Social media and sustainability

Several MASS members attended the Sustainable Urbanisation conference in Melbourne last week. Social media was identified as a potentially important contributor to the transition to a sustainability society for a number of reasons such as allowing direct public communication globally and outside traditional power structures, and empowering youth and facilitating engagement with them.

Greenpeace has just announced a campaign to get Facebook to unfriend coal by increasing its own use of clean energy and also by advocating for the use of clean energy. This provides a really interesting and important test of the role of social media in driving corporate behaviour change, and perhaps also a challenge for Facebook itself which is now firmly embedded in global corporate power structures. If successful, this may also help drive the growing "new" economy (including information technology) towards the use of clean energy independently of the behaviour of the "old" economy.

Further information on the Guardian's Sustainable Business Blog.    

We will provide some more information on the highlights and outcomes of the conference in later posts.

Imagining a sustainable Melbourne - Short Films at Fed Square

Apparently VEIL has some short films showing on the big screen at Fed Square over summer created by students and lecturers of four Victorian universities imagining a sustainable Melbourne in the future. I'll post a program when I can find one.

via Sustainable Melbourne.

Transitioning to a more sustainable society

As a society, we are becoming better at identifying unsustainable practices and processes, however it is extremely unclear how we can make the transition to a more sustainable society, despite some ambitious attempts by people such as Tim Jackson. Here are some other approaches:

The Transition Response (via Kath Williams). Finally something that at least mentions gardens and horticulture! This does pose some interesting questions related to corporate sustainability, such as how the behaviour of corporations affects the resilience of the communities they operate in, and how they are planning to operate in a world without cheap fossil fuel. Also, this is a TED talk, and there is a TEDx event as part of the Sustainable Urbanisation conference in February.  



http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_hopkins_transition_to_a_world_without_oil.html

Or there is always the revolution...

The University of Strategic Optimism (via Crooked Timber)

Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil