THE first real definition of sustainability was given by the Brundtland report Our Common Future in 1987: ‘‘Sustainable development meets the needs of the present generations without compromising the needs of future generations’’. In my view, the best way to interpret this is to picture three nested circles: the sustainable economy is the small central circle, sitting in the sustainable society circle, which itself sits in the sustainable biophysical environment circle.
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This preamble is to set the scene for a good news story from a group of inventors near Byron Bay, who have recently come to my notice through the hugely successful crowdfunding of their efforts to commercialise their invention of a totally new beehive, the Flow Hive.
Their revolutionary new hive has at last, after some 140years, offered the backyard beekeeper a simple way to harvest honey from the hive. But these are also persons with a real social conscience and practitioners working towards a sustainable society.
After Cyclone Pam devastated our near neighbour Vanuatu, the Flow Hive people through Oxfam Australia set up a raffle of one of their hives and raised $121,179 to help people in Vanuatu rebuild their homes and lives. This amount was the largest single donation that Oxfam Australia received for their Vanuatu Appeal, and it made a real difference in the lives of real people, through helping provide food, clean water, clothing, medicine and shelter to some of the thousands of individuals displaced by the storm.
More recently, this same group has raffled another of their revolutionary beehives on the web. This time it was to assist in Oxfam’s efforts in Nepal, which was in a state of crisis following the earthquake on April 25 that devastated Kathmandu. In one week they raised $166,640.
For me the take-home messages are that individuals can make a difference for their immediate and worldwide societies in which we all live, and that the connectedness of the world through the web/cloud allows making a difference possible with an immediacy never before seen and with a magnitude never before seen. Stuart, Cedar and the Flow team have shown us an exemplar of a sustainable society.
Oxfam Australia’s Nepal Earthquake appeal link: oxfam.org.au/my/donate/earthquake-devastates-nepal.
Professor Tim Roberts is director of the University of Newcastle’s Tom Farrell Institute for the Environment
