Vanessa Morris
Vanessa Morris
Growing up in Sydney, mother and former ABC broadcaster Vanessa Morris had an early introduction to solar power. A solar expert lived around the corner and, from childhood, Vanessa felt solar was the future.
Despite her early introduction to renewable energies, it wasn’t until Vanessa was in her 30s that climate change and ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions came to her full attention. “I think I let the busyness of life and adulthood and work and children block my awareness of the reality of climate change, until An Inconvenient Truth came along and shocked me back to the science,” she says.
“When I saw the film I felt like I had been slapped very, very hard. I was devastated that I allowed myself to neglect the subject, that I had allowed myself to be manipulated by the skeptics, by the powers-that-be who funded and maintained the sceptics’ voice, and I held myself together until I got into my car and I cried.”
The film had such a profound impact on Vanessa that she decided to leave her job producing the Morning Show for 666 ABC Canberra to volunteer for climate change work. At around the same time, the Australian Conservation Foundation was looking for people to be volunteer presenters for The Climate Project.
In 2007, Vanessa was personally trained by Al Gore to become a Climate Project presenter and deliver the slideshow known to many as the basis of An Inconvenient Truth. She has given her presentation more than a dozen times and taken up work to help people reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
“I now work for a community sustainability group based in the ACT called SEE-Change,” she says. “It is an opportunity to work with local people to help them reduce the ecological footprint of their suburbs. As Canberra residents consume more of the world's resources than those of any other city in Australia, it seems like a good place to start.
Vanessa and her SEE-Change community group have organised a solar bulk buy initiative which will see 60 households across Canberra install solar panels. Twenty will also install solar hot water systems. The group has also set up a bicycle trailer rental scheme to encourage people to use their cars less. They have bought 10 bicycle cargo trailers and 10 children's trailers to rent out to local residents for three to 12 months.
At the heart of Vanessa’s actions is a desire to get people interested in how they can make a difference to climate change. “I don’t know if my children will even live in Canberra and of course I don’t know what they’re going to do with their lives but I think there are some really exciting possibilities and I’m certainly determined to help spark people’s imaginations on climate change and hopefully my children’s as well,” Vanessa says. “It’s for my children but it’s also for every child and every grandparent and, in a way, it’s not personalised. I think it’s for every forest that’s under threat … it’s so much bigger than that.”