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What else is there?

An ever greater number of people are taking time out from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and work. Some even choose to leave their old life behind them forever. With great personal commitment they make use of the new found freedom to make the world that little bit better. Others focus on self-fulfillment or a complete lifestyle change. Here we present ten people who have realized their personal dreams.

TEXTS AND INTERVIEWS/TOBIAS MOORSTEDT

SEBASTIAN COPELAND
Star photographer turns environmentalist

It’s a long way from Los Angeles to the polar ice. What takes a photographer from the capital of the stars and beach life to the North and South Poles?

Sebastian Copeland: I have been involved with the ecological movement for quite some time now, though most of the time in a passive capacity, fundraising in Hollywood. Then in 2003, more or less by chance, I was aboard a ship heading for Greenland, from which I was able to witness the endangered ecosystem with my own eyes and through my own lens. A few weeks later I was in a production meeting for a cigarette ad, talking about lighting and backdrop design. And suddenly it dawned on me: I can’t go on like this any longer. I have dedicated almost 100 percent of my time to protecting the environment ever since. Photography is now just a hobby.

Your photographs in the illustrated book Antarctica: The Global Warning are breathtakingly beautiful.

C: Antarctica is a foreign, exotic place. Anyone can take awesome photos there. The landscape takes its own picture. The iceberg drifting towards the sun is a powerful metaphor – the beholder senses that this enchanted world is in danger. I believe that in order to raise people’s awareness of a problem as complex and long term as this, we need to connect to their emotions and higher spirit, and say: Look! This is how beautiful planet Earth is. And you are a small part of it.

In December 2009, you attended the Copenhagen climate summit. Is mankind doing enough to stop climate change?

C: Of course not. In early 2009 I was on an expedition to the geographic North Pole. We walked across the ice for 700 kilometers, on the legendary route taken by the North Pole explorer Robert Peary exactly 100 years ago. In another 100 years it will no longer be possible to take this route. The ice will have disappeared by then.

What makes a guy from California want to travel to the (perhaps no longer so) eternal ice?

C: I like places that cannot be reached by scheduled flight. I like expeditions, the preparation, the confrontation with antagonistic nature. At the North Pole you are so far removed from Earth you might as well be walking on the moon. Thousands of square kilometers of white void. Below me the deep sea. It is both the most magnificent and the worst moment you can experience.

ARMIN DIECKMANN
How I sold tea instead of cockpit modules

Taking time out in the midst of the 2009 crisis? As a development aid worker? I am a manager in the automotive industry, and in my opinion a crisis is perhaps the best moment to take a step back and reconsider what you are doing and how the system works. Until I turned 40 I had a pretty streamlined career as an industrial engineer, selling interior electronic systems and cockpit modules in Europe, China and the United States. But at some point I began to ask myself: What else is there? Faster, higher, further? Or alternatively: How can I let other people share in my knowledge? So I applied to “Managers Without Borders” and worked in Nepal for four months assisting a small social company that exports organic herbs to Europe to build up the business. The change from a global player’s headquarters to a small apartment in Kathmandu was obviously a shock to the system. The language. The deprivation. The chaos. I was lost. There was electricity for just four hours a day and no mobile phone network. But you learn from every experience: You don’t have to write 100 e-mails every day. The company runs a training farm and works with a small population of extremely poor forest nomads with superb knowledge of medicinal herbs and ancient trees. The young entrepreneurs help them harvest the forest plants in a sustainable way and market them internationally in order to secure their longterm livelihood. My tasks included visiting the village elders in the remote mountain regions, and developing a sales structure and a kind of quality management system to ensure that the products meet European standards. But just as important as the business meetings were the chats over tea with the natives and local staff. My reason for visiting Nepal was to give something to others, but I received so much more in return. In the Himalayan mountains I learned to take a bird’s eye view from time to time. Seen from above, problems tend to seem so small and easy to solve.

ERICH STEKOVICS
Savior of threatened tomato varieties

Do you actually have a favorite tomato?

Erich Stekovics: Oh, that is difficult to say. After all, we have some 3,200 different seeds in store. I do like the “Yellow Currants,” however: small, yellow balls, very sweet, with a hint of hazelnut. The plant is originally from Peru and is over 1,400 years old.

On your farm you grow all shapes and sizes of peppers, tomatoes and chilies. Are you building a kind of Noah’s Ark for vegetables?

S: In recent decades, 80 percent of well-known tomato varieties have disappeared from cultivation. Future generations would be very reproachful if we were to lose this genetic resource. Many of the old varieties not only taste better, they are also easier and cheaper to cultivate as they need neither fertilizers nor pesticides.

How did you discover your passion for collecting?

S: When I was doing my community service I worked with cancer patients who kept telling me they wished they had time to do the things they loved. It was my wake-up call. I wanted to see a large variety of plants growing. Each year I could cultivate the best 50 varieties of tomatoes. But that is not enough. I want to grow something different on my land each year. I often travel to America or Eastern Europe to do research, to look for old varieties on farmers’ markets.

You also run tasting events?

S: Yes, I do. And many people actually have tears in their eyes when they experience the flavor of a tomato that seems to have come straight out of grandma’s garden.

ANTHONY KENNEDY SHRIVER
Working with the intellectually disabled instead of politics

From his desk, Anthony Kennedy Shriver can see his very own “Wall of Fame.” Photographs, newspaper clippings and election campaign posters featuring his famous relatives make up a collage of grand politics, human tragedies and modern myths. However, the souvenirs are not there to impress visitors but to remind him “that I come from a family in which public service forms an integral part of our upbringing.” Unusually for a Kennedy, the 44-year-old is not pursuing a career in politics. Since 1989 he has, instead, been running “Best Buddies,” whose aim is to integrate people with intellectual and developmental disabilities into society through one-to-one friendship matches and integrated employment

Like everything the Kennedys set their minds to, Best Buddies also made it big, now has more than 200 employees in 46 countries and an annual turnover of 30 million US dollars. Kennedy Shriver himself regularly attends football games with his buddy, for whom he arranged a job in a hotel 15 years ago. “He earns his own money and uses it to buy the tickets,” says Kennedy Shriver. “This independence is incredibly important for him.” Naturally, people often want to know why he did not become governor or at least a senator. His answer is simple: “It does not take a political office to change the world.” Even as a child, he tells us, he realized that people with an intellectual or developmental disability are people like you and me, with the same dreams and ambitions. “Each time we took our disabled aunt along with us to church there would be whispering and we would get nasty looks,” he remembers. He founded Best Buddies to enable people like his aunt “to live in the midst of our society.” It doesn’t matter to him that his old college friends have long since got jobs in prestigious law firms and corporate headquarters, earning big money. “There is nothing more rewarding than the feeling of having a positive influence on the life of a fellow human being,” he says.

Kennedy Shriver is founder, Chairman and central figurehead of Best Buddies. The organization’s growth plans are ambitious. By the year 2020, he intends to triple the number of members receiving support from 500,000 to 1.5 million and operate in 120 countries. Yet his real objective is rather different: “Ideally, I would wish for a society in which there was simply no need for an organization like Best Buddies. We are working towards a society in which people with special needs are able simply to lead ordinary lives. Once we have achieved this goal, we will happily retire.”

KARL LUDWIG SCHWEISFURTH
Industrialist meat producer turned organic farmer

Stooping over the model of the farm, Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth glances at the fields with their small hedgerows, the red-brick barns and the enclosure housing plastic pigs and cows side by side. “Isn’t this beautiful?” asks the 79-year-old, who for 25 years now has been working at the Herrmannsdorfer Landwerkstätten on the ideal farm that “cares for the soil, appreciates hand crafts and respects the animals.” The agricultural shops supply bread, meat, cheese and sausages of the highest taste and health quality standards primarily to organic stores and supermarkets in Bavaria. Until 1980 the model organic farmer, who even turns up at his foundation’s Munich headquarters in the traditional Bavarian attire of Janker jacket and check shirt, was Germany’s meat king, employing 5,000 people in ten factories.

After World War II the trained butcher and business graduate experienced industrial meat production first hand in Chicago’s slaughterhouses. “It was brilliant and exciting,” he remembers. “There were conveyor belts, machines and fleets of trucks. Totally modern.” Schweisfurth brought the cutting-edge technology to Germany and transformed his parents’ butcher’s shop into a giant sausage producer. However, from time to time, when he became aware of the noise in his factories and of the stench and animal masses in the sheds, he had a “funny feeling that something is not quite right.” When in the mid-1980s his children, who were supposed to take over the business, told him they wanted nothing to do with the meat factory, it finally got him thinking: “In rejecting my lifetime achievements, they relentlessly held up the mirror to me.”

Schweisfurth sold the company, established a foundation and set up the concept for the agricultural workshops. In the 1980s many consumers had no idea what ecological farming was. “People gave me odd looks,” Schweisfurth remembers. This was partially due to the fact that on the estate in Glonn he not only experimented with animalfriendly husbandry and ecological agricultural methods, but also lent his employees a hand and lived together with them, propagating a different way of working together. His children, by the way, were happy to take over their father’s fast-growing second business after all. Now retired, Schweisfurth has “no interest in playing golf or going on one cruise after another,” but is committed tirelessly to a responsible attitude towards the use of food and resources. He still spends several days a week in Herrmannsdorf, observing his animals, among other things. He is stubbornly dedicated to further improving the forms of husbandry. One idea is symbiosis, keeping pigs together on a pasture with other animals. “There is no more fulfilling way of living life,” he says.

BRITA KLAS
My summer on a mountain farm

Those who imagine life on an alpine farm as an idyll are unfortunately wrong. The ascent from the valley up to a height of 1,800 meters was for me, training to be a teacher, like a journey back in time. Not only because there is no cell phone reception, central heating or TV. At this altitude you are part of nature and live in rhythm with it. The work has to be done, day in, day out, no matter if it’s dark outside, warm or cold, if the sun’s shining or if it happens to be raining again. The farm I worked on as a dairymaid in 2007 has been run by a family for several decades. It’s no surprise that people’s values of discipline and hierarchy are very different up there. At least we have milking machines and electric fences now, which is more than can be said for 50 years ago. But the work is still hard: You get up at quarter to four every morning to milk the cows, muck out the sheds and make the cheese. During one summer, we turned 80,000 liters of milk from our 90 cows into 7.8 tons of cheese and 700 kilograms of butter. Although the farm is so far from the fast-moving, overcrowded city, you are never alone. You have to share the limited space there is with the other workers and hardly have any privacy at all. It’s not easy, but the unity and sense of togetherness can certainly be a help when times get hard. I learned so much on the farm – and I don’t just mean how to make cheese and mend fences. Above all I have become a good team leader and organizer. I have now spent my third season in the mountains.

PATRICIA PETAPERMAL
Broker starts over again

The attic of an Art Nouveau style building located on Munich’s east side conceals Patricia Petapermal’s treasure. On a shelf there is a small box bearing an inscription that reads “Gold.” However, the sparkling metal platelets, tubes of paint and threads are not part of the 46-year-old’s pension fund, but are the raw materials for her paintings. The attic functions as the artist’s storage space and studio. The real treasure for Patricia Petapermal is not her gold leaf supplies or the artworks that now fetch several thousand euros at auctions, but the fact that she is alive and able to paint. Born in 1963 of French and Indian parents, the artist studied economics and later worked at the Paris Stock Exchange. “I had a good life, a nice apartment,” she remembers. However, in 1993, she spent six months in hospital after being hit by a car in London. “The accident caused me to rethink my life,” she says. Patricia Petapermal was fed up of categorizing life into debit and credit and as a result enrolled at an art school. Today, she often spends entire nights working on her colorful, multilayered paintings. Oil paint is not the only material applied to the canvas – she also uses photographs, newspaper clippings, rose petals and silver threads. “I remix the material of life. Each picture is a window into a world of its own.”

DIRK ROHRBACH
My cycling tour across the United States

My journey began 30 years ago. I was eight years old and fascinated by the strange sounds and voices on the radio known as rock ’n’ roll, as I was to find out later. In my adult life, I have paid numerous visits to the States: traveling by car, flying across the prairie and deserts by plane, taking in the beautiful scenery from above, and going to see the last of the Sioux Indians in their reservations several times. However, I only truly got to know America when I explored the country by bicycle – a mode of transport entirely untypical for Americans. For six months I traveled from Tampa to Seattle, saw the Pacific Ocean, turned around and cycled back to the East Coast.

To the Americans I was a nutcase, a hermit in cycling shorts. However, as soon as I had convinced people in Tennessee or Montana that I was harmless, they wanted to know more about my journey. I was overwhelmed by people’s hospitality, many a time strangers offered me a couch or guestroom to stay, and a primary school in Texas even invited me to talk about my trip. The days on the Pacific coast and in the Great Plains were the toughest. The road cuts through the landscape for more than 100 kilometers – it is dead straight, there is no house, no tree, no bend, you are all alone, battling against the wind. You really need a good deal of inner balance to be able to brush off the sweat and the pain in your legs. But then I saw the desert and the horizon – space, nothing but vast empty space. My goal no longer mattered: I was at one with myself.

Ever since, I have been organizing slide shows to try and share my experiences with other people and perhaps give them some inspiration. To start living your dreams is so important. For many years, I worked as a medic and radio journalist, telling myself: “I can’t right now, my job is going so well. Maybe next year!” And before I knew it, ten years had gone by. I think differently today. Which is one of the reasons why in 2010 I will be going on my next adventure, a tour down the River Yukon in Alaska in a self-built birchbark canoe.

MONICA JAMIESON
My sabbatical after living in a convent for 51 years

In 1956, I left the Glasgow School of Art to join Stanbrook Benedictine Monastery in Worcestershire. I never once doubted my decision to devote my life to God, even if initially convent life seemed very gloomy. We wore veils, were silent for most of the day and were only allowed to speak to visitors through metal grilles.

Throughout the years art remained a great passion of mine. However, because of community duties I was unable to spend much time in the studio. In 2007, after 24 years, I resigned as the abbess of Stanbrook. It is customary for the former abbess to leave the convent for a year to give her successor some time to settle in. This period is usually spent in a different convent; however, I knew this was my chance. So I asked for a sabbatical and enrolled at a school of art and drawing in London. This plan took everyone by surprise. I spent a year working at the school, during which I lived in a small convent in Shoreditch. The culture shock was greater than expected. London city life is very different from convent life. Every bus journey, every walk was an adventure for me. But after three months I had grown accustomed to my new way of living. I got up early and said my prayers, but obviously I could not practice the monastic discipline of silence. Of course there was considerable interest in my lifestyle from staff and young fellow students. But that is only natural; for my part I was fascinated by the fast and cosmopolitan city life. My work as an artist was always the primary focus. It felt good. Soon I was able to enjoy what London had to offer. There were regular classes at the National Gallery and I visited many other galleries and several museums. I have been back at the convent for over a year now and I miss all the opportunities that I had in London: I miss being in touch with other artists. And I miss drawing: people, donkeys, parrots. Most importantly, however, I am today in a position to put what I learned into practice. Right now, I am working on a mural for another English abbey.

DOUGLAS TOMPKINS
The fashion mogul’s second life

Douglas Tompkins is wearing a beret and dark rubber boots. At 66 years old, he no longer fits the image of the fashion market superstar he once was, but then again the southern Patagonian wilderness is not exactly the right kind of backdrop for fashion and short-lived trends. Tompkins has long since swapped his executive office at textile groups The North Face and Esprit for a civilizing outpost in South America. From his window he no longer looks out at big city skyscrapers “but the snow-covered peak of a volcano situated at the end of our valley.”

In his youth Tompkins, who hails from the United States, was an excellent mountaineer and a world-class skier. Later he founded a climbing school in California, the equipment company The North Face and ultimately, together with his then wife, the lifestyle brand Esprit. Annual sales soon exceeded the one billion dollar mark, he was flying around the world opening one store after another. Until the turning point in the late 1980s, when Tompkins was angered by anything that was destroying the world. “I felt I was partly responsible for the socio-ecological crisis,” he says. Which is how his escape into real life began, as he refers to it. Having sold his stakes in the textile groups, he has since been trying to save the world – by buying part of it. He was primarily driven by the idea to purchase primeval forest in order to make it inaccessible for timber groups. He initially considered Canada, the United States and Norway, but then opted for Chile and Argentina. “I want to put a stop to this horrendous destruction of the countryside.” Since 1991 he has purchased more than 800,000 hectares of land in Patagonia and Northeast Argentina through a system of foundations – primeval forests, steppes, lakes, rivers, volcanoes, rugged coastal areas – and combined them to form several nature reserves. Parque Pumalín alone spans an area larger than the German federal state of Saarland. One of the biggest private landowners in the world, Tompkins does not use the area to grow raw materials or develop real estate projects. Rather, he prefers to leave nature to itself.

Today he lives in a modest house located on the edge of Parque Pumalín. “Luxury to me means being able to live in the rugged, unspoiled countryside,” he says. “As far as I am concerned there is nothing as poor as city life.” His first life as a businessman and fashion mogul now strikes him “as being somewhat surreal and long since past. In fact, that period of my life has become so remote that I sometimes wonder if that was really me.”