Soul Economy

You can view Danish architect, Jan Gehl’s vision for a more sustainable city - here - and view the dates of upcoming talks too!

I picked up a postcard at the council recently that was promoting “Help Green Our Parks”. The Rozelle Bay Community Native Nursery, a volunteer community group reintroducing local plant species to the area, was seeking new volunteers.

In turning over the card there was the usual part about “made using 100% recycled paper” but then [...]

While I watched the movie Blood Diamonds some time ago it is one of those movies that I continue to think about. So, I was very pleased to read an article recently about the fair trade jewellery movement.
The Sun Herald reports that ethical gold jewellery accounts for less that 1% of the global $56 billion [...]

It’s Saturday morning and the last wine bottle clatters into the recycling bin. Your head is one throbbing mass and the brain inside simmers in the little liquid your body has managed to conserve. In a matter of hours you will have managed to recover slightly, but the effects of alcohol extend much further than [...]

Corporations can lift human rights standards where these are inadequate and not in line with international expectations; or corporations can abuse them, often as an unintended side effect of operations, sometimes through negligence and in ‘worst case scenarios’, intentionally to obtain unfair advantage.
For some business executives the shift from assuming that human rights protection and [...]

Sustainable fashion - it sounds like an oxymoron. In an industry built upon the profitability of disposability, where a style of jean has a shorter lifespan than a wedge of Pecorino cheese, how could anything be sustainable? The use of sustainable textiles (think broader than purely organic textiles) in the production of garments has a [...]

Sydney 2008: Advertisements for British Petroleum (BP) in proud green and gold, boast the company’s investment in renewable energy. Apparently, Talk stopped long ago. A banner above a watering-hole on George Street makes it known that the establishment has now become ‘carbon-neutral’: a phrase that seems to have edged its way into the vernacular. In [...]

In checking out the dates for Clean Up Australia this year, which by the way is 2 March, I came across these statistics:

Australians are among the highest producers of waste, per person, in the world.
An estimated 7 billion cigarette butts end up in Australian waterways, streets and parklands each year.
80 million plastic bags are dumped [...]

“People are universally becoming much more concerned with the honesty of the company that they’re buying the product from and the environmental impact,” says outspoken fashion designer Katherine Hamnett on the current mainstreaming of organic and sustainable clothing. (see clip here)
Hamnett, who forged an image in the 1980’s with bold protest slogan T-shirts is now [...]

I have just across an article about “Our Moral Footprint” The New York Times by Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic.
He makes some pertinent points which have made me reflect on my moral footprint, in terms of my responsibility to leave as little of an impact on the earth as possible so [...]