The Hedge Chair

A chair, leaning, living,
A maker, learning, loving.
Learning about living, making a leaning chair,
Loving the learning, learning that leans and lives,

Surfing and sustainability

              Wow, I was looking at pictures of the big wave surfer Garrett McNamara setting a new record of riding a 100 foot wave. It got me thinking about how engaging the image of the surfer has become. Since Isaac Newton, our traditional view of how the world works

Private ethics and public conflicts

Recently a senior civil servant who was chief of shareholder investment section in the Department of Finance left his position to take up a new job. He was in charge of the Department’s (the public’s) policy and enforcement of the banking regulations and agreements. His new job however, is with the Bank of Ireland,

Italy, food and sustainability

I am writing this from Italy where I have come to visit my daughter for Christmas. The Italians are a serious food nation, in ways it is difficult to understand without actually being here. Families can fall out over some food detail – she roasts the pine nuts too much, his balsamic vinegar is too sour!

Shared value – Sharing Values – a must for sustainable business

A more sustainable future will require that we devise ways of developing and sharing value. Many of the problems we face are not ones that can be addressed by an organisation on its own. We hear a lot of talk now about stakeholders

A recession or a crisis?

There is a real difficulty in starting a business in Ireland right now. The almost complete sense of hopelessness that persists across all sectors of society. There is a sense that the answer is no! No matter what the question is. This comes from the top, the lack of leadership,

Quality and Sustainability

There are some similarities between the introduction of Quality Systems into the workplace and the development of Sustainability. When the idea of quality was first introduced it was the remit of the production department and only later did it spread across all departments and become part of the way that business is done. Currently, sustainability is […]

Defining Sustainability

Submission to government

SustainEd responded to the call for submissions to the governments Framework for Sustainable Development by making suggestions about some opportunities that exist for businesses in Ireland in respect of sustainability. A copy of our submission document can be seen here http://www.sustained.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/SustainEd-SusDevReport-Mar2012-print.pdf

Competition – a cautionary tale

“The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities – communities that are designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economies, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavour is to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life”.

Fritjof Capra. The Hidden Connections (London:Flamingo, 2003).