Cross-oceanic contamination

Posting purely from outrage right now about something I don't think was ever even mentioned to me, even though I worked in the ship building industry for a little while. I never had to design a ballast system (among many other things...) so that must be the reason my experience didn't educate me on this topic.

Anyhow, here's what I found out today that is really important to share: ships carry ballast water for stability, compensation of lost weight by fuel consumption etc... in doing so, ballast tanks carry marine life among which some multiply into pest proportion. They are then carried like the merchandise or whatever the ships take with them, and infest the destinations.

This page from the International Maritime Organisation website (http://www.imo.org/OurWork/Environment/BallastWaterManagement/Pages/Default.aspx) points out that the spread of invasive species is now recognized as one of the greatest threats to the ecological and the economic well being of the planet. Follow the link to the article and it will explain.


Quoting Dominique Bourg, French philosopher recently interviewed by our colleague Ludovic Coutant (http://www.leblogdudd.fr/) "the first duty of a citizen is to be informed", hence sharing information is critical.

My question is why are such things not on mainstream media?? Well ships carry most of the goods we consume, so the stakes are super high!... At what cost do we take all this stuff that come from all over the world?? I hope with this blog to create a good repertoire of issues like this and investigate a bit more of what's being done and can be done about it...

Poland and Copenhagen!!!

More priceless memories were created in the last 2 weeks! Telling the full stories will take too long, and since pictures speak a thousand words I'll gladly let them do so.

Poland trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/105026054672533308619/PolandCruiseAndExpressVisit?authkey=Gv1sRgCNPC7aK4hIOYbQ#

Copenhagen trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/105026054672533308619/CopenhagenAndWhiteSensation?authkey=Gv1sRgCPuyi5zKzKz-qgE#

Big thank you to everyone present, what great experiences these were!! Hopefully the photo comments will answer some questions if you have no idea what it all was about. This Monday morning we were back to uni, with a loooot of work calling but the time is right to take care of it!

***EDIT***: check out this short vid about our Master's Programme!



Online applications start Dec 1st!

Oct 23rd to Nov 5th - Amazing!!

Hey all!! I haven’t posted for a while so I’ll tell the story of the last couple of weeks before I write again about sustainability.

As you may have noticed in the side bar on the right there are ‘labels’; categories of posts to make it easier finding them. The label ‘Day to day Sweden’ may have to be complemented by an ‘Amazing MSLS weeks’ label because it seems to be recurring – which is awesome!!

So! The week end of the 23^rd and 24^th was rather busy with group work on a ‘tools and concepts’ assignment – basically analysing things like ‘the Millennium Development Goals’, ‘the Happy Planet Index’, Local Agenda 21 etc... we then had presentations from Monday to Wednesday. We also had a final exam Friday 29^th to study for; busy week!

During that time we were faced with a major threat: the potential departure of our good Israeli friend Sar Gross on Tuesday 26^th. Sar is not in the MSLS program but came with his girlfriend Tamar who is (pretty sweet move in my books). Being unemployed and in an uncertain situation here he nearly went back to Israel. Luckily he decided to postpone his departure for the moment and hopefully we can make him stay till next June so we still have the guy around to learn from and enjoy his enthusiasm and wit!!

Friday 29^th evening then, we were all well ready to 'PAR-TAY' (Pearlman 2010): celebrate the completion of Period 1 of the MSLS program! Our teacher Dr. Broman had organised a salsa night at the town’s concert hall with a band of Cuban Friends - I’m lacking words here; he and his wife had probably made friends with them some years back and they’ve been coming to Sweden for various shows I presume: what a pleasure it was to put our salsa skills to the test!!!

Main people ready to go :P

The setting

Mrs & Dr. Broman

Saturday some of us did a workout on Lango, one of the islands Karlskrona spreads onto. Saturday night: Halloween party. Another great gathering, I was so tired though I felt I was talking rubbish the whole time... even to Jane, a MSLS 09 graduate, who is the one who gave MSLS info to Murdoch University – where I went looking for sustainability masters advice!! Although being somewhat socially inept it was amazing to meet her. Here’s a photo of the group on the night:

Sunday!: Lunch at Kim’s (the one who made those beautiful photos of Karlskrona – link in the ‘Karlskrona Part 1’ post). Really good to see him better about 1 week after a bicycle accident that could have been nasty. He’s a hard nut! His brother was here and told us about democracy engineering which he teaches at universities in Strasburg and Freiburg – really interesting. I haven’t made time to look into it deeper yet, will post links here later.

Sunday evening: Good flavour Latino party. Carolina (one of our tango maestros) made me dance with her in front of everyone haha!! Apparently it was good but my repertoire is still quite limited... Ricardo took her for a demo after.

That brings us to Monday this week - day off (thank God). Still busy though! Meeting about a conference for which we want to write a paper, hang out with Maja who was keeping Alicia's dog for the week-end. Good fun chasing rabbits in the park!!
Tuesday we had introduction to 2 new courses (units) part of Period 2: Advanced Societal Leadership (ASL - elective) and Strategic Management for Sustainability (STM). Tuesday evening: indoor rock climbing with the usual crew, followed by a surprise party for Sar's prolonged stay, held at Gustavo's place (Brazilian colleague), organised by Tamar and Maja. Great success!!
Intro to Engineering for a Sustainable Society (ESS – elective) on Wednesday, I won’t do this one because it’ll be stuff I can pick up later, but there will be some interesting lectures to attend.

As part of the STM unit we have a big project to do with a real organisation, for us to find! I had been in touch with Austal, my employer till June this year. We had to finalise groups and partner organisations by Friday this week, and till Tuesday I still didn’t have an official reply. So I joined another group that was actively speaking to many companies. It turns out that the next day Austal agreed to collaborate with us... cool, but we’re in good progress with a German company (ampleman) and a shipyard here in Karlskrona – let’s see what happens.

Thursday was my 25th Birthday! Busy day at uni starting with Goran Carstedt in the morning, (former CEO of Ikea and Volvo, who spoke to us about organisational learning), followed by a group meeting, then an hour at a talk/Q&A with the US ambassador in Sweden, mostly concerning sustainability and Swedish-American relations, then we had a Webinar with Bob Willard, a leading expert on the business value of corporate sustainability strategies (Bio here:  http://www.bth.se/ste/tmslm.nsf/pages/a5bbf5cbc998e921c1256de3003aac43!OpenDocument). 

What a day! Dancing class at 6:15pm, pizza for dinner with those that were there, then we had drinks at Dana, Danielle, Phil, Chris and Jame’s house – super cool offer from Danielle to gather there! Next: Karaoke at the Fox & Anchor!! Great times, definitely one of my best birthdays and huge thanks to everyone for the wishes and being there!!! Some photos here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/105026054672533308619/25thBirthday?authkey=Gv1sRgCPqct8DV8r6g0AE#

This morning we had a meeting with the Environmental Manager of the shipyard in Karlskrona, we discussed the project and presented the framework that we would use to assess the company’s performance from a full sustainability perspective, establish a vision of success towards sustainability, and how we would proceed to elaborate a plan to reach this goal.

It was fantastic to hear that they do take it seriously since there is more and more pressure, whether from customers, legislation etc... to perform business within the environmental and social constraints of sustainability. ‘Constraints’ in a sense that the rules of the game are changing, thereby making great business opportunities in terms of savings, innovation, competitive edge with respect to new market demands, not mentioning compliance to new legislation and other aspects. A really exciting opportunity for us and a first glimpse of the consulting work feeling – SUPA!! So we got the partnership if they’re happy with security checks on us. Great work Isa, Reed and Ricardo!!

That's it in short for this post! Hope you’re as stoked about the content as I am!! This week end will be quiet, lot of reading to do, then I’m going to Poland by ferry from Sunday evening, returning Tuesday morning.

Aloha!

Xav