Tony Smith is chair of Sustaining Hawkes Bay Trust.  We talked about that role, and his career through computing and education. Tony’s family live in a wonderful home, built to celebrate a sustainable future so we talk about that too.
Talking points
See connections, join the dots.
It’s not a matter of environmental values being at odds with financial economic values – those things align.
Sustainability:Â An all encompassing term.
Success: At personal level, electric car.  Hawkes Bay, traction on zero waste.  But not for profit sector is highly fragmented.
Superpower: Being aware of sustainable concepts in day-to-day decisions. The awareness that the little things we do do add up and make a big difference.  Super-mini-man, making things count.
Activist: Probably not, I was more active.
I don’t see a conflict of activism and being a professional.  The definition of a profession is that it is self-monitoring. So that works at an individual level. The whole point of being a professional is that you analyse, you meta-cognate on what you are doing and why you are doing it.  If you see something that you don’t like then it is your professional ethical responsibility to do something about it. So I don’t see activism being in conflict with professionalism at all.
It would be nice if people had more of a view of their similarities rather than differences. I would like people to look for commonalities rather than try to create divisions. It’s all to do with “them and us”.  My hope for humanity is that we get better at having a bigger “us”.
Small things do count.