Categories
communication participation

Socially enterprising

Louis Brown

Louis Brown mobilises people to do good.

Passionate about getting more people off the couch and active on important community issues, Louis Brown is an inspirational social entrepreneur.

Louis Brown won his first job at the age of 11 in the tiny West Coast village of Fairdown skinning discarded dead calves for $1 a pop.  This set the course for his life, balancing the seesaw of eeking out a living and following visions that make a difference to society.

He studied education and commerce after he finished high school in Christchurch and worked for three years as the Executive Director of the community organisation Social Innovation, which he also co-founded. These were three of the most important and meaningful years of his working life, spearheading the large-scale Love your Coast and Student Volunteer Army social movements.

Louis is working on the Scarfie Army, a new movement for Dunedin students and other start-ups to drive and support thousands more citizens to be a ‘working voice’ for a better future.

 

Shane’s number of the week:  400.  (NASA).

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Back from a whistle-stop tour of Europe, Sam is brimming with things to talk about and people he’s met.  Some great shows coming up.

Categories
Middle East

Prof Bill Harris

Bill Harris

To most of us, the Middle East is a puzzling, complex, and often contradictory part of the world. We ask Professor Bill Harris to help make it more understandable to those of us who don’t know anything like as much about it as he does. Bill unravels sectarian tensions, global recession, oil, wheat prices, oppressive regimes, historic politics, and drought as we explore the story behind the Arab Spring uprisings.

(Having set the scene, Bill is coming back on the 4th April to focus on Syria).

Shane’s number of the week: 2,000,000,000. Two billion dollars is the estimated cost of the worst drought to hit New Zealand for 70 years. Droughts such as this are expected to become more frequent under a changing climate.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam is working Otago Polytechnic’s head of Photography Mark Bolland to explore the changing relationship with photography and nature as photography becomes consumerised.

Categories
botany conservation biology ecology

Prof Sir Alan Mark

AlanMark

Emeritus Professor Sir Alan Mark is New Zealand’s first Knight honoured for services to conservation. We explore the relationship between science and championing change. So long as you have the science behind you, Sir Alan has no problem with taking an activist role – indeed, he says, it is an obligation of the privileged position of the academic. We talk about Sir Alan’s love for New Zealand’s alpine ecosystems – a passion and deep knowledge that he shares in his new book Above the treeline: A nature guide to alpine New Zealand.

Sir Alan is currently involved in the Wise Response (wiseresponse.org.nz) campaign, a call for a national risk assessment of the “unprecedented threats to our collective security” facing the country as a result of climate change, fossil fuel extraction, and economic and ecological uncertainty.

Shane’s number of the week: 1.2 is the percentage of material used in the production of goods left usable after six weeks. In other words, we’re wasting 98.2% of what we consume.

Categories
Conscious Consumers food marketing tourism

Megan Williams

Megan Williams

Megan Williams is the Otago coordinator for Conscious Consumers. We talk about Megan about background in sustainable tourism and Sustainable Wanaka. Conscious consumers is a non-profit sustainbility and ethical accreditation programme in New Zealand. Initially based in Wellington, Conscious Consumers has recently expanded nationally, including Otago.

We talk about the recently released smartphone app that allows consumers to find ethical businesses and check in to support them.

Shane’s number of the week: 2. The two extra colours added to Australian weather maps recently to represent the extreme temperatures.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam revisits Klinenberg’s 2003 book Heatwave that examined the deaths in the 1995 Chicago heatwave.

Categories
labour politics

Dr David Clark MP

When Sustainable Lens first talked with David Clark he was an aspiring politician. Now just over a year into his first term, the Labour MP for Dunedin North comes back to tell of his “interesting year”. We talk social justice, environment, debating, and values. We ask him for the best, the worst and the most difficult of 2012.

Categories
environmental entrepreneur food organics

Local food systems

After experience in business creating and running an organic mushroom farm, Bart Acres undertook an Masters in Planning to explore local sustainable food systems. Concerned with how a city can feed ourselves with nutritious food he established Otepoti Urban Organics – a local collective that aims for a healthy city. Now Bart aims to scale this up to his new community venture. Foodweb aims to make local farming worthwhile by facilitating the growth of local food production.

Shane’s number of the week: 97% The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate says NASA – with 97% of it thawing during July.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: The role of entrepreneurship and enterprise in education has been exercising Sam this week. He tells us why.

Categories
education food organics permaculture

Michelle Ritchie

Michelle Ritchie is an organics and permaculture edcuator with a background in resource management (she holds a Masters in Regional and Resource Planning).  Michelle is responsible for the ongoing development of Otago Polytechnic’s LivingCampus.    Michelle describes the transformation of Otago Polytechnic’s campus into an integration of community garden and focus of sustainability education.  People come to the garden, ask questions “how do I plant a bean?” but quickly move on to realising “something bigger is going on here”.  The LivingCampus then becomes a prompt for questions like “how did I get here today?”, “what is it I’m eating?” and “how do I make changes to my life?”.

Shane’s number of the week: 120 is the number of kakapo left.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: How could we promote not-buying stuff?  Sam explores three options: trying to be impervious to marketing; removing all marketing; and recognising the value of marketing (full text here).