Of Air Travel and Cake

Here in the sustainability office we have been spending some time thinking about air travel and cake.

First, the air travel. There is a significant issue here, and it affects a lot of staff at the university. From time to time, we’re expected to travel, and being able to meet others face to face and form that community is actually really important.

So Sharon and Matt have decided that they will attend the annual conference of Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability this year in Adelaide. We are currently engaged in a benchmarking project with them, which is going to be really handy for us (developing a Sustainability Scorecard for tertiary institutions), and we’re going to be presenting a paper about working in the sustainability field post natural disaster.

These conferences are awesome for us and in the past have led to a whole lot of good developments (like the new eco office programme, for example).
We are acutely aware of this, especially since air travel is a substantial component of UC’s carbon footprint and it needs to come down. We have two conferences to fly to in the next six months, the second one being in Hamilton. And Matt has a couple of meetings for Soil & Health to get to out of town (Auckland and Nelson).

But it’s a challenge, isn’t it? That human contact with other people we’re working with is essential for us to make a difference. We figure that the best thing we can do is to limit our travel as much as possible, and not just jump on the first jet going to the tropics. And in Christchurch, we mostly use the busses.

We are also learning about video conferencing, and last week we attended the first meeting in about two years of our colleagues at Auckland Uni, AUT, Massey and Victoria by vid conference. Video conferencing is not that flash at the moment, especially for a group of people who don’t know each other that well. But it certainly serves a purpose. We found that just by walking to a conferencing suite in the Psych building and sitting there for an hour chatting, that we’d really made some important links that in the past would have required tonnes of carbon to make.

Still, sometimes you just really want to offer people a cup of tea and a slice of Hermann cake, and you can’t do that on a vid conference. As well as ensuring we have good links with our Australasian colleagues, we put most of our community building energies into our campus community. And we’ve been really lucky because one of our earthquake refugee housemates at Sustainability House has been busily promoting Hermann friendship cake.

This cake is amazing. I mean, it’s really, really good, and I’m pretty sure it must be really good for you as well. And probably really slimming. Hermann cake is a bug, like sourdough, but you use it to make cakes. It’s been amazing to have cake to offer people after our weekly gardening group get togethers while we’re swapping odd Mexican herbs to flavour our beans, and whatever else people have brought from their gardens for swapping that week. Thanks Philippa, we really appreciate it!

Come along and visit us… there’ll probably be cake!