Join a Low-Carbon Wayfinding Conversation

Come share carbon concerns & carbon-lowering skills at a 90-minute virtual gathering.

Sign up to receive updates: Low-Carbon Wayfinding Substack

Book a Wayfinding Office Hour

Come to a one-hour virtual guided reflection.

Consider how to disrupt everyday carbon norms.

Office Hours can be adapted for larger groups. Contact me HERE.

Low-Carbon WayFINDING:

**To accommodate participants in different time zones, sessions are offered at two different times.

** The 2025 schedule has changed slightly.

April 16 - Session #1 Time: 08:00 AM Eastern Time (New York)

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09:00 (Rio de Janeiro) / 09:30 (St. John’s, Nfld) / 13:00 (London UK & Tunis) / 14:00 (Paris & Stockholm & Cairo) / 15:00 (Kyiv) / 19:00 (Jakarta) / 20:00 (Shanghai) / 21:00 (Seoul)

April 16 - Session #2 Time: 20:30 PM Eastern Time (New York)

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14:30 (Honolulu) / 17:30 (Vancouver & San Francisco) / 18:30 (Calgary & Guadalajara) / 19:30 (Lima & Montevideo) / 21:30 (São Paulo & Buenos Aires & Montevideo) / Following day (January 23): 07:30 (Jakarta) / 08:30 (Manila & Shanghai) / 9:30 (Tokyo) / 10:30 (Brisbane) / 12:30 (Rotorua, NZ) / 13:30 (Apia, Samoa)

2025 Session Descriptions

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

• Sessions #1 & #2 — Inspirational Share & Tell — These conversations share creative ideas — projects that have transformed communities, books/films/podcasts that have sustained our hope and sparked action, and people who motivate us to work toward carbon-lowering practices. Bring something to share with us!

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?

August–December 2025 dates to come… Stay tuned!

PREVIOUS WAYFINDING SESSIONS (2024)

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

• Session #1 — "Let’s NOT talk about carbon” with Pok Man Tong and Kate Elliott

Pok Man Tong (Low-Carbon Conversation co-host) and Kate Elliott facilitated a continuation of this conversation, which started in November 2024. We offered creative ideas to invite carbon fatigued family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours into collaborative activities that inspire wonder and help shift to lower-carbon thinking. Pok Man Tong guided a compelling discussion of the carbon tensions in traditional holiday rituals.

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

Guest speaker Kara Stone shared 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 introduced the inspiration and process for building the server and design tactics for the creation of its first game, Known Mysteries, the first chapter of which participants were invited to discover. together.

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.

• 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.

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

UP NEXT YEAR — 2026 Special Sessions:

Recipes for art-ful action (Care-ful Convening Collective)

February, March, April, May 2026 (Dates & times TBD — We’ll announce these in Dec 2025)

Join us in 2026 for four (4) special gatherings that re-convene scholars, artists, and activists whose ongoing collaborative projects engage local communities in pro-environmental action, increasing food justice, eco-justice, cultural empowerment. You can meet these folks and their projects in November 2025 at two special hybrid events co-hosted by York University. Contact me for info and registration.

Come ignite your imagination and take away a recipe to adapt with your own community!