separate 11ft tent, dubbed the ‘love yurt’, alone or with another commune member.

"It’s a kind of experimental futurology to try to learn about life in a post-apocalyptic world by pretending that we are already living in around 2040," says Dylan. "By then, civilisation may well have collapsed due to forces such as climate change.

"We will learn all the things we’ve lost such as practical skills and how to live in a small community. I’m convinced a more primitive lifestyle will lead to incredible happiness.

"Industrialisation was supposed to bring us happiness. It hasn’t. We’ve become increasingly unhappy over the last 40 years. Society has broken down. No one cares about one another anymore. This is our chance to answer the call of the wild. We’ll discover passion and real purpose."

The decision to change every aspect of his life came to Dylan in a flash one day in September last year. Fear of the future and dissatisfaction with the present proved a combustible mixture. Unwinding after a lecture tour of Mexico, he visited the stone cities abandoned by the Maya civilisation.

"They’re incredibly moving, eerie places,’ he says.

"Wandering around, you realise that this amazing civilisation wasn’t the victim of invasion or some terrible calamity. The people were the architects of their own demise.

"They cut down their trees, sapped the earth and encouraged a huge boom in population until they didn’t have any resources left. Their whole civilisation imploded — there was famine, disease and bloody civil war. The survivors fled into the jungle.

"I thought: could the same thing happen to our civilisation? All previous societies have collapsed at some stage. Why should ours be immune?

"We are so dependent on technology that without it everything would go into free fall. Even farming is dependent on it — oil and fertilisers to run equipment and work the earth.

"A collapse of the infrastructure would throw everything out. We are destroying ourselves. Lots of scientists say the same."

With these ideas rumbling around in his head, Dylan found himself a few days later relaxing on a Mexican beach. It was then that the next step became apparent.

"I was on my way to spend the night in a beach hut," he says. "Stumbling across the sands, I realised I was carrying far too much. My possessions were weighing me down, so I started giving them away.

"There were kids without shoes, so I gave them my spare pair. I gave away clothes. When I reached the hut, I only owned a candle and the clothes I stood up in, but I felt tremendous. I have never felt so liberated."

For most people the sense of liberation would have quickly faded. But Dylan was different. Back home, he took a long, hard look at his life and the results were cataclysmic.

"I had felt discontented for a long time, but I hadn’t appreciated why. Now I know it’s because all my assumptions were wrong," he says. "Like most people, I thought the more successful I was in my career and the more I owned, the happier I’d be.

"My life was meaningless. I had become a senior lecturer. I had written several books. I owned a lovely two-bedroom stone cottage in the Cotswolds, but my life was so bourgeois and boring it disgusted me.

"My salary seemed great, but it all went on feeding a lifestyle I wasn’t enjoying — with a mortgage, Sky TV and insurance on my washing machine.

Nothing I owned added anything significant to my life.

"I felt myself getting sucked back into my old consumerist life but, for the first time, I realised it was making me sick. I could see that modern civilisation is a collection of drugs: TV, iPods, mobile phones. They are all substitutes for real happiness: friendship, learning, community spirit.

"We think that our highly industrialised society has enriched our lives. But I became convinced that societies that spend most of their time on primitive tasks — gathering, preparing and cooking food — are the happiest.

"I felt crazy for questioning things, but I knew I had to follow my gut instinct. That’s why I’m putting my ideas into practice by building Utopia."

Dylan’s decision to abandon his conventional lifestyle cost him his relationship with a fellow academic.

"We had been very happy together for several years," says Dylan. "But when I came up with this idea I knew it would be the parting of the ways.

"My ex loved her university career and loved city life. I was giving up both. I asked her to join me but I knew she would refuse. Of course, I was sorry, but this experiment is too important for me to compromise."

Even so, a less likely Robinson Crusoe would be hard to find. Most of Dylan’s academic life has been spent closeted in classrooms and lecture halls.

Dylan’s divorced parents are teachers. Brought up in a comfortable middle-class home in Kent, he attended a prestigious private school in Sevenoaks, before taking a degree in linguistics at Southampton University.

Moving to the London School of Economics, he gained a doctorate in the philosophy of science. However, after working as a psychotherapist, Dylan developed a passion for robotics. In 2003, he took up his research post in Bristol where he perfected a social robot that would act as a plastic friend for lonely people.

Dylan's prototype, Eva, has a realistic-looking face with artificial skin and can make convincing emotional expressions. Then came his life-changing moment in Mexico and all his doubts crystallised.

"Eva’s the stuff of science fiction," says Dylan. "The plan was to hook her vision system to her emotional expression system so that she could engage in realistic social interaction with humans, smiling when you smile, looking concerned when you frown and so on. It was terribly exciting.

"The technology was so advanced it was magical. But then it came to me. Eva is brilliant. But what was I doing trying to find a technical solution for a social problem?

"Scientists used to believe that life would be wonderful when robots did all the dirty work and left us with masses of leisure time, but the truth couldn’t be more different.

"The further we’ve come from our roots, the more miserable we’ve become. In primitive societies neighbours talk to each another. They don’t need robots to do the job for them. Technology doesn’t improve the lot of the human race. It makes things worse."

So Dylan resigned his post. His last day will be July 14.

Dylan put his house on the market — it sold last month — and started giving away his possessions. "The only things I’m keeping are my books," he says. "They will form the basis of a library in Utopia — and my car, an old Peugeot 206. My house had come to seem like a prison. Selling it was liberating. But giving away my belongings was even more exciting.

"I found a recycling website called www.freecycle.org and offered everything, from my furniture to my washing machine on it. Seeing my goods going to loving homes was wonderful."

For Utopia, Dylan has chosen a spot as far away from civilisation as possible at a secret location in the Highlands.

Over the next nine months he will spend the £80,000 profit from selling his home into laying the fabric of his community, including converting a barn for sleeping and setting up yurts.

By March, it will be ready to welcome the first volunteers. Dylan posted his first advertisement for recruits on his website in January and, so far, 90 people have responded.

To ensure variety, applicants can stay for a maximum three months. So from next March, almost 200 people will pass through the communal yurt in the 18-month experiment.

"Most of the men are interested in honing survival skills for the end of civilisation," says Dylan. "They want to make tools and build yurts. The women want to explore social dynamics."

Recruits include Janie Hampton, from Oxford, an environmental writer and veteran of alternative lifestyles. Now aged 54, back in the Seventies she modelled herself on Felicity Kendal to lead ‘the good life’ on a smallholding in Shropshire.

She raised four children, grew fruit and vegetables, milked goats and cured her own ham and bacon. Now she can’t wait to live on the commune.

"I’m not afraid of wringing a chicken’s neck for supper," she says. "I suppose some may see me as a mad old woman. My husband thinks I am. He’d rather go sailing."

Janie is already getting her head around sanitary arrangements.

"Luckily I know how to construct a ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrine," she says.

"They don’t need water, last for ages and have no smells or flies. They were invented by a water engineer in Zimbabwe and can be made from straw, corrugated iron, sacking and wood. If Dylan doesn’t know how to make one, I’ll happily come and build one."

Janie’s daughter, Daisy Hampton, 32, a business administrator from Essex, is another eager recruit.

"It’s a fascinating experiment and I’m interested to see who else will turn up," she says.

Naturally, there are sceptics. As Janie asks: "Are we just a bunch of weirdos convinced the world is going to end?"

With his psychotherapy background, Dylan thinks he can root out oddballs.

"I want a good mix of individuals," he says. "Seeing how different people get on is at the core of the experiment.

"There’s bound to be conflict but I aim to reduce arguments, not encourage them. We need to work together in harmony."

Which is where the love yurt comes in. Dylan feels this will provide the perfect balance between privacy and community. But will it have another, perhaps less desirable, effect? Removed from their families, and making up rules as they go along, will sexual passions run high?

Dylan shudders at the notion of this as Big Brother caveman-style. "This isn’t a reality show," he says. "Volunteers want to live in Utopia. They’re not coming to get famous by having sex on TV."

But he admits he has already tested the love yurt himself with his new girlfriend.

"A real test of our relationship was whether she could bear to sleep in a yurt," he says. "If she’d said no, I’m afraid there would have been no future. But she loved it.

"She’s 37, a housewife with two children, aged 11 and three. I would love them to join Utopia, but they’ve not said either way yet. I’d like to be part of a couple. It would be much more conducive to harmony in a small community."

Apart from the ban on TVs, mobile phones and similar ‘divisive’ technology, there will be few strict rules.

"I hope we can agree all decisions democratically," says Dylan. "I’ll only step in if there’s a serious dispute and someone needs to be ejected.

"Our society has become riddled with rules and regulations. It’s horrifying. The more you try and formalise things, the less room you leave for common sense.

"When I heard that Tony Blair was planning to issue an 18-page manual for cat owners, I knew I didn’t want to be part of this society any longer."

Dylan plans to write a book about his experiment, but the numerous TV companies who have approached him have all been turned away.

"If we’re banning TVs it seems a bit hypocritical to participate in a TV programme," he says.

So how primitive is life going to be? Dylan’s website is abuzz with discussions. Will toilet paper be allowed? What about medicines? One enthusiast is desperate not to be parted from his hayfever medicine. And with the hills of Scotland alive with midges, what about insect sprays?

"Even after the Apocalypse there would be goods to scavenge, such as medicines. It would only make sense to use them," he says.

As Dylan sets off to the Highlands to prepare for the end of the world, only one question remains: is this anything more than a mid-life crisis? After all, Dylan is awaiting his own apocalyptic moment — the arrival of his 40th birthday. In swopping the Cotswolds for a love yurt, is he just dealing with the age-old problem in a pparticularly extravagant style?

"I’ve thought about that," he says slowly. "But no. This is about much more than a birthday. It’s about experiencing the future."



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