Ecology brings in a sense of nature as relationships, and recent developments in this field have changed the sense of identity. Milla speaks of the potential uses of fungi and how recent development projects arise from a worldview that doesn’t prioritize nature.

Previously published 2008 A conversation with Johnny To be perfectly frank, I came here looking for Jan, my wife at that time, and our first child. Our life in Sydney had been pretty turbulent. Although I had been to university and studied architecture, I dropped out of university. I was driving a taxi and we were leading a hand-to-mouth existence, sometimes without food. It was the sixties, a very turbulent society, but in the end Jan decided that I was hopeless and she took Jonas and went to Pondicherry. She had known about Pondicherry through the Theosophical Society. There was a Hungarian woman, Georgette, from the Ashram, who would come to Sydney for three months every year and work there for the Theosophical Society. She told us about the Ashram. The Theosophical Society was the only place in Sydney where you could find the writings of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. They weren’t even in the public library then. It was at the same time as the French New Wave cinema, Truffaud and Godard, and you had a small cinema that showed only these films. Everything else showed only American movies. That small cinema showed the New Wave, and underneath was the Theosophical library. There you could get a sniff of incense, and inside there were all the works of Sri Aurobindo. And it was a place where you could take a cushion and sit on the floor and read books. People at the counter would suggest, “You could read this and that”. It was not like a normal bookshop. When Jan gave up and came to India, she lived in the Ashram, at Parc à Charbon [Guest-House]. Our eldest boy Jonas was in class 3 and he went to the Ashram school. Eventually he went to what they called Equals One (=1), with Medhananda and Yvonne Artaud. 1 So Jan was there and I was in Australia. I was reading spiritual books in those days and I did know who Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were, but when Jan wrote to me she described Auroville as “a tribal music scene”; I think because she thought this would sound attractive to me. I often think that many of the first Aurovilians that came had a common experience: somewhere in their lives they had a common contact with Mother somehow. I had one interesting experience. I was right up in the north of Australia where you have the deep rain forests, and it was on my birthday, the 2nd of February 1970. I was walking through a forest where there was no path. I got really badly lost. I was so lost that I took the compass and threw it away, so wrong I thought it was. I was climbing a hill to try and see where I was. And really I got to a point where I was in such despair that I sat down with my head in my hands, like this, “What is going on?” And then I got up and when I turned round, there was a gate. A gate! I opened the gate and there was a path. And the path led into a road, which led me down to a river, where I found some Aborigines who picked me up. But this was around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and that was the time when Jan said she took my photo to the Mother. For me that was a powerful connecting experience. I later saw a painting of the Mother’s called Ascent to the Truth that reminded me of that hill. When I came here, Jan already had a house on the beach. It was not Auroville land. She was very connected to Austin Delainy, this Irish Canadian psychologist who was working with sand boxes. 2 A very interesting guy. But he was very traumatised, his legs were covered with shrapnel wounds from the second World War. He was working with the people of Equals-1. He had a very big house built on the beach there and he dressed only in white. He would have long depressions for three months, when he would only drink and shout and play wind-up phonograph records. Then he would come out of it and would be quite sociable. He had a very large shed there with sand boxes, and a huge array of little things. He was very good with children, and he had a particular interest in the children in Equals-1, and that included Jonas and Chali and a lot of kids. When he moved to where Quiet is now, Jan built a small house just beside, and Jonas spent a lot of time relating to Austin. That’s how she came to be there. Then I turned up. I actually had come for a week, just to say hello, and if I am not wanted I go. But I came and everybody seemed glad to see me, so I stayed. Then because I had had some experiences in Australia with building houses like this (and Vijay was building in Udavi) I worked with a small group of villagers, in particular Ramu from Bommayarpalayam. They would come by my house in the morning — I must say that the minute I got to India I felt I had come home. For me right from the start, when I travelled by train, India looked to me much more like home, like a country I knew, than Australia. And Australia is quite similar to India when it is hot and dry. I felt at ease with lungis and a big beard. Ramu and these guys used to come by in the morning, with tundu 3 and tiffin 4 and lungi, 5 and we used to build. If you have studied architecture, you have many ideas but you never get a chance to do anything. But with bamboo and casuarina and keet and ropes, you can do it, it doesn’t matter what mistakes you make, it is not concrete. So it was

What the green cover in Auroville means in terms of pioneer afforestation, development, and the right conditions to work harmoniously together.