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 genuinely love having these conversations and will miss the opportunities that the podcast has given me to speak to so many extraordinary and inspiring people. However it’s reached the point where the joy of the conversations is starting to be outweighed by the work involved organising and scheduling everything, editing it all, creating the blog posts and the socials etc etc, so time to put this particular project to bed, for a while at least.

 I am so delighted to be going out with such a bang and having the amazing opportunity to interview one of my absolute heroes, Clover Hogan.
Clover is a 24-year-old climate activist and the founding Executive Director of Force of Nature - the youth non-profit mobilising mindsets for climate action. She has worked alongside the world’s leading authorities on sustainability, consulted within the boardrooms of Fortune 50 companies, and counselled heads of state. Her TED talk, 'What to do when climate change feels unstoppable', has been viewed 2 million times. As we’ll hear in the chat, she started her activist journey at the age of just 11, and attended the instrumental Paris COP in 2015 at the age of just 15. She genuinely is a force of nature, and is the kind of person who you just want to be able to download everything that is in their head. We talk about her own journey, what we can do as parents to support our young people, and what we can do ourselves to move beyond individual action and to be a bit more activist. We discuss what the word activist even means, acknowledging that it’s an uncomfortable word for many, but that it encompasses such a wide range of things, and that an ‘in’ for many people is thinking about their workplace and what they might be able to to do to encourage their workplace on a sustainability journey.

I’m pretty sure it’s obvious from the chat, but this was a massive fan-girl moment for me,  I loved this chat and totally want Clover to be my new BFF. Ooh and just a quick warning if you tend to listen with kids around, I do drop an F-bomb towards the end – apologies in advance.

Enjoy!

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 what Fork Ranger does, we also talked about climate communications, story telling and messaging, all of which Fork Ranger does incredibly well, and hopefully there’s a lot in this episode for all of us around how we talk about food and climate with friends, family and colleagues.

Enjoy!

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, making this a crucial year for climate action.
In this week’s episode I’m delighted to be chatting to Amy McDonnell and Oliver Sidorczuk, co-directors of Zero Hour, a campaign that is working to get a new bill, the Climate and Nature Bill, passed into law, which would ensure that UK government  policies are in line with the latest science. With an election looming at some point this year, support for this bill in the run up to that, not only shows MPs and prospective MPs that this is an issue that the electorate care about, it will also mean that the campaign will have the momentum it needs to hit the ground running, when a new parliament sits after the election.
Studies repeatedly show that most people are concerned about the climate and nature crises, but especially when it comes to politics and elections, it can feel like we can make a difference, due to our electoral system. Supporting the Climate and Nature Bill is a brilliant (and very easy!) way make your voice heard  by your local politicians, and we can amplify our own individual support by asking businesses and organisations that we’re involved with to support it to.

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 got started.
Well… today’s guest Isabel was listenting to that episode, and not only started her own Party Kit off the back of it, but went on to create the Party Kit Network, which now has 360 kits listed in the UK, over 100 in Australia and is starting to branch out into North America too.
I Could. Not. Love. This. More!

In this episode we dive into party kits, what they are, how they work, how to find one, as well as how to start one if you’d love to have near you and there isn’t one. We also talk more broadly about the sharing economy – so this is the idea of an economy based on renting and sharing things rather than the linear buy, use, dispose model we currently have. We explore some of the difficulties around trying to do business in a different and lets face it, conter cultural way and Isabel’s ambitions for the Party Kit Network.

I hope you enjoy listening to this one as much as I enjoyed recording it!

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 part of the climate crisis too - around a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from food. When it comes to 'sustainable food' it very quickly gets very complicated - there are so many different things to think about, and often it feels very difficult to make the 'right' decision.

I loved hearing Sarah's personal story around her career pivot from Astrophysics to food and climate change, and how she has also had to navigate the difficulties of trying to change family diets and habits in her own household, so understands that what can sound like straightforward swaps on paper, are often more challenging!

We cover a LOT in the episode, and I'm very aware that we might have simply opened a whole can of worms and raised even more questions - do let me know if there's bits that you would love to hear more about and dive into a little more detail!

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 tackle the climate crisis. And oh my goodness, I can't tell you how much I love this!
I think that one of the big problems we have when it comes to engaging people in all things climate and sustainability is that as human beings we love to put each other into boxes. So I'm assuming that in the eyes of my friends and family I'm very firmly in the crusty green box. Despite my lack of yoghurt weaving skills. And everyone else kind of feels like the greenies are over there doing their fun green hobby, but it's nothing to do with me. They know what they're expecting to hear from us, and probably in many cases, either avoid conversations with us, or start to zone out a little. So when someone 'normal', a non greenie comedian, starts to talk about climate it somehow has much more impact, as it's not the usual suspects talking about this stuff - and that's hugely powerful.

We didn't talk about even half of the things I wanted to dive into. I omitted the most obvious question - how do you make the climate crisis funny? But I really hope that you enjoy this conversation. Right at the very end, Stuart talks about how stepping into the climate space, and starting to talk about climate in his work, wasn't as scary as he thought it would be! Which I would love to be the take home message from this episode. We might not all be stand up comedians, or confident public speakers, but we do all have something we can do, a particular skill set, a superpower that we might not even realise we have, that we can use, to play our part in the tackling the climate crisis.

What's yours...? 

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 of us might have ideas for projects that we would love to see happening in our local community - whether that's something like a regular repair cafe, solar panels on your kid's school, transforming a derelict bit of land into community garden, or something else entirely. But for most of us, those ideas stay in our heads as dreams, when the reality of trying to find the money to get it off the ground. This is where Spacehive comes in - they have helped to fund over 2000 projects, and raised over £30million for local projects, and they have they highest success rate of any crowdfunding platform with over 85% of their projects getting funded.

Misha talks in the podcast about 'small but mighty' projects and you will probably be able to tell from my reaction that I just love this! Many of the projects on Spacehive are small, they're not going to change the world, but they are going to change their local community. And with governments around the world failing to take the ambitious actions that we need to protect nature and the climate, community action is vital. And so many of the projects come with additional co-benefits, so the original intention might be supporting wildlife, or installing solar panels, but the ripple effects might be improved physical and mental health, or financial savings, and all of them will be bringing people in the local community together, to make where they live a little bit better.

I would love to hear if you have any ideas for local sustainable(ish) projects you'd love to get off the ground, and if this episode has made you feel a little bit braver about it, and possibly even launch your project on Spacehive! 

Enjoy!