Ted Trainer’s site is at Pigface Point, Sydney. It was set up as a 50-acre alternative lifestyle education site. He promotes global consumption, lifestyle trends, future technologies, lifestyles for healthy people and a healthy Earth. Dr Ted Trainer is a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of NSW.
Ted Trainer is not doing much food growing at this stage in his mature years but there were plenty of old chicken houses including a miniature thatched roof mansion and old veggie-gardens, he has a very whimsical approach to landscape.
Part of his site was designed for fun (bridges, arches, islands, caves, etc.) and other parts was for purpose (dams, rammed earth shed, cob oven, and home made furniture from found branches.
He uses his site as a model to show people how to create an interconnected, resourced and equipped ‘village’ or housing complex. He has a lot of energy experiments (tidal energy, water wheels, methane gas, composting toilets, etc.) He’s like a happy nutty professor let out of the lab! For years I had believed someone else that said that methane converter couldn’t work in our cooler climate, now i know that to be untrue simple bio-gas chambers off composting toilets will work in subtropics. Ted had one working off his toilet.
He also had some low-tech stuff which is demonstrated in a fun way, like a simple hose coiled to pump water as you turn it. He also had some great scaled models of a villages or suburbs that converts to low energy (post carbon).
Some of Ted’s writings are available online here
This Video is a Ted Trainer Interview on ‘The Simpler Way’