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Watch: First Impressions From the Inaugural SXSW Eco Conference
October 6, 2011 By Schuyler Null
Our director, Geoff Dabelko, provides a brief update from South by Southwest’s (SXSW) first Eco conference, being held in Austin, Texas this week:
Bill Ritter, former governor of Colorado, was impressive in an interview with Bryan Walsh of Time magazine, seamlessly alternating between technical and policy questions about energy security.
Ned Breslin, CEO of Water for People, provided some real talk, challenging the notion that it’s “easy” to provide needy populations with freshwater. It’s not as simple as “$25 saves a life,” he said. Providing long-term, sustainable water and sanitation solutions to people around the world requires a great deal of hard work, particularly on financing and ownership questions.
Finally, Jon Foley of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment presented a five-step response to what he called today’s three main food challenges: providing enough to feed today’s population, tomorrow’s (an estimated nine billion people by 2050), and doing it all in a sustainable fashion. The Institute on the Environment publishes an almost-quarterly magazine, Momentum, whose work we’ve featured before on New Security Beat (here, here, and here), and, incredibly, is available, delivered to your house, for FREE. Highly recommended.
Stay tuned for more updates from SXSW, including the ECSP-supported panel, “Three Great Ideas That Won’t Be On the Rio+20 Agenda.”Topics: conservation, energy, environment, food security, From SXSW Eco, population, SXSW, video, water
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