—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Jacquie is a student at Curtin University. She discovered her passion for sustainability in Curtin's inaugural Sustainability Challenge in 2022. Since then, she has helped create a new role at the Curtin Student Guild of Vice President of Sustainability & Welfare and has successfully been the first person to be elected to the role (which starts later this year). She took part in the Carbon Literacy Project that was facilitated at Curtin by the University of Queensland.
She founded and is the current President of the Sustainable Collective at Curtin, a student club at Curtin with the goal of fostering a sustainable community on campus. She is co-lead on an urban ecology project, One Planet Many Worlds, with Dr Boon Lay Ong at Curtin, volunteers with UNAAWA on the environmental committee, and is part of the Youth Advisory Committee with AMP.
She is close to finishing her undergraduate in Property Development & Valuation (B/Com) and will start her Masters of Environment and Climate Emergency next year.
People complain they don't have time, money, or energy to live more sustainably, I think because marketers see the demand so come up with things to sell people to address the demand. Since neither buyer nor seller understand how nature or systems work, the offerings don't help sustainability. Meanwhile, high demand and low supply means high prices, so people associate costing time, money, and energy with sustainability when they should associate it with their gullibility and ignorance. Jacquie didn't complain about costs, but she did say she was too busy. She was even busy working on sustainability. I suggested in our first conversation that cause and effect might be the opposite of what she expected. That is, I suggested that her busy-ness wasn't keeping her from nature but that her disconnect from nature was distorting her values to where she did many low-value things that kept her from what she valued more. I based this prediction on seeing the pattern many times. I think of it mostly in people insisting they buy takeout food (really mostly doof) and coffee to save time because they're so busy, but the ones who switch to sit down for meals and coffee find it gives them more time, not less. In our second conversation, you'll hear many things, including this pattern play out in Jacquie acting on her intrinsic values and seeing where it leads. I recommend connecting more with nature to help restore your values and priorities, which will create more time and energy in your life, allowing you to save money too.
Jacquie emailed me that this podcast is inspiring her. She wrote that she'd "always had a spark of interest in sustainability, but I mostly followed the herd mentality and went about my life not really making a conscious effort & just thinking about ways I could reduce my impacts. In the last couple of years, it’s like jet fuel has been added to that spark and it’s changed the trajectory of my career aspirations, and had a significant impact on my life as a whole. . . It’s comforting to know that there are people all around the world who feel similarly to me, and it’s been inspiring to hear other peoples’ stories. I find this especially helpful on the days where I feel helpless/hopeless or even on low energy days." She asked me for advice, we got to emailing, and I invited her to be a guest, following the lines of other impassioned listeners who contacted me. You wouldn't believe it from her sounding natural and confident in our conversation, but she hadn't been on a podcast before. In our emails, she talked about how busy she was, which I hear from everyone, especially businesspeople, who say: "I'd love to work on sustainability. It's very important to me. I just have to do this one thing first, then I'll get to it." If you've felt that way, you may learn a lot from Jacquie and our experience doing the Spodek Method. Working on a podcast may sound like me talking to guests a lot. There's a lot of solo work, so I can't help but quote her from her first email again, since I appreciate her validating all that solo work: "Again, I’m a hug fan of the show and yourself. You’re an inspiration and a wonderful reminder that individuals don’t have to fix the worlds problems overnight by themselves."