Five Top Sustainability Speakers

  1.  Al Gore Former Vice President in the Clinton Administration, Al Gore helped bring climate change to the forefront of our minds with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.  The film won an Oscar and Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

  2.    David Cook Executive Ambassador of The Natural Step, Briton David Cook was Chief Executive of the organisation until 2009.  Companies who have used The Natural Step methodology to understand their impact speak highly of the process and Cook is certainly a no-nonsense, straight talker who manages to challenge and inspire industry.

3.  John Elkington Founder of our favourite news service Environmental News Daily Service (ENDS) and a raft of other environment and sustainability businesses, John Elkington is one of the UK’s top sustainability speakers.  Elkington has published a series of books on sustainability and originated the term triple bottom line.

4.  Annie Leonard Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute animation which aims to shed light on the wastefulness of our consumer society.  She also blogs for Patagonia.  Check our her recent piece on the holiday season.

5.  Philippe Van Parijs Perhaps less well-known internationally, Professor Van Parijs is Belgium’s homegrown ethical champion.  Professor of ethics at the University of Louvain, Sustainability Consult’s Aris Koutentakis was so impressed by a presentation given by the bearded academic, he blogged on it on our Thoughtshower blog.

Picnic on the Streets for More Sustainable Living

Source KAURI

This week, we attended KAURI’s event celebrating its fifteenth anniversary.  KAURI is a Belgian CSR organisation.

All the presentations were brilliant but I was really inspired by one of the speakers, the Belgian Professor Philippe Van Parijs.  As he was fed up with cars taking over public spaces, he wrote an article asking people to come to boulevard Anspach in the centre of Brussels every Sunday for a picnic in the road.