Join our November webinar with Dr Ella Susanne Lawton.

Ella was the primary researcher for the New Zealand Footprint Project in 2013. The project looked at how different lifestyles and urban forms consumed differently and the types of changes needed to live within each person’s fair earth share. The project team was also interested in understanding the role that policy could play in the development of urban forms that support individuals and communities to reduce their individual and collective footprint.

Ultimately the answer is to live and consume locally. Hyper-localism can reduce the average ecological footprint by more than half. Living locally means relying on the available biocapacity of your catchment, and the infrastructure available to support it. Lifestyles, particularly of the wealthy, would be drastically different. We will explore these opportunities using the scenarios developed through the NZ Footprint  Project research.

Ella is a generalist specialist with a passion for connecting people to their natural environment. She believes that science is failing to give people an honest insight into the resource constrained future we are headed for. She was the South Island Project Manager for Otago Polytechnic’s Centre for Sustainable Practice, and has taught sustainable practice at both Otago Polytechnic and University of Otago. In 2013 Ella was elected to the Queenstown Lakes District Council and later the Otago Regional Council.

In 2019 Ella moved her tiny house to Invercargill where she and her partner Nathan have embarked on the journey to build an off-grid home. Her next challenge is to contribute to local food system resilience by becoming a small-scale producer of healthy happy food.

Zoom meeting link

Meeting ID: 818 7730 8450 | Passcode: 559903