“Andros? Never heard of it.”

Quinn and I are moving to Andros, Greece, to start a permaculture homestead. This is our inaugural update.

Somewhat wildly, Quinn and I are moving halfway around the world, to Greece. More precisely, to Andros, one of the many, many islands. People tend to have questions — questions like “What? Why?” “What are you going to do?” “Does that mean you’re quitting your job?” “What will Quinn do?” “Do you have a connection to Greece?” “Are you crazy?” — but also frequently: “Andros? Never heard of it.” Let’s start there. (If you don’t want all the preliminaries and want to jump straight to the plans, start reading here.)

Where is Andros? What is your connection to it?

Andros is a Cycladic island halfway in between Athens and Mykonos, about a 2 hour ferry ride away from each. It’s the second largest of the Cycladic islands, and the greenest. It also has relatively few tourists, one of the desiderata I mentioned to my colleague Cleo when I solicited Greek vacation spot recommendations from her in 2018. (Thank you, Cleo! Also, don’t be mad at Cleo, we would have left anyway — more on this below.) My friends who I went with and I stayed at the Aegea Blue, which sits above the spectacular Zorkos Beach. It was arguably love at first sight. The island is mountainous (great hiking!), with winding roads and views everywhere. It feels arid on first sight, but if you venture away from the stunning beaches and main roads, you’ll find that it’s in fact full of lush green valleys.

Zorkos Beach in the summer.

Cut to a few years after this first trip, in the middle of the pandemic. Very different vibe. Quinn and I decided to really participate in the moment and got zoom-married on our green couch with a view of the tomato forest I managed to grow on our balcony in our otherwise sterile Palo Alto faculty housing. We didn’t get to see our witness, who was obscured by the zoom background that our Santa Barbara County official put up (though we did get to pay for him). The official herself looked about 15, and when she told us that the way we felt today would be how we’d always feel, it was hard not to laugh. So we started thinking about where to properly celebrate our marriage with family and friends. It didn’t take very long for Andros to emerge as one of the options.

Cut to a few years later yet again, September 2022. We spent two memorable weeks on the island around our wedding celebration, a wonderful event I won’t recap here, except to say that it made it into a sweet, albeit not entirely accurate local news article. The important thing for now is that in planning our pre-wedding-day trivia night at a local taverna at the beach, we had help from Ioannis, a local man in his early 70s who speaks English because he was married for decades to Philip, an Englishman. (Philip sadly passed unexpectedly a few years prior.) We kept running into Ioannis at the taverna and in town, and he kept inviting us to stop by his house, “right by the chapel with the round blue top, on the right side of the hill if you drive up the valley a bit, just below the village.” (There are no addresses.)

The property sits on 8 hillside terraces. The main house sits on terrace 2. Above it, a bit of the pigeon house and one of the water tanks that we plan to convert into tiny homes are visible on terrace 1. The plot continues down all the way to the cypresses visible on the left.

After the wedding, once most of the guests had left and only our friends Greg and Nathan still shared our honeymoon with us, we decided to go seek him out on a windy day. And indeed, following the directions to the best of our ability — there are many chapels, they all have blue tops — led us to a characteristic white house on the hillside. There was no obvious way in besides a small gate behind the house, so we entered with timid calls of “hello?” and upon coming around the corner, were greeted by Ioannis, not the least bit surprised to see us in the shade of his jacaranda tree. We spent the next few lazy hours drinking coffee and perhaps some tsipouro, and hearing stories of Philip and the island and all the famous people that had been to the house, including a former prime minister of Greece and Omar Sharif.

Our last cut is to late May 2023. On a deeply depressed whim, I went on spitogatos.gr, the Greek equivalent of Zillow, and clicked on the dot closest to Zorkos Beach. (I clicked on many dots, in fact, but this was the only one I reacted to.) Where it was on the map, it looked like it was on the other side of the valley, but the photos looked eerily familiar. Relaxed outdoor spaces, that chapel with the round blue top. First I was worried that Ioannis might have died, so I texted Ion, one of the Aegea Blue guys, who luckily said that no, he just wanted to move to the mainland. It took another two months for us to start considering it as a real possibility.

From left to right: Rudy, Ioannis, and Bingo, who we’re taking over from.

But why leave?

One of my PhD students, in the lab meeting where I broke the news, eventually raised her hand and said “What does it feel like to leave a tenured position?” I did not have tenure when she asked that question, nor do I at the time of writing, but it’s a question many people seem to have: Why would I leave my fancy, widely coveted Stanford professor job? “Why would you throw away all the social capital you worked so hard to establish?” (My family members are well-known for their gentle and indirect expressions of opinion.) And not for something fancier, like a high-paying tech job?

There are many reasons, which I’ll eventually write about in a separate post. For the time being, this will have to be enough: a mix of personal and structural factors. On the personal front, there are two main reasons: one, I never really recovered from The Big Unraveling at the University of Rochester in 2017. Witnessing the mob’s reaction left me feeling unmoored and detached from the community ever since. Two, to quote my wonderful colleague Dan who stoically bore my hour-long crying fit on an advising walk to Bernal Peak at the height of my depression: “The joy is gone.” I have come to accept that it used to give me tremendous satisfaction to study the space of questions and possible answers in many areas of language and cognition; and that now that I understand the very incremental progress we’ll make in that space in my lifetime — yes, even with ChatGPT and friends around, perhaps even more so because of the distraction they introduce — it simply doesn’t excite me anymore. I understand what an incredibly bratty expectation of the world this betrays — who says that what we do for a living has to excite us? But for better or worse, if you’re an academic or an artist, joy is typically the main currency you’re paid in. Once that’s gone, you’re better off finding a job that actually pays you in $$$.

Underneath the jacaranda.

On the structural front, there are many reasons. All of them have to do with broken (mostly American) systems — from the country as a whole, to the Bay Area, to Stanford, to academia at large. Like I said, that’s for a different post. Obviously, there are no problem-free places. Perhaps it’s just a matter of expectations.

A final reason, and this is a weirdly big one and connected to all of the above, is that for a while now I’ve been experiencing a lot of climate anxiety. Perhaps it started during the pandemic, but it certainly intensified severely over the past year. I generally love to travel. But almost everywhere I’ve gone over the past few years the weather has been weird. European rivers drying out in the summer; walking around in a T-shirt in Sydney winter; the impossibly ginormous empty rock trenches left behind by the disappearing glaciers around the Matterhorn; last year’s California floods after years of wildfires — those are just the ones I directly experienced. At the time of writing, we’re looking at 112 lives lost in the Chilean wildfires. None of this will get better anytime soon, and the consequences — loss of biodiversity, loss of human and non-human life, massive waves of displacement and concomitant increase in authoritarianism — are frankly terrifying to think about. The very immediate effect that climate anxiety has had for me is that I find it increasingly difficult to continue with business as usual, especially living in an area as wasteful and greedy as Silicon Valley.

A variable number of cats inhabits the property at any given point in time, hopeful for yields, especially when fish is being grilled.

So what will you do?

Alright, enough bummer talk, let’s get to the meat of it! Quinn will continue his music career, spending part of the year songwriting and recording on the island, and part of the year touring and recording in the US and mainland Europe. He has a new record coming out in the summer and will be touring both the US and Europe (France and Spain), so don’t miss it! More on that in a few months. I’ll work remotely as a data scientist so the money doesn’t run out, but my main plan, the thing I’m most excited about, is to create a permaculture homestead.

Permawhat? “Permaculture” is a portmanteau of “permanent” and “agriculture.” It has many definitions, but essentially it’s a design system for ecological and sustainable living. It’s a term I first encountered in June 2023, at the height of my depression. Quinn and I were spending a week at his yearly musician residency in lovely Doe Bay on Orcas Island. I had been looking forward to this trip for many reasons, one of which was knowing I could volunteer in the beautiful garden that feeds the resort’s restaurant. I spent hours contentedly deadheading flowers, freeing the raspberry patch from choking weeds, and putting tiny lettuce plants into the ground while listening to the sounds of the bees and the chickens. The next day, Quinn and I took the ferry to neighboring Lopez Island, where I found myself looking at a wall of books in a bookstore with titles like “Eat What You Grow,” “The Home-Scale Forest Garden,” and “The Sustainable Homestead.” I bought the latter and over the next few days, devoured it.

The wall of books I got sucked into in the Lopez Island bookstore.

Here, allow me a digression. (Skip it to get to the plans.) The last time I felt as excited as I did reading my first permaculture book was probably in my late teens/early twenties, when I discovered there was a science of the mind. Reading about soil, compost, food forests, rainwater catchment, and rotational grazing gave me the same sense of elation and relief I felt when I first read Schopenhauer’s “Essay on the Freedom of the Will.” This may seem completely crazy (and indeed, it may well be). But in the same way that I was deeply confused in my late teens by the way people treat each others’ choices — by the way we both idolize and punish, depending on whether we like or dislike the target behavior — so, too, have I found myself deeply confused over the past few years about how we have been collectively treating our habitat (and both human and non-human co-residents of that habitat) as an infinite resource that it’s fine to waste and exploit and destroy.

So it was a huge relief to find Schopenhauer saying eloquently 160 years earlier what I had been brooding over — oversimplifying dramatically, that we can do what we will, but we really have no choice in what we will in the first place at any given point in time. To know that there was at least some small minority out there that didn’t think “free will” was a coherent concept made me feel less gaslit by the world and allowed me to try to treat those around me with compassion and a curiosity mindset. (Not that I am always successful in this endeavor — just ask my family.)

In that same way, reading my first permaculture book made me realize there is a whole minority out there that is and has been trying to think about how to efficiently use resources (instead of treating food, gas, electricity, and water as things that just magically keep flowing out of grocery stores, gas pumps, outlets, and taps, respectively); how to turn waste back into food and fuel (instead of polluting the land and the water and the oceans); how to support one’s self and others (instead of treating relationships as transactional, exploiting labor, and being so focused on computer labor that we lose the ability to use a drill or grow a vegetable from seed) — in general, how to build sustainable lives that also afford a sense of agency and connectedness — both with each other and with nature.

Terrace 4, one of the main annual crop terraces, sits just under the main house, waiting, full of potential. In the background, the chapel to St. Catherine (one of the many Greek saints) with its round blue top that made us confident we had found the right house when we first searched for it.

I am no longer under the same idealistic illusions as I was in my early 20s. I don’t actually think any of these permaculture ideas will “save the world,” whatever we may mean by that. I think the systems that are in place are too entrenched and too many people with too much wealth and power have no incentive to change the systems that work for them. Sure, we have things like the renewable energy sector and Tesla and the Paris Agreement. Yes, it’s great that there are large-scale attempts to bring about change. Also, a lot of those attempts are pursued only by people trying to profit off of them. Growth for the sake of growth is and will remain the status quo. That doesn’t mean I won’t be watching, hoping I’m wrong. It just means that as a personal choice, what I want to do next is try to put a tiny bandaid on the Earth.

So what is the plan for your permaculture homestead?

The property spans 4600m2 (~1 acre) and sits on eight terraces facing southeast, protected from the strongest of the north winds. It has no official address, but here it is on Google Maps, just 3km from Zorkos Beach and a 20 minute drive from the port town Gavrio. It might be part of the village Varidi (which is more like small scattering of houses), but that’s unclear. Just like nobody quite knew exactly where the property boundaries were until Foteini, the civil engineer, showed up in October and started measuring everything to be in compliance with EU laws.

There are tons of fruit trees on the property. Here: apricots and one of the many figs. Fun game to play with any photo: count the cats.

The property includes:

• a 140m² main house with sun deck overlooking the valley and shaded back patio (fully functional and ready for move-in, though we’ll make some changes)

• a dilapidated pigeon house (aka dovecote, but “pigeon house” has a better mouthfeel) to be renovated as a tiny house — not as handsome as these, but possibly better suited to humans eventually living in it

• a large concrete water tank, to be renovated as a tiny house

• mostly underused vegetable gardens to be redeveloped

• ~25 fruit trees at various stages of maturity (including citrus, stone fruit, figs, olives, pomegranates)

• water systems that reach all terraces, including 3 water tanks, a well, community water, a seasonal creek, and a just off-property freshwater source

• a chicken coop with active laying hens

• a variable number of cats

The general plan is to grow as much of our own food as we can. Over the course of 5-7 years, we want to implement a perennial food forest complemented by annual plantings on the property’s 8 terraces using permaculture principles and methods. These include no-till farming, companion planting (the parts that aren’t bullshit), including as many perennials instead of annuals as possible, compost/mulch/organic soil amendments instead of chemical fertilizers, small livestock integration, integrated pest management, and generally efficient use of resources (e.g., rainwater harvesting, graywater recycling) and minimal waste generation. Whatever produce we harvest will initially serve mainly the purpose of sustaining ourselves, our guests, and our neighbors. Perhaps we’ll expand in the future. In fact, the neighbors have already offered that we can also use their land in exchange for some produce. But I reckon: one thing at a time. Let’s first see if we manage to scale up from growing a few vegetables and herbs on one balcony to growing dozens of crops on an area the size of a few hundred balconies.

Ladies plus rooster roaming the property.

The second big plan is to develop two existing structures on the property (the pigeon house and the large water tank on the upper-most terrace) into tiny homes for multiple use: as holiday rentals, investor timeshares, and low-budget retreat space/no-budget residency for artists, musicians, and writers (details TBD). In the longer term, perhaps we can even become one of the standard stops on the multi-day hiking trips organized by Andros Routes, an excellent organization dedicated to (among other things) restoring and maintaining the ancient trade path network and repurposing it for modern-day hiking tourism. Even further down the line (once I acquire some experience), we might pursue an educational partnership with Livada Farm, a permaculture market farm an hour’s drive away run by the lovely Petros and Alexandros, to showcase permaculture principles at work at different scales. Overall, we envision the space as one where people will want to come, stay, appreciate nature, and be inspired.

How the hell will you do all of this? Do you even speak Greek?

As with everything, the answer is “one thing at a time.” A nice thing about permaculture is that it emphasizes the value of long and careful observation before taking action. Is there anything that gets a researcher’s heart beating faster than being told to observe and document? For instance, to plan windbreaks we need to know what direction the wind comes from at different times of the year (and there can be serious wind!); to plan where additional fruit trees will go we need to know what the sun/wind/water/soil situation is like on different parts of the property at different times of year; to plan the rainwater systems we need to know how water flows through the property. My pleasure research for the past few months has been putting together an overview of potential plants to grow. Feel free to suggest additions. But more practically: I’ve been glad to have been spending every other weekend for the past few months at the Santa Cruz Permaculture Farm taking permaculture design and skills classes, to be at least a tiny bit prepared for what’s to come.

The pigeon house and part of the water tank on terrace 1.

Nothing works without good people. On our past few visits to Andros we have started meeting the local community. The people around us are a mix of locals who have been there for many generations (and know all the best spots for mushrooms and seasonal greens), Athenian weekend/seasonal/full-time island-dwellers, and ex-pats. And of course, Ioannis himself is someone we will hopefully continue to see in the future. Everyone has been very welcoming and generous. We have been offered a banana tree cutting, help in thinking through renovation ideas, and we have certainly been very thoroughly and deliciously fed. In general, the vibe is communal and collaborative. My Greek is ever developing, so I have high hopes for future translator-free communication (though many people also speak English).

Of course the hardest part about leaving is also good people. I’m extremely fortunate to work with both colleagues and students who I respect, admire, and just also really like. That’s hard to find. Not to mention our close friends. Quinn, at least, will be back in the US fairly regularly on various musical missions. I likely won’t. But I hope you will visit us at the Green Soul Chalet — especially if you want to get your hands dirty! You now know where to find us. And if you’d like to follow along from a distance in the meantime, go ahead and subscribe below.

The overflow basin of the freshwater source, just off-property at the bottom of terrace 8, where the citrus grove lives.

---