Learn from one of the founders of the world’s largest living experiment – the 30 year old Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) UK.

ABOUT PETER HARPER:

Peter Harper is one of the founders of CAT (The Centre for Alternative Technology - www.cat.org.uk) in Wales UK.

 

He has been a member of CAT staff since 1983, and is currently Director of Research and Innovation. He was the originator of the term ‘alternative technology’ and has been a prominent theorist of the movement since the early 70s.

Peter is also a biologist, horticulturist and landscape designer. His writings on sustainability and environmental themes cover a wide range and are noted for their original, occasionally heretical, views.

Publications include the Radical Technology (1976 - an agenda-setting text), The Natural Garden Book (1994), Crazy Idealists? (1995 - a history of CAT and the wider green movement), and Lifting the Lid (1999 - on ecological toilet systems).  

Peter designed the education component of CAT displays and the bio-systems in operation on the site. (This now includes a woodchip CHP plant providing 200 KW of power). 

He is perhaps best known for his research and writing on his "Life-Style Laboratory" work, trying to put real data and personal and community targets on sustainable consumption, or what could be called sustainable prosperity, in a developed economy.

 

Lifestyle Lab workshops:

A series of workshops held around the world (EU, Eastern Europe, Japan, soon Australia) which get participants (typically 30 to 50 people) to  define their current dreams of 'home' and then to develop models of that ideal limited by environmental/consumption/greenhouse  goals.

Through this process, Peter begins by building an idea of “bourgeois” standards of living and then collective views on how those aspirations can be delivered in a sustainable world.

Peter is able to guide the process by contrasting high-tech and low-tech lifestyle models and to draw out implications for both householders and policy-makers.