In Geelong, Bellarine and Surf Coast on 13 October 2019, 15 houses open their doors to the public to showcase green solutions and clever ideas for how to lower your ecological footprint. Sustainable House Day is like a one-day community festival as it involves 100 volunteers, 50 sustainability experts and thousands of curious neighbours, plus the hosts, the house owners themselves.

Before that, 7 October marks the beginning of a Global Rebellion calling for governments at all level to declare a climate emergency, act accordingly, and establish Citizens’ Assemblys to deal with the crisis.

Guests in The Sustainable Hour’s Sustainable House Day special on 2 October 2019 are:

Sue and Frank Wall – house #8 in Portarlington (the poster house) – who have done a brilliant job achieving a 7.6 star passive solar house as owner builders.

Sally Wills – house #4 in Norlane – who is a designer and builder, Small Change Design & Construction, and who opens her new exemplar 7 star extra small home on tiny site. Sally is a member of our micro village group and passionate about low footprint, affordable housing.

Gavin Pocock – house #2 in Batesford – who has built a large sustainable native and food producing garden. Gavin is a landscape architect who lectures at Deakin, has just started his PhD. He’s a Geelong Sustainability business member, who has small business, Garden Consultants in fits in with child care duties.

Vicki Perrett​, President of Geelong Sustainability​ and organiser of Sustainable House Day Geelong

Sustainable People: The Danish charity organisation Dan Church Aid is the founder of three surplus shops called ‘WeFood’ – with more shops to come. The shops sell surplus food from Danish supermarkets which would otherwise be thrown out. In Denmark, a few years ago it was made legal to sell food that has an expired date on it – as long as you inform people that this is the fact. Food that is run out of duedate is being tested every day in the shop. The volunteers smell, taste and try its freshness. Every year, 700,000 ton of food is thrown out in Denmark. Every fifth shopping cart. With the three shops already opened, WeFood have reduced the amount of food waste by nearly 30 per cent a year. This year the shops will sell 200,000 ton of surplus food. The NGO is planning to open a forth shop and one of the ways to fundraise is to sell ‘Nationshares’. The Danes can by a ‘Nationshare’ for DKK100 (AUS$20) if they wish to support the shop and the idea. Thousands of Danes already have done this. In this episode, Lene Outzen Foghsgaard talk to one of the managers, Jan Petersen, and two customers. 

We talk about the climate emergency declaration campaign and about the Spring Rebellion,

Guest in The Sustainable Hour on 25 September 2019 is Lachie Chomley from The Farm Next Door in Norlane.

We play an excerpt of the many questions from the community and of a speech by Councillor Jim Mason at the Council meeting on 24 September when a decision was to be made on whether or not to declare a climate emergency. Six of the eleven councillors rejected the idea.

We talk with Ben Pearson from World Animal Protection about the ghost nets that are killing turtles, sharks and other animals in the Gulf.

Greta Thunberg gave an emotional speech at the global climate summit in New York, we play an excerpt. And we round the hour off with a #FridaysForFuture song called ‘Unity’.

“In climate terms, time is running out. The climate deniers are a threat to our safety and security. Be kind to them, love them, but get them out of the way.”~ Jim Mason, Councillor, City of Greater Geelong

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 286 on 94.7 The Pulse:

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 LISTENER SERVICE: 

Content of this hour

Links, excerpts and more information about what we talked about in this Sustainable Hour

Video recording of Geelong Council meeting on 24 September 2019

“Every minute fibre in the cable adds to its strength.”~ Jim Mason, Councillor, City of Greater Geelong

A regenerative hour in the company of Shane Ward from Action Ecology – about the power of regenerating landscapes, sustainable food systems and how climate action requires us to stop thinking in silos, get in people’s faces and value the soil, and its ability to not only support ecosystems but also draw down carbon from the atmosphere.“One of the main drivers of our climate and biodiversity crisis is land use, specifically agriculture. It is a key area people need to understand – this is really important for everybody,” explains Shane.

The music in the hour was selected by Shane: Puscifer’s ‘The Humbling River’ – and Tool’s ‘Right in Two’

livingthechangefilm.com

TEDtalk: A climate change solution that’s right under our feet

There’s two times more carbon in the earth’s soil than in all of its vegetation and the atmosphere — combined. Biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe dives into the science of soil and shares how we could use its awesome carbon-trapping power to offset climate change. “[Soil] represents the difference between life and lifelessness in the earth system, and it can also help us combat climate change — if we can only stop treating it like dirt,” she says.

British ecologists declare climate emergency and biodiversity crisis

The Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM) is the professional body for ecologists and environmental managers working to manage and enhance the natural environment in the UK and Ireland. The body’s declaration calls for action from its members, governments and society on reducing greenhouse gas emissions through nature-based solutions. → Read more on www.cieem.net

Briefing paperIn addition to the declaration, CIEEM have published a briefing paper which summarises the current evidence and actions: ‘Climate Emergency and Biodiversity Crisis: The Facts and Figures’

. . .

Nature is collapsing – what must we do?

“We may well be approaching a tipping point, a phase shift into a state of accelerated decline (a biodiversity death spiral) resulting from human impacts, as reflected by the increasing frequency and severity of catastrophic events. Without a global emergency response, this is likely to accelerate as the causal factors continue unabated and our priorities remain incompatible with the natural world.”

Professor Brett Bryan and other world-class experts from Deakin University’s Centre for Integrative Ecology are calling on us all – from governments to individuals – to take more action to save nature before it’s too late.

In The Sustainable Hour on 18 September 2019, Michael Martinez, head of the community and immigrant education organisation Diversitat and its radio station 94.7 The Pulse, officially declares that “we are in a climate and biodiversity emergency, and therefore we need to act accordingly.”In the context of a Geelong City Council, as we understand it, currently busy figuring out behind the scenes how they can denounce, reject or water down Councillor Sarah Manfield’s motion for the municipality to declare a climate emergency – a motion which she has scheduled to table at the Council’s ordinary meeting on 24 September – Diversitat CEO Michael Martinez‘s announcement today in The Sustainable Hour stands out as an example of what leadership looks like.

The call from climate-concerned school children and parents generally hasn’t resonated among local leaders in the board rooms of businesses, organisation, schools and universities in Geelong. Deakin University’s new Vice Chancellor, for example, has outright rejected the idea of declaring a climate emergency, as has the chair of Geelong’s Chamber of Commerce.

Therefore, in a local context, the Geelong’s Ethnic Community Council and Diversitat’s decision to declare a climate emergency becomes the kind of call to mobilise and prepare for action which makes a real difference. Similar to how Darebin City Council’s declaration in December 2016 has been followed by more than 1,000 other councils since, the idea of a community radio declaring a climate emergency is an idea that can be replicated.

In The Sustainable Hour team, we feel confident that this move from the management of our station will inspire and empower many others to take new and bolder steps to reduce emissions, first of all among organisations, businesses and families in our local community, but potentially also, just like we’ve seen it happen with Darebin City Council’s historic motion, here’s a tiny snowball rolling and it could go round the world.

We talk with professor John Hewson, former leader of the Liberal Party, about why he supports Senator Mehreen Faruqi​‘s call for the Australian Parliament to declare a climate emergency. “Look, it is just like when a Parliament declares a war or participates in a war. In itself it doesn’t do anything. It is the base on which they mobilise and prepare for that. And that is really what we need to do,” he explains.

We also play short excerpts of Greta Thunberg‘s interview in The Daily Show in the US, where she talks about the importance of that everyone spends some time on educating themselves around the issues with the climate and ecological breakdown, of a speech by climate scientist Dr Heather Price, expert in atmospheric chemistry, who tells the school-striking kids that “You are already living with the failure of your parents’ and your grandparents’ generations. We have failed you because we have ignored the scientist warnings,” an outcry by a

The first half of this Regenerative Hour is about mangroves, seaweed and blue carbon in an indigenous perspective. The rest of the podcast digs into the topics of soil health and carbon sequestering through regenerative farming.

Our guests are: Zoe Ellen Brittain who is working on a PhD at Deakin University where she is looking at how First Nation Australians used seaweed with a view to investigating the commercial possibilities for them in this area, and Oli Moraes who has looked at blue carbon – mangroves and seagrasses – in the Pacific Island region as a means to addressing climate change mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Oli has a Bachelors of Arts and Science from Monash University where he studied earth sciences and international studies and recently completed a Master of Environment at the University of Melbourne specialising in climate change and conservation. His Masters research took him to Fiji in 2018 where he worked with Fijian conservation NGOs, practitioners, government agencies and indigenous communities around Fiji to understand the opportunities and challenges of protecting and restoring blue carbon ecosystems through carbon market approaches. He focused on empowering all voices and particularly capturing the deep indigenous knowledges about coastal resource management in his research.Oli currently works at the Brotherhood of St Laurence as an Energy Broker in their Climate and Energy Research Group, and as a Research Assistant at RMIT University with IPCC lead author on climate change adaptation Dr Lauren Rickards.

The interview was conducted by Anthony Gleeson

It’s time for planetary-scale interventions to combat climate change — and environmentalist Tim Flannery thinks seaweed can help. In a bold talk, he shares the epic carbon-capturing potential of seaweed, explaining how oceangoing seaweed farms created on a massive scale could trap all the carbon we emit into the atmosphere. Learn more about this potentially planet-saving solution — and the work that’s still needed to get there.

Blue carbon in Australia: 20 million tonnes CO2 annually

“Australia’s mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows are absorbing about 20m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, according to a major new study that is the first to measure in detail the climate benefits of the coastal ecosystems.But the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, warns that degradation of these “vegetated coastal ecosystems” was already seeing 3 million tonnes of CO2 per year being released back into the atmosphere.The study reveals Australia’s vast coastlines represent between 5% and 11% of all the so called “blue carbon” locked up in mangroves, seagrasses and tidal marshes globally. Some 44 scientists from 33 different research institutions collaborated on the study, which began in 2014.”

→ The Guardian – 1 October 2019:Australia’s vast carbon sink releasing millions of tonnes of CO2 back into atmosphere “Australia’s mangroves and seag...

Guests in The Sustainable Hour on 11 September 2019 are Heidi Fog, a carbon consultant, who helps companies and schools lowering their carbon footprint and save money on the electricity bill, and who is featured in the ninth episode of our Show Me How series, and Audrey Aronsten-Whytcross, school strike organiser from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, who explains about what will happen at Geelong City Hall on Friday 20 September at 10am.

600 business leaders from around the world have pledged to support their employees to strike on 20 September for the Global Climate Strike. 

We also talk with Dr Geoff Berry, who has drafted a succinct one-page letter designed to help supporters get their workplaces on side in reference to the 20 September climate strike.

Sustainable People reports from a unique event in Denmark: The Democracy Festival, a festival for the youth, which this year gathered 30.000 young people from all over Denmark. The festival started back in 2013 as a very tiny one with only 150 people invited, but after the first meeting, the vision of building a festival started growing, and three years later it was a reality with more than 80 organisations supporting it. The keywords are democracy and involvement in the society. There are several stages and workshops in tents all over the park, Valbyparken, where it takes place, with thousands of curious young people visiting. The climate issue played a big role this year. Lene Fogsgaard spoke with Olav, one of the founders of the festival, Rye, Anders and Benjamin, three young Danes attending it, and the famous Danish rap artist Jesper “Jokeren”, who spoke from the stage about starting a “green revolution now”. Lene asks us: “Australia! What about you being next in line to start a festival like this? You have our full support!”

“If today’s decision makers do not understand the double seriousness of climate crisis and social crisis and understand that we need a radical change, I fear that some in desperation will end up in eco-terrorism.”~ Jørgen Steen Nielsen, Danish journalist, Information

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 284 on 94.7 The Pulse:

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Could we turn the 2020s into ‘The Regenerative Decade’? Welcome to a new series of talks about what that could imply. We talk ecology, deep adaptation, grief, compassion and passion, connecting with nature, resilience, revitalisation, restoration, revolution… – the bigger picture, in other word.The aspiration of this series is to share understandings, observations and ways of thinking that could help us discover a renewed sense of direction and meaningful vision for the lives we live and the causes we fight for on this fragile planet we call home.

Our guest in the second episode of ‘Regenerative Hours’ is Dr Geoff Berry for a talk about our relationship with nature, the search for 21st century ethics, and the concept of “being at home in the universe”. 

Holistic vision guiding the movement “We need both the global civil disobedience and the small, local, even ‘inner’ work – the loud and the quiet. It’s possible, in fact, to have an entirely holistic vision guiding the movement in this direction,” says Geoff, who does a lot of this kind of work. He publishes some of it at his website, www.naturecalling.org

. . .

Changing our thinking

Dr Geoff Berry’s film ‘Climate Science and Urban Planning’ explores new ways of adapting global society to the limits of nature, seeking the wisdom of Australian Aboriginal elders as well as climate scientists, leaders in renewable energy and urban planners.

First episode in the “City Living, Nature Calling” documentary series – www.naturecalling.org/film

‘City Living, Nature Calling’ was created, written and presented by Dr Geoff Berry. It features interviews with climate scientist Professor Will Steffen and environmental urban planner Professor Barbara Norman.

It is part of what is going to become a first-ever ecomythic documentary series.

This first film in the series explores the way modern societies have developed out of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, distancing us from close contact and identification with the more-than-human natural world.

Dr Geoff Berry is the Australian representative to the International Ecopsychology Society.

He explains on his home page:“People naturally love their homes and want to protect their lifestyles. But modern life has gotten out of balance and we know we need to adapt to the ecological limits of the earth. In evolutionary terms, humanity spent most of its cultural history in close contact with the more-than-human nature all around us. But nowadays, the city has become our natural environment. Shifting our ‘homes’ from nature to cities fundamentally changes our thinking – and this is what leads us to the precipice of the ecological crisis.

Making cities more ecologically sustainable is possible but we need to explore how to do this. Nature Calling presents our challenges in clear language and places the current crisis in evolutionary context. This results in a fascinating and novel ‘ecological history’ of humanity, including an overview of the way the agricultural revolution promoted a way of thinking about the earth as a set of resources (or objects) rather than a home filled with extended kin (or subjects). We live in a world where this tendency has been increased exponentially by the fossil fuel power of the industrial revolution.

Today,

“Yes, I know we need a system change rather than individual change. But you can not have one without the other.”~ Greta Thunberg, Swedish teenager and climate activist

Guests in The Sustainable Hour on 4 September 2019 are:

Libby Coker, Labor Member of the Australian Parliament for Corangamite, about why she has published media releases in support of the climate emergency declaration in Surf Coast Shire Council and of the school children who will be going on strike on 20 September. Our question to her is whether she is going to extend that call to the adults, in particular the parents, that they should be joining their kids?

Phil Baulch, Belmont Heights Transition Streets in Geelong, who is starring as one of the 30 members of the Transition Streets movement in Geelong, who are featured in our ‘Show me how’ Youtube-series. Today, we premiere the eight episode, entitled ‘Transitioning the way we consume’

Abbey Sweeney, Chiara Eden and Taylor Sadeghi from Sacred Heart College, who organise the Fight for the Bight paddle out at Cosy Corner in Torquay on Saturday 14 September 2019 at 12pm. 

Mary Stringer, president of Transition Australia, who spruiks the Transition Australia Victorian Convergence which takes place in Melbourne on Sunday 15 September. 

Today’s ‘Sustainable People’ episode by Lene Outzen Foghsgaard is inspired by a study from a Danish university which claimed that not only red meat produces a large carbon footprint, but also coffee, sweets and alcohol. Lene interviews Vibeke Lund, who is a health coach, Ann Kathrine, who spent a year in Melbourne and loves coffee and Anna, who is a teenager, representing a Danish youth that drinks twice as much alcohol as other young people in Europe. What are we ready to say no to for the sake of the climate?   

“Oh no, I thought, this one is a tough one. I have to find out what people think about this. Later it turned out that the study had been strongly influenced by the meat industry, so I only refer to it as an inspiration for the more general discussion about which sacrifises we are willing to make if it would be better for the climate. Because, no matter what, you and me together with billions of others have to cut down on consumption in general. Are we willing to do that?” ~ Lene Outzen Foghsgaard in ‘Sustainable People’

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 283 on 94.7 The Pulse:

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“Say no to consumerist greed.”~ Pope Francis,

In the lead up to our collective entrance into what we suggest could be termed ‘The Regenerative Decade’, we open a new series of talks about regeneration, climate restoration, ecology, connecting with nature, deep adaptation, grief, compassion and passion, resilience – and solutions.

Welcome to the regenerative journey!

Our first guest in this new series of ‘Regenerative Hours’ is Mark Dekker for a talk about deep adaptation, and what this expression really means. 

We also listen to two youtube-videos, ‘How to create an abundant economy’ narrated by Charles Eisenstein and produced by Sustainable Human, the video ‘Because the Future is Organic’ by the Rodale Institute, and Dr Rupert Read‘s ‘The Uncertain Situation We Are In | Extinction Rebellion’. You can see the videos below.

For the Australians: Before you let your garden overgrow as the Danish professor, check with your local fire brigades, and watch out before you have a clean up of “snake infested” area. Remember fire controls could be in place.

“We are all in this together.”~ Mark Dekker, permaculturalist

Servants of life: Finding the people who care

Mark’s remark on climate solutions and deep adaptation“We need to do with less,” says Mark. “And that is where we can all make those individual decisions to do with less. There is no substitute for that. We can also sequester carbon. There are ways and means to do that, but it is going to take a global effort – whether that is sequestering carbon with the use of rock minerals, no till, and biochar in our vegetable systems, properly grazed livestock through holistic management strategies, implemented through the likes of sustainable livestock management, who were inspired by Alan Savery’s work at the Savery Institute – they are sequestering carbon on the grasslands. And the world is covered in grassland and savanahs. That is going to take a war effort, but from that we can sequester six gigatonnes a year.

And that’s even getting to the point of [putting] ten per cent of carbon in the soil. It has just got to stay there. And with no till systems it will stay there. If you have got that healthy ten per cent carbon in the soil, with your rock minerals and biochar and no tilling, it is a no brainer – but is going to take a war effort. For example, on the topic of ‘a war effort’, we could see GM and Ford building electric cars and e-bicycles. We have seen this before in the Second World War: The whole of America’s industrial complex was turned upside down and created a war machine. So instead of creating that, how about we create some life?

We can do it. I have great faith in humanity, and there are a lot of good people, even in politics,

Our guests in The Sustainable Hour on 28 August 2019 are:

Alex Marshall, who has lead a year-long community campaign to get Surf Coast Shire Council to declare a climate emergency declaration. The petition she had tabled with more than 1,000 signatures was on the agenda of the Council’s 27 August meeting, and there was joy and loud applause in the chamber when the motion for a climate emergency declaration was eventually passed.

Ben Shaw, owner of Ben Shaw Permaculture, who is featured in the seventh episode of ‘Show Me How’, today about food production in the back yard.

Dr Mark Randall, counsellor and psychotherapist who is organising the event World Heart of Connection Day in Geelong’s Botanic Gardens on Wednesday 4 September at 12:30pm.

We play Louis Armstrong’s ‘It’s a Wonderful World’, and Sting’s song ‘Fragile Planet’ from 2007

“Join the revolution. Food is a great connector, and people are coming together.”~ Ben Shaw, permaculture trainer

Listen to The Sustainable Hour no. 282 on 94.7 The Pulse:

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The Guardian’s weekly carbon count

How good is Australia?Responding to #ClimateEmergency with #ClimateVandalismAustralia's carbon emissions continue to rise to new seven-year highshttps://t.co/VxQYPMyTtd via @adamlmorton pic.twitter.com/4xpnoSGkSV— Prof Ray Wills (@ProfRayWills) August 31, 2019

Great Barrier Reef outlook very poor, Australia says(In many ways it’s an analogue for our earth. We can see her decline, we know how to save her,