Hi, it’s me. The person who responded to the president elect of the United States of America with a tweet about the importance of climate change. He hadn’t asked my opinion. He had just accidentally responded to a tweet that accidentally mentioned me so I accidentally ended up being thrown into the limelight for a short while. My response though was deliberate. Given an opportunity to speak...
It’s January 17th again tomorrow… 3 years since that Tweet. I toyed with big ideas, I toyed with letting it go, but here I am, late evening 16th, putting together some thoughts. As we are discovering, accidental tweets are the very least of President Trump’s questionable activities but, for me, this still represents the day I decided to take the power accidentally given to me and use it as...
Hello, my name is Ivanka Majic and 2 years ago on the 17th of January Donald Trump accidentally tweeted me. I replied: And you’re a man with great responsibilities. May I suggest more care on Twitter and more time learning about #climatechange. I had lots of retweets and made it onto TV, Radio, and the newspapers. It was all very exciting. Two years on and the UN has issued a...
A year ago today President-elect Trump tweeted me – by accident. I replied highlighting climate change. The story got international coverage. I had a choice: sit quietly and wait for it to go away, or take the platform offered to me and add my own voice. While I am a person who is vocal and I have opinions, I have never sought any limelight. I was going to ignore it. The original tweet...
One morning on my train journey to work I read this article by Alex Steffen (thanks @argonaut for the link) I began drafting this post the week before the UK General Election. We are now embracing our new Tory Light government. UK current political hot topic is cuts. Turns out that we aren’t that powerful when it comes to volcanic ash and oil leaks. From Alex’s post: The future that...
My TV doesn’t have an off switch. The stereo doesn’t have a proper off switch either. In the war against standby this seems to be rather a big obstacle. Each of these devices has a big button which implies that it should be ‘easily turn on and off-able’ (to borrow from the old ad) and yet I hit the big button and am rewarded with a little red light. Turn it off at the wall, I hear you shout. Well...
The Balkan Witch is now happily solar powered by the very friendly and helpful people at ecological hosting. Thank you to Jamie for all his help rescuing my blog. Why solar powered? It dawned on me that I bang on about the environment a lot but had failed to consider how much power was being consumed just keeping my little blog alive. I googled and am happy with the results. Now I can blog from...
My friend Claire has Flickr set illustrating the effect sand dredging is having on the Gower Coast.
We are a funny bunch us humans, the way we just consume without thinking.
As I have said before: reduce, reuse, recycle!
One of my favourite Seth Godin posts is a very old one about the branding of Global Warming.
To summarise: Global sounds nice, Warming also sounds nice.
What if it were called Atmospheric Cancer or Pollution Death?
So, on that note: Reuse, reduce, recycle!
Apparently Apple came last and Lenovo came first (replacing Nokia) on a Green Peace list of companies who are nice to the environment. Apple are quick to state that on a different list they come higher. I say well done Lenovo! Apple, we can all try harder, don’t be all tit for tat, it’s the wrong subject for that. p.s. Lenovo, it would be good if you could change your country selector...
Ivanka Majic works in technology. She was Head of Design for Ubuntu, service managed Digital Marketplace through to beta, was acting director of digital for the Labour Party. She lives and works in Brighton where she works with the council’s digital first team, does a bit of teaching at Sussex University, and works with her husband on projects like restaurantsbrighton.co.uk and the BRAVOs. She has also started a podcast with her friend Michael which you can listen to at grandpodcast.com.