As George Monbiot has pointed out, plane travel is difficult to reconcile with a planet loving green lifestyle (though others disagree). Either way it’s easier to commit too when you live in Europe, but is much harder when you reside in the rather isolated countries like Australia however - and so with a heavy green heart i recently agreed to travel to Europe for a wedding.
I’ve made the trip part business, part pleasure and extended the trip to maximise the value and reduce the need to travel again next year. I also made the most direct flights rather than the cheapest to and from London. Once in Europe I am minimising my carbon footprint by utilising the train and ferry networks. So all intra European travel on the trip is via trains, ferries and wherever possible regular public transport. (ok ok and the odd cab when its just too hard!)
A great website to assist the sustainable traveller is The Man from Seat 61 - a self confessed train boffin and ex British Rail manager who has pretty much travelled all over Europe and the world via train and can tell you which trains and even which carriages are the go for various legs of your journey. He’s passionate and as always it rubs off - i’m a convert to train travel as the most sustainable and cool form of long distance mobility - tis a shame there’s no underground from Australia to Europe though.
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Kristen Le Mesurier’s recent article on sustainable offices ran in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. It featured myself (with a 5 year old photo bless her heart!) and Rick Millen from PricewaterhouseCoopers and Kate Noble from the ACF discussing the value and impact of sustainable business operations.
We, of course have been quite active and vocal in our efforts to walk the talk as it were; and continue to improve the way we do things. (Our current studio renovations project will feature many sustainability inspired innovations which we’ll share with you as they become reality). To her credit Kristen included a point i often raise in interviews (though it rarely seems to get through the editors) regarding the operational aspect of a company’s sustainability …
“… And while all of these sustainable operational initiatives are important and commendable, they are really just the tip of the iceberg. What is really important is the impact companies have on the world in terms of the actual work they do.”
“The actions we inspire, enable and facilitate are by far the biggest part of our ecological footprint, that’s the chunk of the iceberg under the waterline,” Gravina says.
When talking about design agencies in particular; the iceberg is the proverbial elephant in the room.
Laying down a challenge to other companies, Digital Eskimo recently carbon offset the entire history of the agency, dating back to 2001. We calculated our carbon emissions with our friends at Climate Friendly and offset the lot, effectively cleaning up the (relatively small given our ecological ways) mess we’d left behind on our way to becoming Sydney’s pre-eminent sustainability focussed design agency.
We now challenge other companies to do the same. As we all sit and wait for what looks like a pretty lacklustre response from the government to the Gaurnaut review, we as industry leaders can do a lot to set the pace.
So what’s your company doing about it’s past emissions?
Above is a fantastic piece of political art created by a friend of ours. It’s brilliant - I think it’s strength is in its simplicity of message, and the way in which it still manages to summarise so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics themselves as a force for change in the world as well as the Chinese Government and it’s use of extreme force at Tienanmen in particular but since and before of course.
One of the events that forged Digital Eskimo into being was the Sydney Olympics. I’d just returned from a few years working and living in London and the sheer hypocrisy of the PR and media supported spin regarding Australia as a reconciled and fair country was staggering (especially given the severe lurch to the right under the Howard Government of the proceeding years). Practically no dissent was getting into the mainstream and so we were inspired to create a satirical spoof site of the Sydney 2000 site, we dubbed Shame 2000.
We received a bit of press and attention (including from the IOC’s legal attack dogs - a cheeky exchange is archived on the site for those interested) and all this resulted in a serious amount of traffic and i think some good exposure to the issues that were not being discussed, or as we put it the “Events that Matter.”
Not much seems to have changed as Chairman Rudd and others remain silent on the big issues as the spectacle unfolds. What better way to say to China and the world, if you play our game we don’t mind what happens off the field?
UPDATE: Another nice piece of artwork on the topic .. Do-It-Yourself Tienanmen Square Memorial Kit from artists Wei Lai and my wonderful friend Deborah Kelly.
Just the other day, Duncan talked a little about how we find new talent, and share some of the benefits. He called it “sharing the love.” Today, I want to talk a bit about how Digital Eskimo shares code, too.
Of course, Digital Eskimo is very big on sharing. Everything from our work culture to our strategy planning is based on encouraging collaboration from our employees, our clients, and last—but certainly not least—our users. Even beyond this, however, the whole idea of sharing is actually central to our business model because (for instance) we proudly use free and open source software. In fact, most companies use free software in one capacity or another.
Free and open source software is great because it provides the building blocks of world-class products for none of the cost…but this isn’t going to be one of those posts that preaches about the philosophies of FLOSS. Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to two small utilities I developed in-house that I’m happy to say are now available for public use.
These are the beginnings of our code contributions back to the free software ecosystem …
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