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Once upon a time, there were three siblings who inherited some money from their Mother.

The oldest sibling, Donald, loved hamburgers. With his inheritance he decided to be a cattle rancher to rear as much beef as he could eat. He cleared some ancient forest by a busy river and built himself a tall house made from steel and concrete.

Donald wasn’t very good with his money. What he didn’t fritter away, he hid in a box under the bed, so that the tax man wouldn’t find it. He liked to spend his days watching TV while his beef herd munched grass outside his window, happily farting methane into the blue sky.

The middle sibling, Boris, counted the bankers and hedge fund managers among his closest friends. He took his inheritance and bought himself cheap shares in a friend’s Russian oil drilling company. He grew very, very rich as the company sucked up whole oceans of thick, black, crude oil for industries to burn. With his oil money Boris built himself a fine mansion carved from solid marble, held up by soaring Grecian pillars.

The third sibling was called Greta. She was much younger than her brothers and much smarter. Greta bought a wind turbine and set up a small eco-electricity company. Like her fat, older brother Donald, she too built herself a home by the river, but Greta’s house was made from reclaimed wood, with solar panels for energy, and an air heat pump for heating. Her house was practically carbon neutral.  Greta’s brothers both teased her for her mindful lifestyle; Boris even called her a “dirty crusty” and dismissed her simple house as a “hemp-smelling bivouac”.

One day a storm blew in. The rain was a giant hosepipe, watering the earth. Gallons fell onto the smooth sides of the hill where the trees had been cleared for pasture. With no roots to hold it back, the rainwater flooded quickly down the slope to meet the rising river. The huffs and gusts of wind became a sustained howl as it tore at the roof of Donald’s tall house, smashing furious blows against the high concrete sides which began to wobble and totter.

Alarmed, Donald jumped into his Humvee, revving the engine. In his rear-view mirror he saw his house collapsing into concrete rubble and his beef cows floating, hooves up, in the flooded fields.

Boris opened the solid door and pulled Donald inside his marble mansion. 

“You’ll be safe as houses here,” he grinned. 

But the rain began to hit the roof tiles, like hammers on an anvil. The wind huffed and puffed and banged against the building; it raged across the roof, howling like a wild animal. All the designer roof tiles were pulled up in one huge roar of fury and the marble columns swayed, beginning to fall.

Terrified, the two brothers ran from the crumbling mansion, jumped into Boris’s stretch limo and headed to Greta’s house.

“You better come inside!” Greta shouted over the guttural squalling of the chasing wind.

“But the river is flooding and we will all be drowned like my cows,” wailed Donald. 

“The rising river won’t drown us because my house is designed to float on flood waters. It has a specially fitted float chamber in the basement,” replied Greta. 

“The wind won’t bother us because my house is made from Southern Yellow Pine, the strongest of all softwoods that can flex in even the fiercest winds. We have plenty of food from my vertical vegetation system, and fresh drinking water from the rainwater purifier. We even have bio-digester for all our waste. We are all very safe here.”

And so they were. Donald, Boris and Greta were so safe and cosy that even after the huffing, puffing, howling wind had died down, they continued to live happily ever after, with minimal environmental impact, in Greta’s eco house. 

The end.