Our guests in The Sustainable Hour on 18 December 2019 are seven-year-old Holly and her mum Jana Holmer, who share their enthusiasm for everything organic, repurposed or reinvented.

We talk with kayak-campaigning Steve Posselt, who recently published his new book, ‘Tough is not enough’ about climate despair and redemption – described as “a must read for every climate activist, adventurer and their friends.”

Sustainable People is on a hard mission this time, and it is not about finding Santa Claus… One of the most popular Danish Christmas songs, written 171 years ago, has this famous sentence: “Just don’t touch my old Christmas”. But Christmas has been touched, big time. The 5.5 million Danes go shopping for around $5 billion Australian dollars in the days around Christmas, and the figure for all the presents given equals to tonnes of carbon emissions. So Lene Foghsgaard asks: What on Earth can we do to actually make Christmas both green and sustainable? Two women, Johanne Stenstrup and Louise Thustrup stand behind the company Sustain Daily, which has made it into its mission to collect relevant information of all aspects of a sustainable lifestyle and inspire us all to change our habits into a more sustainable dailyday. They know everything worth knowning about the transition needed, and they generously give out some of their advice. 

We start the hour with a clip of Greta Thunberg and an EU media representative Elina Bardram speaking at the UN Climate Summit in Spain, and Colin Mockett‘s perspective on this in the global context of things. We end the hour with an excerpt from an inspirational end-of-year TEDtalk with Jane Fonda. Cheers, and a happy new year to all our FM and podcast listeners and followers in social media.

Video recording from the studio

“Health and medical groups from across Australia are calling the current air pollution crisis from unprecedented bushfires in NSW a public health emergency and calling on federal and state government to act to address the immediate health crisis as well as the underlying climate emergency.”~ Climate and Health Alliance’s joint statement

In the same breath as we send our respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which The Sustainable Hour is produced, the Wadawurrung people, in recognition of their continuing connection to the land, water, culture and community, in today’s program we also send our disrespect to our leaders in Canberra, who went to Spain to sabotage the global climate negotiations so that they basically collapsed — while in Australia, an area almost the size of Denmark now has been burning in the last month. More than 30,000 square kilometres – Denmark is 43,000. So that’s like seeing three quarters of Denmark on fire.

And we’re told it will be 47 degrees in Mildura on ...