Join a Low-Carbon Conversation

Share your carbon concerns and carbon-lowering skills in a monthly virtual gathering space.

Each 90-minute session begins with 30 minutes of meet-up and discussion time, followed by 30–45 minutes of low-carbon doing/making & learning.

Find the schedule below and SIGN UP HERE to receive updates..

Low-Carbon Conversations:

**To accommodate participants in different time zones, all conversations are offered twice. The doing/making content of sessions may vary depending on the availability of presenters/skill-sharers.

If you have a skill to share or a making/doing idea you’d like to see in a particular calendar slot, please reach out.

** The 2025 schedule is changing slightly. — We’ll meet up every 2nd month (January, March, May, July, September & November 2025). Both sessions (#1 and #2) will still run at their regular times.

January 22 - Session #1 Time: 08:00 AM Eastern Time (New York)

SESSION #1 LINK TO JOIN (ID 823 9479 3588 Pwd: 367025)

09:30 (St. John’s, Nfld) / 10:00 (Rio de Janeiro) / 13:00 (London UK) / 14:00 (Tunis & Paris & Stockholm & Zagreb) / 15:00 (Cairo & Kyiv) / 20:00 (Jakarta) / 21:00 (Shanghai) / 22:00 (Seoul)

January 22 - Session #2 Time: 20:30 PM Eastern Time (New York)

SESSION #2 LINK TO JOIN (ID 897 2194 1452 Pwd: 509883)

15:30 (Honolulu) / 17:30 (Vancouver & San Francisco) / Following day (November 20): 08:30 (Jakarta) / 09:30 (Manila) / 10:30 (Tokyo) / 11:30 (Brisbane) / 14:30 (Rotorua, NZ & Apia, Samoa)

2025 Session Descriptions

January 22 (January 23 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Session #1 — "Let’s NOT talk about carbon"

  Pok Man Tong (Low-Carbon Conversation co-host) and Kate Elliott will facilitate a continuation of this conversation, which started in November 2024. We’ll offer creative ideas to invite carbon fatigued family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours into collaborative activities that inspire wonder and help shift to lower-carbon thinking. — All of this without ever talking about ‘carbon.’ Come bring your suggestions and take away inspiration!

• Session #2 — “Solar Server: Low-Carbon Game Design”

  Guest speaker Kara Stone will share the creation of Solar Server, a solar-powered web server running from her apartment balcony that hosts a series of videogames designed to be low-carbon. Kara’s presentation will cover the inspiration and process for building the server and design tactics for the creation of its first game, Known Mysteries.

  **Check out Solar Server’s Carbon Report HERE

March 18 (March 19 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Session #1 — “Repair, Re-use, Re-purpose Skills-Share” — How and what we might offer a longer — and even more beautiful — life? This session invites folks to share the ways you offer second lives to the “things” in your life — from the ubiquitous to the beloved.

• Session #2 — Low-Carbon CVs: Part 2 — Join us for a workshop that offers unique ways for us to share our low-carbon identities through resumés and CVs.

May 15 (May 16 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Session #1 — “Dark Skies for Brighter Futures” with guests who work to create safer environments for winged creatures, some of which are vital pollinators for our food system. This session shares ways we can reduce harmful impacts of light at night. (Hint, hint: these are often solutions that lower carbon, too!)

• Session #2 — Conversation: “A few light challenges for food security in darker times” — This conversation invites people to think about all the ways that nocturnal light (and the carbon emissions involved in its production) affects the food needed for our own carbon-based bodies. Bring your ideas, conundrums, questions, and experiences! (We’d also love to hear about ways your organizations, workplaces, institutions are fostering food security and low-carbon food practices.)

July 16 (July 17 for some Session #2 attendees)

• “Of greener houses and greenhouses” — These conversations offer opportunities for participants to share and learn about greener modes of living in our homes and lower-carbon choices we can make—even if we don’t own the spaces in which we live. For those of us who grow food—what does that growing look like? Where are the “invisible” greenhouses in our communities, and how might we strengthen, support and participate in local food systems?

PREVIOUS SESSIONS (2024)

November 19 (November 20 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Session #1 — "Hosting meaningful online conversations" with guest speaker Aksel Biørn-Hansen.

  Hosting meaningful conversations online can be hard, but not impossible. Art of Hosting (AoH) is an approach that offers a diverse toolbox of methods that can be used to host meaningful conversations and support co-creation, both physically and online. In this session, Aksel presented several concrete examples of online meetings where he and his research group have used AoH to host generative conversations about topics such as academic flying and sustainability education. This talk offered a very practical approach but also provided some theory framing, taking low-carbon conversation participants through the breadth and design of these sessions with a focus on process.

  Keep an eye on the schedule for 2025: there’s interest in having a Part II where participants bring an idea to collaboratively workshop with Aksel and fellow participants.

• Session #2 — ”Let’s NOT talk about carbon”

  We discussed creative ways to talk to climate fatigued family, friends, colleagues and neighbours about lowering carbon without actually talking about carbon. Can we find our way to lower carbon through wonder and through participating in shared activities? Participants said yes.

  Join us in Session #1 on January 22 for a continuation of this conversation.

August 15 (August 16 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Session #1 — “The FLIGHT project: attempts and struggles at unsettling the status quo of academic flying at a Swedish University” with Aksel Biørn-Hansen

  In this session, Aksel shared ongoing efforts to encourage university staff to engage with their own flying data, and to collectively reflect on how this data connects to inequities and carbon-emissions at the university.

• Session #2 — “Virtually There: Stories of best practices and next practices to ensure access, inclusion and enjoyment at virtual and hybrid conferences” with Kate Elliott

  This session compared cases of conferences where options to participate virtually have enabled attendance by people who otherwise would not have been able to participate. Come and share your own experiences and wicked drawstrings! This session connects nicely to our November session about meaningful hosting online.

July 17 (July 18 for some Session #2 attendees) Click HERE for Summary and HERE for video

• “Low Carbon Consumer Electronics” with Brian Sutherland

  In this session we looked at design-market logics which favour repeated consumption vs low carbon, degrowth strategies for repair, upcycling, and energy harvesting, some summer-friendly speculative designs to incline your electronic use towards zero carbon.

• Click HERE for more details, about 17 July, and for a summary of the June 12 Conversations.

June 12 (June 13 for some Session #2 attendees) Click HERE for a Summary

• Workshop — “Bureaucracy-Busting for Carbon (and Frustration) Reduction” — To examine where bureaucracy, human frustration, and carbon emissions intersect, we workshopped real-life scenarios and discussed strategies to lower carbon through shifting ludicrous bureaucratic processes. (Spoiler alert: humour is an important part of our toolkit!)

  During recent conversations, Wayfinding workshops and Low-Carbon Office Hours, many of you identified policies that “waste” your time and resources. Your examples clearly indicate that: where frustration lurks, carbon might be lurking, too.

• Read some of the scenarios submitted for discussion — What do you think: can we shift policies to reduce both human frustration and carbon emissions?

May 14 (May 15 for some Session #2 attendees) ==> See this page for Session Notes

“Ditching Datacenters, Building Community, and Reclaiming Our Online Lives”

Session #1 - Guest Speaker: Quentin Dufour (of Deuxfleurs.fr — See also: Garage)

Session #2 - Guest Speaker: Forest Johnson (of cyberia.club)

**If you’d like to connect with the speakers to receive more information, contact Quentin HERE and Forest and Sam HERE.

April 18 (April 19 for some Session #2 attendees) ==> See this page for Session Notes

• Session #1 - Post-doctoral Researcher Ashley Cahillane joins us to share:: Decarbonising Research Policy: Reflections on a Series of Events

• Session #2 - Considerations for Creating a Low-Carbon CV and using it to disseminate ideas around low-carbon possibilities within academia and beyond

March 13 (March 14 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Making/Doing & Skillshare — In Session #1, we discussed what a low-carbon CV might be and do. In Session #2, we learned about small scale distributed networks of community-hosted servers, and discussed how this type of system might be implemented within the communities where we work and live. This is a discussion to be continued at a future Low-Carbon Conversation. Stay tuned!

February 15 (Feb 16 for some Session #2 attendees)

• Making/Doing & Skillshare — We discussed carbon concerns in our own work and lives, shared low-carbon wishes for our institutions and beyond, and suggested creative initiatives to encourage specific carbon-lowering shifts in our communities. We proposed collaborative possibilities for this space