The weather has finally started to cool down here in southwest France after a phenomenally hot summer, breaking records and causing me to hide indoors with our newborn baby for the past months. A hotter planet will certainly invoke difficulties for humanity the world around, particularly to those already living in hot climates and especially for women, children, the elderly and disabled.
As we look ahead to the next year, it feels as though there is a compelling need for increasing discourse around regenerative futures, and we are committed to contributing our research and storytelling to help drive positive change.
With school back in full swing, the soccer (football) season kicked off, and our baby finding her groove at home, Remy and I have been both working our jobs (Remy in data analytics and I’m currently working with my creative partners on both a new virtual reality experience and a 2D documentary project) and actively looking for that 'special sailboat who will soon join our family for the Floating Stories Lab expedition. To bring folks along for the ride every step of the way, we have created a Substack community, where we share the ‘best of’ our website content (free subscribers) along with Floating Stories Lab progress newsletters and ‘Real Talk’ videos (paid subscribers).
A steel schooner rig sailboat that has caught our interest.
In a recent Substack post and newsletter, we shared all the specs of a steel sailboat (check out the sneak peek picture with this blog post) we are currently interested in and I made a ‘Real Talk’ video (paid subscribers) sharing more about our interest in this boat - these updates are delivered right to your inbox so you don’t miss a thing. There is also a chat section on Substack where we can communicate with our community more directly, and a podcast functionality that we are considering in the future.
Over at our YouTube channel, we posted a real-time update video last week, as we are now ever-so-close to completing the uploads from our Crossing Asia expedition five years ago and have some exciting ‘catch up’ videos in the works before we transition completely to documenting the Floating Stories Lab project from the ground up!
Finally, I wanted to share an article that caught our attention a couple of weeks ago, The Huge Threat Fibreglass Poses to Healthy Sea Life, talking about an issue very close to our hearts and shaping some of the research that we will be participating in on the Floating Stories Lab: WASTE. Whilst there are some great steps forward in the boat building industry (Yachting World recently covered some of these innovations), and increasing attention surrounds surfing brands like Patagonia who are turning to better solutions for harmful products such as wetsuits (check out The Big Sea film), we find there is still minimal dialogue surrounding the dilemma of what to do with all the waste as we transition towards better, more sustainable and regenerative materials?
Come join us at Substack where we have opened the marine waste discussion on our chat thread to ALL subscribers (paid and free). We want to hear your thoughts.
