Trent Dalton visited the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, to talk with Steve Quinto, an American businessman who believes the world is “in the second phase of certain self-destruction.” But Steve and his wife, Ruth, aren’t worried – they’ve been building their dream retreat:

Steve’s utopia … [is] an 800ha living ark that he has spent the past eight of his 79 years creating, investing his life’s fortune in the shipment of 300 tonnes of materials from around the world to the very edge of human existence. Paradise. Salvation. A new world for when the old one dies. He calls it Edenhope.

Dalton goes on to describe his tour of Edenhope, which, Steve estimates, can comfortably accomodate 23 people:

The turning track straightens to a clearing and there it is:

the dream, Edenhope, a new world among the trees, a network of wooden bridges and paths and staircases weaving through manicured garden beds and rolling orchards with fruit trees in the hundreds and a kitchen hut and 10 octagonal bungalows made of high-end red hardwood timbers. The wondrous dreamscape includes wild blue flowers and bird of paradise plants and trees so big their root ­systems form houses of their own. There’s a communal library; a warehouse filled with ­endless tools and hardware; a surgery stocked with enough medicines to last two decades.

It’s a staggering work of human endeavour. Steve brought an earthmover and a front-end loader here from Canada. He rallied workers, paid and paid for their services for eight years; organised thousands of nine-hour sailing journeys back and forth between civilisation and sanctuary, hauling floors and sacks of concrete and machinery and miscellaneous goods in preparation for the apocalypse. He walks to a patch of dirt in the centre of his village. “It started here,” he says. “It was nothing but Ruth and I in two hammocks tied to trees.”

Steve closes his eyes and breathes his home in deep through his thin chest. “This is the birth of a new species,” he says. “This is the birth of beauty. This is the birth of dreams.”

(Photo of Vanuatu by Graham Crumb)