February 2009

This is the launch event in an ongoing series of informal Green Meet-ups aimed at inspiring Sydney people who have an interest in sustainability. The idea is to connect, learn, share, inspire (and conspire!) with other like minded peeps.

Digital Eskimo joined with a very talented bunch of collaborators (Ben Ward, Dan Cass, Lianne Rossler, Phil Stubbs and Jessica Miller) to organise the series. Judging by the crew involved there are going be some very interesting people there.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009
6:00pm – 10:00pm
The Falconer Cafe
31 Oxford St Darlinghurst

I’d love to meet some of the people who read our blog so rsvp on our facebook events page or send an email into rsvp@greenups.net.

I just spent the weekend at the Sustainable Living Festival held at Federation Square in Melbourne, Victoria. It was truly inspiring to see just how much our southern state is doing on sustainability issues, particularly climate. They are clearly leading the country in terms of the mainstreaming of sustainability and there seem to be many more grass roots initiatives for climate related social change as well as larger scale projects than i have seen here in Sydney.

I wouldn’t call Victoria the Green State just yet with all of those dirty coal fired power stations (and sadly it may never be called the Garden state again with it’s climate change driven 12 year drought and subsequent bushfires) but its clearly got a strong community that is pushing the agenda forward.

Matt Wright at Beyond Zero Emissions gave a fantastic presentation on what we need to do to move Australia towards a target of 100 % renewables by 2020. (inspired by Al Gore’s We Can Solve it Campaign (100 % renewables in 10 years). Beyond Zero are providing visionary leadership and inspiring targets for people and Matts presentation showed the way we need to be thinking (and talking!) when it comes to the big shifts needed. They do a radio show on 3CR and its podcast so get into it!

He was joined by Elliot Fishman from the Institute of Sensible Transport for a panel afterwards who also displayed a strong grasp of the issues and gave the crowd clear and logical transport solutions that involved serious bike usage that you could immediately see would work if only the political will existed for this to happen. The message was loud and clear .. this is is not rocket science, its simply smarter ways of moving people.

One of the highlights included Tim Cotter’s excellent presentation on behaviour change and sustainability (his approach is deceptively simple and completely spot on, don’t try to change people’s values (they are in the most part just fine and it’s almost impossible to do anyway!) but instead convince them of the need for change (through education), empower them (give them the tools) and (most importantly) make the connection between their values and the sustainable things you want them to do. People will then most likely act in their own enlightened self interest. Simple!

I left the festival inspired by our southern cousins and the work they’ve been doing to move us in the right direction. I’ve returned to Sydney invigorated and excited by the challenge of bringing the city of sin in line with her greener sister. We have about 10 years to get the job done. All aboard!

The team at Digital Eskimo would like to offer our heartfelt condolences to the people of Victoria who have been affected by the horrific fires of the past week.

We’d like to do something to help so we’re working on a range of banners and buttons you can put on your websites. Send us an email if you’d like them when they are done or check back in the next few days.

Meanwhile go directly to the Red Cross Donation page, 100 % of the money goes into a Government managed fund for the appeal. Right on.

Furthering our efforts to be a sustainable organisation, Digital Eskimo have teamed up with Locavore who have installed a rooftop garden above our studio. The Locavore landscape gardeners designed and built a custom shade cloth ‘vegigloo’ and planted a range of herbs and vegetables, including mint, basil, lettuce, rocket, pumpkin, watermelon and corn.

The plants were chosen according to permaculture principles. Already surviving our Christmas break and a blisteringly hot start to the new year, it has started to produce a good crop. We shared our first harvest recently at our weekly friday night wrapup session, consisting of some green leaves – basil, mint and lettuce.

The garden is for nourishing our staff and is part of an integrated system at our studio. We collect organic waste in our kitchen and it is fed to our three worms we have in our basement garage (we’ve effectively converted our ‘car space’ into a ‘worm space’). Our worms produce very rich liquid and solid fertiliser, which is then fed into the soil in our rooftop garden and from that grows more food for our staff, closing the loop.

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