TEDxSydney talks

A short while ago, there was a TED talk spinoff event in Sydney. TED talks feature people with big ideas about the world, and the demand for their events has grown so much that it’s impossible for them to include all the speakers they’d like, or to cater to all the people who’d love to go to one of the conferences. So they’ve been having extra events in other cities so people can organise their own.

The TEDxSydney conference seemed pretty popular from what I could tell on Twitter. It took a little while for videos of the talks to be put up online, but you can see them all now if you search for ‘TEDxSydney’ on YouTube. There were 3 talks in particular I think would be of interest to anyone with environmental concerns.

The first is by Murdoch University’s Professor of Sustainability, Glenn Albrecht. His talk was called “Environment Change, Distress & Human Emotion: Solastalgia”. I found his talk really interesting and thought-provoking. The blurb on the site says “He is a transdisciplinary philosopher with a focus on the intersection of ecosystem and human health. His concepts of ‘solastalgia’ and ‘solaphilia’ are now widely applied in academic contexts and have also inspired creativity in art, literature and music.”

The other two talks I thought you might be interested in are Rachael Botsman’s Collaborative Consumption talk, about how sharing is the 21st century answer to overconsumption and waste; and Nigel Marsh’s Work/Life Balance is an ongoing battle talk, which has a pretty self-explanatory title!