In a world where it is routine for international conferences on the crisis of climate change to be held in fossil fuel producing countries or to be chaired by oil barons, one small step for humankind has been made by the 2024 SIETAR conference.
SIETAR, the Society of Intercultural Training, Education and Research, is holding its conference in Lille – part of an immense conurbation on the border of France and Belgium, and one of the most accessible places in the world.
This year’s conference includes an eight-member team working out a plan to make the gathering as sustainable and CO2-free as possible. From Ghana, Romania, Poland, Germany, Malaysia, England and Ireland, most of the greening group are business owners, and two are students. *
The group is headed by Joe Kearns of intercultural business Carmine Training, who, up to recently was a member of the SIETAR Board. At the peak of a corporate career, Joe abandoned the empty calories of commerce for a fulfilling life in intercultural training. Now he is harnessing his unique talents to fight for our beleaguered planet. “Lille is a very sustainably focused city, which is an important aspect of this,” he says. “We picked this city because it has wonderful access from all sorts of places. For instance, it’s actually an hour and a half by train from London. We deliberately picked a venue that would allow people to travel sustainably.
“I proposed to the Board that we set up a team that would specifically look at how we can reduce the carbon footprint.” The group has three core objectives:
- to make the Congress as sustainable as possible,
- to increase awareness of the challenge of climate change,
- to make people aware of the role of interculturalists in climate change.
“And we also want to create a legacy for future learning. Because this is a long-term project. We’d like to leave something for the next Congress, so somebody can pick it up and say, right, we need to do this, this, and this.
“For the Congress itself, we’re dividing it into two areas. One is getting to and from the Congress and travel within Lille, and the other is the time at the Congress bit.
“We’re hoping to persuade people to travel sustainably when they can – which requires evangelizing, or persuasion, or even propaganda, because a lot of people will default to say ‘I know I have to fly’. And sometimes some people will have to fly because they don’t have a choice – they’re time constrained or it’s simply too far for them. But there’s a marginal group that we can push and persuade. For example, somebody said, ‘I live in Madrid, that’s a whole day’s travel to get there’. But if you don’t fly, there’s a huge difference in carbon footprint for a train journey: it’s about 10 times as much if you fly. The train is very, very efficient – and the journey can be much more fun than a hassle-filled flight.”
Joe’s view of the world was shaped by interculturalism. He graduated as an engineer from University College Dublin in 1981, spent a year working at the university as a machine designer, then six months studying in Lyon, France. After Lyon, he volunteered in Ethiopia for two years with the Concern organisation, on an irrigation project bringing water to an arid area north of Dire Dawa to Somali people of the Issa clan. But while he was on this project, the terrible Ethiopian famine of the 1980s broke out and he was transferred to the urgent need of the feeding stations.
Africa revolutionised the young engineer’s view of the world. He had been, for two years, in a place where community was the absolute centre of the world, and every value related to the kindness of that community. He was a changed man.
“If I could do one thing, I would make people wake up to the fact that we are absorbing US-centric values without noticing. Culture is fluid, it moves and changes. The root of the problem of climate change, the damage we’re doing, is a selfishness, and the pursuit of profit without any care for the future. We have to change that.
“A lot of countries, and indeed Ireland, still have that underlying strong sense of community. But we’re being poisoned, increasingly poisoned. We used to have television and film to influence us. Now we have the internet, we have social media, a flood of things that kids are absorbed in – TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and more.”
When Joe came home from Ethiopia in 1985, Ireland had unemployment of 17%. “My passion still was for irrigation, and I would love to have gone back, but I really felt I needed to settle. I came home with a total wealth of £200. I didn’t even own the clothes that I was wearing.”
He needed a stable career, and the tech industry was just getting under way in Ireland at that time. “I converted as an engineer, did some training courses, and spent most of my career in the tech industry.”
It was a very successful career. Joe joined the German computer company Nixdorf in 1985 and worked as a computer programmer and project manager in Paderborn, Germany. Four years later he moved to the American software company Ashton-Tate and soon became MIS Manager (leading a team managing the company’s and its customers’ data and information) at its manufacturing facility. When it was taken over by software giant Borland, Joe became the European systems integrator for Borland’s new European IT centre in Dublin, working with Borland offices in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
In 1995 he set up as a consultant and worked with a prestigious law firm in Ireland to design its systems, then was headhunted by the new Hewlett Packard manufacturing team in Dublin, where he rose to director level in the company and lived and travelled in the USA, the Caribbean, Asia and Europe.
In this tech world, Joe became fascinated by corporate culture, and how rigidly different it could be from one great organisation to another. “I was involved in a number of corporate mergers when I was in the business field, and I was fascinated by the clash of corporate cultures I worked in. One was two very different companies coming together in the Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq merger. You could describe Compaq as a military-style organization – orders came from the top. You did what you were told, very little discussion. HP was more of a community of semi-autonomous entities tied together with a very strong corporate culture. Every part of the business invented itself, and that was its strength. So, the people who came from Compaq into HP found it difficult to handle the freedom.”
Once you start noticing intercultural communication, you can’t stop… “I wasn’t even aware of the intercultural field. I didn’t know such a thing existed. But when I heard about it, I thought, oh, that’s what we did in business! I dredged back through my experience working and living in many different countries and found that intercultural concepts and ideas were at the core.”
He began to look at cultural differences around some of the most basic parts of life. How communities deal with death, for instance; at a family funeral in the UK, the English in-laws were shocked when the small niece and nephew who had come over from Ireland were brought to their uncle’s funeral – but that’s the norm in Ireland, children always go to funerals.
Joe has done a number of workshops and presentations on the role of culture in the challenges of climate change and environmental destruction. In these workshops Joe has suggested that we are in such difficulties with climate because of certain cultural values that we’ve accepted. “And I’d be very blunt and say that they’re the cultural values which have come out of the United States. These are individualism, the pursuit of money, industrialization, a failure to understand the role of community and basically a selfishness. So to stop climate change and environment destruction – and I realize when I say this, that I am probably wasting my time – we need to switch to a more community-focused, less selfish world.”
While the SIETAR Congress in Lille is a small matter in the grand scheme of things, all any of us can do is to influence the areas where we impact the environment. Our small team hopes to make a difference and help our community with important and critical climate change and environmental footprint issues. If you are interested in learning more about the team’s work, you can get in touch with it via their website and sign up to their mailing list to stay updated on the latest news, which can be particularly useful if you are planning to travel to the SIETAR Europa Congress in June.
The team members working on the SIETAR Europa 2024 Congress Sustainability initiative:
- Joe Kearns – Director at Carmine Training
- Christine Fröhling – R&D Manager at Lohmann GmbH & Co. KG
- Joanna Reiter – International relations at SustainableStartup&Co
- Annette Jall – Intercultural Training & Consulting at Tourist Guide & Tourism Consulting, Halloguide.com
- Pei Pei Vong – Senior Lecturer, Internationalisation Coordinator at NHL Stenden, Leeuwarden, Friesland, Netherlands
- Kay Watson – Founder & Coach at Ameliore Coaching
- Asanatu Nuhu Mohammed – student, MSc International Business Management, London South Bank University
- Albertina Terciu – Student, BA Intercultural Management, FACHHOCHSCHULE KÄRNTEN – Carinthia University of Applied Sciences
Author: Lucille Redmond
Image Source: Pexels, Alena Koval