Sustainable(ish)

Hello and welcome to episode 184, and as it turns out, the last episode of the Sustainable(ish) podcast! I wanted to try and get to 200, and I’m annoyed not even to be ending on a nice round number like 185, but often in life things aren’t tied up in a nice neat bow. Long term listeners will know that at times the podcast has been very stop start, and the time has come for an intentional stop. For now at at least. I’m not going to say that it will never be back in some form, as I genu...

In the spirit of London buses, ie nothing for ages and then two come along in close succession, this week’s episode is another foodie one, hot on the heels of Episode 180 - Food and climate change without the hot air with Professor Sarah Bridle. I’m chatting to Frank Holleman who is the co-founder of Fork Ranger, a platform and app that aims to help us to explore how to eat for the climate.
I was super aware of the recent food episode, and wanted to avoid simply repeating the same messages from that, so alongside diving into...

One of the things that frustrates many people, is a lack of action from governments around the world to protect nature and mitigate the worst impacts of the a warming and rapidly changing climate.
The UK government was one of the first to come up with a Net Zero target back in 2019, and declared a ‘climate emergency’ that same year. However the problem with both of these commitments is that they often don’t translate into the urgent and radical action that is needed. Apparently half of the world's population is heading the polls for elections in 2024, including the UK...

This week’s episode feels a little bit liking coming full circle on an episode from nearly 5 years ago!
If you’re a long-time listener, and have an excellent memory, you might remember, way back in 2019, I interviewed the wonderful Tillie Mabbutt who runs Frome Eco Party Kit, renting out a party kit of reusable plates, cups and bowls to avoid the waste associated with disposable partyware. At the time, Tillie was one of the first people in the UK to be running a reusable party kit and we dived into the idea, how it works, and how she...

In this week's episode I'm chatting to Sarah Bridle, who is possibly our first Professor on the podcast! Professor Sarah Bridle is Chair in Food, Climate and Society at the University of York, researching environmental impacts of the food system and potential impacts of the environment on food availability. She is also the author of Food and Climate Change - Without the Hot Air, an accessible guide to how different foods contribute to climate change, a brilliant book which I would highly recommend!

Food is a big part of all of our lives. And it's a big...

In this week's episode I'm chatting to comedian Stuart Goldsmith. I'm a bit of a comedy fan, so I listen to Stuart's podcast, the Comedian's Comedian where he interviews other comedians about their work and he seems to pretty much be BFFs with everyone on the comedy circuit. It might seem a bit random to be interviewing a comedian on the podcast, but as you will hear, in the last few years Stuart has been 'bitten by the sustainability bug' and has started to explore how he can use his skillset as a comedian and a speaker to help...

In this week's episode I'm chatting to Misha Dhanak, CEO of Spacehive, the home of community fundraising. We're probably all familiar with the concept of crowdfunding and may have even funded products and projects on platforms like Kickstarter. Well Spacehive is a similar concept, it's a crowdfunding platform, but it's for community projects - so on there you will find things like a cricket club raising funds for new kit, or a town looking to create a rural arts hub. And as we will hear from Misha, there are a huge number of nature and climate projects too. Many o...

In this week's episode I'm chatting to William Eccles from The Commitment.
The Commitment is a campaign asking us to commit to voting for a healthy planet. You do this by heading to their website, hitting the "make the commitment" button, and ticking the box that says “ I commit to vote only for politicians who work for urgent action on the climate and nature.”.
We discuss in the episode just why that is so important, and the really clever ways that they’re using your commitment to engage with MPs and give them a mandate to be braver...

Advertising.
It's all around us. Persuading us to buy stuff we didn't know we wanted, telling us how much happier/more popular/better our lives will be with the latest/newest whatever it is.
Most of think that we're immune to it, but studies show just how insidious and manipulative it is, and how it influences our brains at a deep level. Which perhaps wouldn't really matter if we weren't in the grips of climate and ecological emergencies driven by our consumption of the very stuff being advertised to us.
Leo Murray is the co-founder and...

Climate and play might not be two things that we naturally put together. And even less so, climate and 'playfulness'. Climate change is a huge, overwhelming, complext issue and i couldn't be more important. So we need to take this seriously and absolutely need to be bringing our best game, there's no room for messing around, right?
Maybe not!
I loved this chat with the brilliant Lucy Hawthorne, founder of Climate Play who is "making it safe, light and fun to face climate change". Lucy runs a range of workshops and programmes that help people work through...