Paul Allen

CAT began life as an off-grid test-bed community for experimenting with alternative types of technology and lifestyles in response to the 1970s oil crisis and an emerging concern about the environmental impacts of how we lived.

Responding to potentially catastrophic climate change is a challenge unlike any other in our history. We have the technology to meet this challenge – the barriers are social, political and cultural. So how can we make it happen?

We live in spectacular times. On one hand we have the incredible advances of medicine, art, science, education and entertainment. In the developed west, our material wellbeing and life expectancy have increased dramatically over the last century. In fact, if you have the means, you can have most of the things you could ever want. You can listen to a perfect digital reproduction of traditional Tibetan flute music, whilst watching wide screen 3-D images on the beauties of the lower Nile, eating authentic Chilean cuisine with fresh New Zealand kiwi fruit to follow. If you wish, you can even go there and experience them all in person. Modern life offers an incredible range of experiences which we all, to a lesser or greater degree, participate in.