COULD YOU GO CARBON NEUTRAL?

Public concern about the environment has reached a record high but what can we do as individuals? Amanda Riley-Jones meets four inspiring people who have successfully reduced their carbon footprint

- Amanda Riley-Jones

Hamish McKenzie, 63 lives with his psychologist wife, Sarah, in Shoreham-on-Sea, Sussex. Almost everything he owns is recycled— including his floating home.

“In times of yore, there’d be ringing of the church bells during a national emergency. They should be ringing now. Climate change is the biggest danger we face,” says Hamish McKenzie—a bell-ringer, boatbuilder, extreme recycler and climate change activist.

He’s been living in a community of houseboats for the last 33 years and says “The Greenland ice cap is melting even faster than predicted. My biggest personal fear is that we can’t keep building our way out of what's coming,” he sips his tea and gestures over to the wall defence just feet from his boat.

“In 100 years' time, maybe less, it will be unviable for people to live here because of rising water levels and the likelihood of hurricanes.”

After training in civil engineering and carpentry, Hamish volunteered in Fiji, building community halls from timber. At 48, he enrolled at art school where he learned welding and fibre-glassing skills.

Now 63, he’s turned recycling into an art form and has created eclectic, eccentric houseboats out of old vehicles and bits and pieces he retrieves from junkyards and farms.

He and his wife live on Verda—an amalgam of an old Bedford coach and eight boats, built on the hull of a 1928 Portsmouth-Gosport ferry, which Hamish rescued from the tidal mudflats. He lists another houseboat, named Dodge, on Airbnb to fund his lifestyle.

Onboard Verda, underneath a striking ceiling incorporating second-hand aircraft wings, the spacious main room is currently home to a banner Hamish has made in support of Extinction Rebellion, the international climate change protest movement.