Posts filed under ‘sustainability’
The power of ‘we’
Becky Rowe writes:
I’ve been in Australia for a few days for a client project and one of things I have noticed (aside from the jetlag and great weather) is the constant reference across all kinds of public communications to ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘together’, ‘you’, and ‘community’.
New building projects mention ‘helping our communities grow stronger’, while ‘no alcohol’ signs on the beaches explain why it is beneficial to everyone if you don’t drink your beers on the beach. The taxi rank at the airport had a large sign which communicated clearly and simply what you could ask of your taxi driver, and what he could expect of you (you are entitled to ask your driver to turn on or off the radio or aircon, and to take a different route, but you aren’t allowed to be drink or eat in the cab).
The prevalence of these signs, the explicit wording, and clear reference to shared responsibilities, all communicated in a friendly and understandable way, somehow surprised me. In some ways I found them a bit patronising, but I also found it refreshing to have ‘the rules’ of ‘good citizenship’ made clear.
Knowing the rationale behind an apparently bureacratic or even irrational rule can make all the difference to compliance. I think the UK has something to learn from the Australians about how to behave – and how to get people to behave.
7 million litres of water
Jo Phillips writes:
Our More London office reopens today after two days of closure following the Great Flood of Tooley Street. Some took the fact that the nearby Greater London Assembly building was out out of action in the week of the mayoral elections as a bad omen for Ken Livingstone. The events have demonstrated rather vividly the vulnerability of all city infrastructure; you might have thought a fifth floor office would be immune (I did), but servers and electricity supply in the basement are – unsurprisingly – vulnerable to street level flooding. Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital was similarly affected.
In this instance, 7 million litres of water poured out of a burst water main. But it gives us a glimpse of a possible future London — as we see more climate-change related extreme weather events, what will change? What I learnt was that crises in the real world push us further into the virtual world. With email and phone systems down, our company used text messages and a blog to disseminate important information. Local residents similarly used the SE1 community forum to communicate with each other. One possible outcome is an increase in mobile working (or more exactly, ‘extended working’, in which the workplace is extended in space and time), but this leads to interesting questions about infrastructure. Maybe not that sensible to leave it below street level when the local flood risk map looks like this:
So maybe there’s likely to be less emphasis on managing your own infrastructure, and more on getting it delivered to you as a service by a supplier – already a strong developing trend, as Nicholas Carr blogged this week. Having servers down in the basement may provide an illusion of control, but would not prove very resilient in a world of increasing environmental risk.
Environmental damage a modern day sin
Amy Esser writes:
In recent years the noise around environmental sustainability has increased, and society mostly now acknowledges its part in damaging the planet. Despite this, we are not yet seeing significant changes in behaviour to reverse the damage and help preserve our planet for the future.
Sadly it seems that even the prospect of environmental Armageddon is not enough to prompt real action or even divert our moral compasses. If we as individuals are lacking motivation and desire to make the changes ourselves then who needs to take the lead? Perhaps sensing that faith could make a difference, the Vatican announced earlier this month that environmental pollution and damage is a modern day sin.
Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary, said – in language that was largely misunderstood in the (non-Catholic) English media – that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation”. Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance”.
Bishop Girotti told L’Osservatore Romano,
“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbour’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos”.
The effect of this interpretation will take time to manifest itself. Perhaps it is more interesting to see the re-emergence of old authorities in response to more turbulent times.
Image source: http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1308679,00.html
From wind-powered cheese to socially-conscious snack bars
Anouk van den Eijnde writes:
Over the past few months our global streetscapers have been busy tracking down examples of how sustainability issues like energy consumption and fair trade are playing out in their home markets. The cheese manufacturer Forlasa in Spain produces wind- and solar-powered cheese, using renewable energy to minimise its CO2 emissions and to power local homes.
The American company Peaceworks produces a range of natural foods , such as the ‘Kind’ snacks bars, through promoting joint ventures between people on different sides of conflicts. Five per cent of the profits go to OneVoice, a PeaceWorks foundation, that fosters co-existence in the Middle East.
Remarkable recycles UK waste by making it into useful (and fun) stationery and office products. This notebook is made of recycled car tyres:
The Upside of Down
Andrew Curry writes:
I was asked to write a paragraph on a book which had influenced my thinking in 2007 for a forthcoming issue of the WPP newspaper The Wire. My choice: Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Upside of Down:
The Upside of Down changed the way I look at the world. It is about what holds together the complex systems which make our societies work. The answer, in short, is energy – and in particular, energy which doesn’t take very much energy to produce. Sun works well in warm countries; oil is perfect. As societies get more complex, they have to create and shift ever more energy, which makes them even more complex. When the easy energy starts to run out, collapse follows. Homer-Dixon brings his argument to life with stories about the Roman Empire and Californian fires. So where’s the upside? Only this: it may not be too late to make our shift to a world of scarcer energy less disastrous than it was for the Romans.
I’ll blog some more when The Wire is published on the other entries.
24 November 2007 at 12:39 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Green influencers
Clare Archer writes:
To mark Energy Savings Week, which finished yesterday, the Energy Saving Trust commissioned us to research the role of word of mouth and community in promoting ideas about saving energy. Our research showed a strong correlation between people who were informed about ‘green ideas’ and their level of connectedness to other people in their communities – creating a kind of virtuous circle. From this we developed a index – working in conjunction with another consultancy, Wildfire – which allows any individual to calculate the power they have to influence others to save energy, on a scale of 1 to 100, by answering a few simple questions. The EST has shifted its strategy to focus on the power of communities to influence change.
There’s coverage in a number of publications – for example in Metro and Marketing Week.
If your products could talk…
Andrew Curry writes:
I attended an event on Friday organised by the Sustainable Development Commission to look at the future of sustainable retail – obviously a challenging proposition. SDC Commissioner Alan Knight, who has a retail background, opened the event with a presentation which included a challenging question: what if your products could tell you – and your customers – their stories?
What would they say? Would you be proud? Or would you be embarrassed? At the moment, of course, this is a journey which companies mostly imagine comes to an end as the product leaves the store in the arms of a happy customer. As the sustainability evolves, of course, the rest of their journey will become more important – and more visible – as well.
Alan’s article, “The Retailing Paradox”, can be found here.
24 September 2007 at 3:52 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
