When communities take up environmental health campaigns against big, multinational companies (and Governments who support them), the script is full of drama and it feels like David will never beat Goliath again. The Anglesea and Surf Coast communities had a huge win today. Alcoa announced the closure of it’s Anglesea Coal Fired Power Station and Coal Mine. They tried to sell it off … but no one wanted to buy it. The Surf Coast Air Action (SCAA) group, together with it’s partners and supporters, waged a long campaign to disuade potential buyers. They made it clear that our community wanted the …

I love this latest cartoon from Hugh McLeod at Gaping Void … Hugh writes about it by saying … “This cartoon was inspired by my friend, Mark Earls’ new book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having”. Mark (@herdmeister), a former hot-shot London advertising planner, came to the conclusion that advertising needed to worry less about the usual buzzwords swishing around the industry, and more about the hard science of human behavior. He calls it “Herd Behavior”. People are hyper-social creatures who behave en masse, not individually. And there’s a lot of new science to back it up. Which renders a lot of old-school, command-and-control …

I am currently facilitating a series of conversations between a group of people who have joined the 3 Pillars Network Active Learning program. The core purpose of this program is to connect people from all over Australia who work in the field (if you can call it  field?) of behaviour change for sustainability. The idea is to promote learning between practitioners, researchers and those in policy. Last week I drew a map of the key things I remembered from the conversations. I love creating these maps after reading books and listening to TED talks. It helps to make links between …

I am heading to Vancouver in June to work with friends – Chris Corrigan and Steven Wright. We are currently designing a series of World Cafe conversations for the World Indigenous Housing Conference. You can read all about WHO is behind this gathering by clicking on the Conference Logo. One of the crucial parts of the design is the Invitation (Chris writes about Inivitation here and here). If an Invitation to a gathering was a small plate of nuts that needed to be cracked … then one of our key organisers has just cracked a few open! He has built …

I’m excited! This year I have been privileged to co-design a Sustainability Congress which is happening in Sydney next month with the 3 Pillars Network. This Congress has emerged from a network of people with unanswered questions and great ideas. This extraordinary group of practitioners and researchers have been on a learning journey together in 2011 – The 3 Pillars Active Learning Program EARLY BIRD rates end this week on Friday 21st October for the Behaviour Change for Sustainability National Congress. The reason I am excited has been the collaborative approach to the shape, the content and the design of …