In recent years, many consumers have been moving away from gifting newly made items to ‘experiential’, upcycled, second-hand and eco-friendly gifts. 

Take the example of London lawyer Alex Law, 29, who dubs himself an ‘ethical non-consumer’. 

“I think so much stuff just gets chucked into landfill and I do my best to ethically reuse things already around: buying a picture frame to customise for a friend, for example.” Law adds that consumer ethics and a heating planet are informing what he sees as a generational shift. “My friends and I are keenly aware of the carbon that’s gone into any product we buy as well as the risk of factory exploitation in the manufacture of cheap goods,” he says.

A 2017 report by Goldman Sachs Research, the Millennial Spending Survey, highlighted three consumption trends we are likely to see more of as millennials reach their peak spending years, around the age of 40. Alongside a more pronounced migration to online purchasing, which was super-powered during the pandemic, the report predicts a growing demand for markets for ‘efficient exchange of pre owned products’. Attendant to this growing demand for pre owned items is ultra-low environmental impact, or planet-positive or environmentally friendly gifting.

Buying gifts can almost feel like a formality one needs to fulfill, but there are examples where people are finding alternative paths to navigate this situation. 

Rachel Mills, founder of ecological education charity Buttercup Learning stopped buying Christmas ‘stuff’ for adults in 2019, although she does buy her daughter material goods she needs second-hand. “I now go product-free with gifts for friends, visiting (charity listing site) workforgood.co.uk and picking a charity that matches the recipient’s values, be it concern for animals, deforestation, or homelessness, and making a donation in their name.”

Aimee Higgins, co-founder of grassroots climate action charity Every One Of Us, is also trying to go ‘planet positive’ in her giving following the dramatic picture of the world’s plight reported in the recent CoP 26 climate change conference. “I choose either ‘experience’ gifts that will give the person I’m gifting to a lifetime’s memories or something that supports an organisation that’s doing good. This year I have funded tree planting for one friend and sponsored an elephant in an African sanctuary for my business partner Sonia.”

New York-based Alex Sands, 35, gave up presents last year after being overwhelmed by the number of plastic toys sent to children over a Christmas in lockdown. “I hid some of the presents away because they were given so much” she says, adding that for years she feels that Christmas prompted her to “panic buy” and spend far too much. 

A 2018 study by the University of Lund in Sweden found that a seasonal spike in heart attacks during the Christmas period might be caused by increased emotional stress, including the pressure to excessively give gifts.

Now Sands donates to charity instead and this year is sending chickens to a community in rural Africa through the Send a Cow charity on behalf of her family. A chicken costs US $10, she says and a cockerel costs $7. Sands’ gift recipients can follow the progress of their avian friends on the charity’s site. Sands admits that not giving material presents is something of a relief. “We can just enjoy spending time together as a family,” she says. 

And maybe that’s the best gift of all.

Gift planet-positive this year by buying a Sacred Groves Cluster for friends and family.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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With its lofty pines and vast, glassy lakes, its rare roaming wood bison and endangered whooping cranes, Fort Chipewyan seems like one of the world’s last true wildernesses. Yet even in this remote spot, with its rich natural resources, the effects of the climate crisis are an ever-more pressing daily reality.

This community of 1,000 souls, many of whom are descended from the Chipewyan, Misikew Cree and Métis First Nations tribes, have for decades had their heat and cooking power supplied by a diesel power station owned by Canadian energy group ATCO, which trucks in its heavy black liquid fuel via barge down the northern Alberta’s waterways, or via the ice roads that form across its lakes and tributaries during the freezing autumn and winter months. The trouble with this arrangement, however, was climate change. With Canada’s north warming nearly three times faster than the global average, both the river barge and ice road seasons are becoming increasingly unpredictable.

In 2018, a group of First Nations leaders in Fort Chipewyan decided that enough was enough. In a joint venture of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association, Three Nations Energy (3NE) they decided to bring an ambitious renewable energy project to their remote community.

“We worked together and we made it happen,” Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation said at an event celebrating the completion of the project’s second and final phase.

Replacing 800,000 litres of diesel a year, or 2,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, the Three Nations Energy Solar farm project is Canada’s largest remote off-grid solar farm in Canada, with 5,760 solar panels supplying Fort Chipewyan with 25 percent of its energy needs (in the first phase). The solar farm’s energy will be bought under a long-purchase agreement by ATCO and supplied back to the local grid.

Blue Eyes Simpson, Vice President of the Fort Chipewyan Métis Association and one of the founding directors of First Nations Energy, has lived in Fort Chipewyan all of her life. Simpson is area manager for Parks Canada as well as an advocate for sharing the stories of First Nations elders with younger generations, in a bid to reawaken an imperative for protecting the national environment.

“Our people have a proud tradition of making our livelihood from the sustainable use of local renewable resources,”she says. “We are committed to being good stewards of the land for future generations.”

In a picture in which Canadian native ancestral lands are often denuded and polluted by oil speculation, including neighbouring Fort McKay (where emissions from a controversial oil pipeline project have poisoned plants and fish), Fort Chipewyan is a brighter picture. The Three Nations Energy Solar farm was launched November 17, 2020 with a ceremony at the solar farm in Fort Chipewyan featuring indigenous drummers and prayers as well as tearful thanks from the directors of 3NE.

The group now plans to set up hydroponics food production and support other indigenous green energy initiatives across Canada. This model of use of renewable energy goes to prove, Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says, what can be done if indigenous communities have a 100 percent stake in their natural resources, as well as their future.

“We work with the sun, we work with the wind, we work with mother nature and we work with the water for the children of the future to give them a better life, a cleaner life,” he adds.

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 3NE

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Sixty miles south of Montreal, near the United States-Canada border, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge is one of the most pristine wetland ecosystems in the Candian Northeast. An important wintering area for white-tailed deer, this network of woodland bogs and glassy lakes is a refuge for endangered birds, including swooping great blue heron and the charismatic red-billed wood ducks that are nicknamed ‘acorn ducks’ for their preferred fall food.

So scientists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Geological Survey were surprised when a 2016 study found that the region’s wetlands were also home to an abundance of fish with bizarre abnormalities.
“An astonishing 60 to 100 percent of all the male smallmouth bass we examined had female egg cells growing in their testes,” says the study’s lead author, Luke Iwanowicz. The problem, they knew, was a little white pill.

Invented in the 1950s and introduced to the mass market in the 1960s, the contraceptive pill was revolutionary for humans: freeing women from a physically gruelling cycle of pregnancies as it gave couples control over family size.

For freshwater fish species, the result of this contraceptive revolution has been less rosy. By the early 2000s, it had become clear that the synthetic oestrogens in the pill, excreted by humans, were making their way into water systems and disrupting fish populations’ fragile endocrine balance.

“We identified that some individual fish in fish populations were being affected by a range of compounds going in the environment that can mimic and/or disrupt oestrogen signalling in fish,” says Charles Tyler, Professor of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Biology at the University of Exeter, who has researched the effects of oestrogenic pills on marine life in the UK.

The main offender is ethinylestradiol (EE2), the synthetic oestrogen found in contraceptives. Designed to be resistant to degradation and inactivation, EE2 is more stable in the human body than naturally occurring oestrogen. When excreted into our water supplies by humans, however, EE2 can make its way into aquatic habitats, causing an intersex condition in which male fish display female traits like carrying eggs in their testes; rendering the population infertile. The effects, studies including the Missisquoi study have found, is transgenerational, disrupting the reproductive capacity of fish populations for many life cycles.

What was needed was a solution that preserved the social benefits of pharmaceutical contraception as it enabled marine species to thrive. Mithra, a Belgian biotech company that specialises in novel reproductive pharmacology, came up with one answer: Estelle, a contraceptive pill based on natural oestrogen, estetrol (E4), a unique human hormone produced by the fetal liver early during pregnancy. It forms the basis of their new Estelle contraceptive pill.

Dr. Graham Dixon, Chief Scientific Officer of Mithra Women’s Health, argued in a statement heralding the launch of the new pill that it would be a ‘game-changer’: “E4 is significantly more environmentally friendly compared to alternatives currently on the market, does not accumulate in living organisms and dissipates rapidly from water and sediment.”

Mithra’s own research has found that E4 incurred no adverse effects on aquatic egg production, testicular growth or fish reproduction and that only 2.5 percent of released E4 was biologically active.

Any beneficial effects on aquatic populations will, of course, require broader uptake of the new drug, however in May 2021, the European Commission announced that the pill had been approved, and it will be commercially launched during the second half of the year in Germany, Poland and Austria. A rollout is already commencing in the US from the end of June.

Looking ahead, Tyler says, there are reasons to be hopeful about the prospects for freshwater fish: “There’s a move towards more eco-pharmaco vigilance,” he says. “Looking for drugs which are less harmful to the environment.” He adds that the world has a ‘moral and social responsibility’ to make these drugs accessible to everyone.

Author: Sally Howard and George Walker, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Charles Tyler, Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge and Unsplash

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The Covid-19 pandemic showed many global city dwellers a future in which we might all breathe more freely. Across the world, as populations were subject to stay-at-home orders and road transport activity dipped, city-dwellers enjoyed clear skies; and a respite from road traffic produced pollutants such as nitrogen dioxides, carbon monoxides and the dangerous vehicle particulates PM 2.5s: tiny specks of pollution which, once inhaled, lodge in the lungs and can cause a variety of health problems.

Those traffic-borne emissions prompted the World health Organisation, in 2019, to characterise air pollution as the number one environmental health risk globally, the cause of an estimated 7.1 million premature deaths per year.

One solution to cities’ pollution problem is air purifiers and, as populations demand clearer air yet policies to reduce car-borne pollution lag behind, air purifiers are big business. Indeed market size is expected to reach USD 22.80 billion by 2028 and is expected to expand ten percent a year from 2021 to 2028.

The problem with standard electric air purifiers however is similar to air conditioners, in that they can compound the problem in themselves requiring power to run, which, in most global contexts, produces additional carbon pollution. Trees, of course, are excellent natural air purifiers but demands for land in cities make it difficult to plant the number of trees necessary to drastically improve air quality.

One answer to this problem also comes from nature, in one young German horticulturist’s design for an air filter that’s based on air-cleansing abilities of common-or-garden moss.

Green City Solutions was founded in 2014 by 29-year-old Peter Sänger, who brought together a team of experts in fields ranging from horticulture to mechanical engineering to design a novel bio-tech filter, the City Tree. “I felt the solution to air pollution can only emerge in combination with nature,” he says, of concentrating his research efforts on moss. “After all, nature has millions of years of experience in air purification.”

Moss is well adapted to the task of filtering polluted air, possessing the ability to bind fine dust and metabolise it. It can filter soot and particulates from the air breathed by 7,000 people every hour. In addition, mosses cool surrounding air by evaporating water on their leaf surface. The problem is that mosses can barely survive in cities due to their need for water and shade. So Green City Solutions solved this problem by connecting a range of species of mosses (with different filtering abilities) to low-energy water and nutrient provision based on unique Internet of Things technology, which measures the plants’ requirements and surrounding pollution levels in real time.

Independent field studies have shown that up to 82 percent of the fine dust in city air can be filtered directly by the City Trees, which the company has installed in cities across Germany, and in London and Paris. Each moss tower has the carbon dioxide absorbing capability of 275 trees.

Positioning is key; as Sänger notes: “Not all places where people live are polluted, and people aren’t everywhere there is pollution. Where the two meet, that’s where we place the trees.” Sänger would like to see his devices installed in the world’s most vehicle-polluted cities within the next decade.

The company is now developing moss-based air filters that are also suitable for consumers to use in their homes or that function – in an extra boon – as attractive greenery for vertical facades.

Author: James Gavin, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Green City Solutions; Peter Sänger and Peter Puhlmann for Green City Solutions; Nate Bell

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Imagine being inside a house, a smoky hearth at its centre around which the family huddles for warmth with snow falling in flurries outside. This is how people in Lahaul and Spiti, the remote, high altitude region in Himachal Pradesh, India, spend over seven months of their lives every year. Their need for fuelwood, a scarce but highly polluting resource, is undeniable, given that minimum temperatures in winters dip to minus 30 degrees centigrade. Which is what makes the inexpensive renewable energy innovations developed and implemented here by Ecosphere Spiti, a social enterprise with a passion for eco conservation, responsible mountain travel and adventure, so important.

Ecosphere Spiti uses principles of solar passive architecture: south-facing, direct solar gain windows and insulated floors and walls, to trap the sun’s heat in Spitian homes. Over the years, people here have noted that these tweaks ensure that even when it is minus 30 degrees outside, the inside temperature remains around ten degrees without artificial heating. On average, passive solar rooms reduce a household’s fuel wood consumption to half, leading to savings of USD $130-260, depending on family size. They have also developed solar greenhouses — polythene-covered structures on wooden frames with a ventilator and door, in which villagers can grow food even when it is snowing outside. These ensure that villagers have a supply of spinach, coriander, onions and garlic – not just to consume, but also to sell.

Both these solar technologies make a perceptible improvement in the local quality of life, and cost relatively little to implement. Solar passive houses cost about USD $700 to construct, while a greenhouse can be made for about USD $400.

“While Spiti urgently needs better infrastructure, we have also seen how its vulnerable ecology is being adversely affected by its very creation,” Ishita Khanna, co-founder of Ecosphere Spiti, explains. Ecosphere Spiti uses tourism as a funding mechanism: operating local tours, a café, B&B and a successful volunteer tourism programme to subsidize its development programmes. “Some time ago, volunteers helped build an artificial glacier in the village Demul to recharge the groundwater,” says Khanna. “In fact, they’ve built most of our greenhouses as well!”

Now Ecosphere is studying the potential of cost-effective solar water-pumping technologies to aid people in mountain-top villages, who have to walk long distances downhill to collect even drinking water.

While the need for plentiful direct sunlight limits the replicability of Ecosphere Spiti’s innovative solar technologies, they serve as a model for sustainable development projects in ecologically fragile regions. As importantly the project shows that development goals need not be in conflict with the urgent task of protecting the natural environment.

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Spiti valley banner image: Carlos Adampol Galindo/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Geetanjali Krishna, 2. 3. 4. Ecosphere
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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When university friends Wiktor Warchałowski, Aleksander Konior and Michał Misiek were training for a marathon in the Polish city of Krakow in 2016, they were stopped in their tracks by the thick smog produced by large numbers of coal-burning stoves in the city and its surroundings. They had no way to tell when the air was at its dirtiest or where to go to find a cleaner place to exercise, so being technically minded, they set about developing a small but sensitive air sensor.

And not a moment too soon: Poland has some of the worst air in Europe; its dependence on coal-fired power, which accounted for 74 per cent of the country’s electricity last year, is largely to blame. Toxic air has been particularly problematic in Krakow due to the city’s topography: it is situated in a valley where smog tends to pool during the long winter months.

Today, their company Airly sells affordable, hyper-local sensors to city halls and local communities across the globe. These smart sensors track all the key pollution markers, such as particulate matter and levels of nitrogen dioxide and feed this information into an online map. This is accessed through the company’s free app, which has had more than a million downloads. The readings are much more detailed and easily accessible than most cities’ reference stations, the latter rarely providing real-time data. “Tracking and understanding the factors that cause air pollution in a specific location gives communities essential material for successful campaigns for better air,” says Warchałowski. “Locals empowered with this information can cite hard facts in a discussion with local authorities.”

Air pollution has emerged as the fourth-leading risk factor for deaths worldwide, with exposure to polluted air increasing the risk of stroke, dementia, heart disease, lung cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. Airly is just one of several initiatives started by young people in the Polish city, who were tired of living with smog and frustrated with the slow pace of change. Grassroots NGO Krakow Smog Alert, for instance, is now a country-wide network that promotes anti-pollution measures. After much vociferous campaigning from residents armed with Airly’s data, Krakow agreed to ban the burning of coal and wood, is now phasing out its coal and wood-burning boilers and giving grants so residents can install cleaner, cost-efficient heaters.

The company has gone from strength to strength, its sensors helping campaigners to hold their governments to account in 400 cities, including Bucharest, which has some of the dirtiest air in Europe, Berlin, Jakarta, Rome and Oslo; though the project is limited to cities with smartphone saturation. Recently, the company raised USD $2 million from angel investors, including the daughter of Richard Branson, Holly, founder of Big Change Charity.

“Measuring air quality is the first step to pollution-free cities,” says Warchałowski. “People can point out the sources of pollution, plan corrective actions and citizens can plan their outdoor activities.” With Airly’s real-time data in their toolbox, cities everywhere can finally begin cleaning up their acts.

http://airly.org

Author: Sonia Zhuravlyova, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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What can one person do when an entire megapolis begins to lose all of its natural water bodies? Ask Bangalore-based ex-techie Anand Malligavad. In the last three years, he has managed to rope in entire communities to revive five large lakes in India’s Silicon Valley. Now his charity Lake Revivers Collective plans to work on 40 more by 2025. Malligavad has no technical training in lake conservation and rejuvenation: “All I have is a sense of urgency that if we don’t repair the damage we’ve already wrecked,” says the environmentalist, “it’s going to end badly for all of us…”

It all began when Malligavad visited the 36-acre water body, Kyalasanahalli Lake in 2017. “It had been reduced to a bone-dry cricket field and dumping ground,” he recalls. “It struck me that I’d actually seen Bangalore transform from a city of lakes to one where everyone depends on water tankers to meet their daily needs!” So he approached Sansera, the engineering company he worked for, to fund the rejuvenation of the lake. With local volunteers, three earth movers and six trucks, Malligavad removed almost 400,000 cubic meters of mud from the lake. Again with the help of volunteers, he planted 18,000 saplings of indigenous trees including 3,000 fruit trees, 3,000 native plants and 2,000 medicinal plants. The excavated mud was used to create five `islands’ in the lake for birds to nest. In a mere 45 days, the area was transformed and the next monsoon rains filled up a lake that had been parched for 35 years.

Buoyed by this success, Malligavad quit his job to work on lake revival full time and was joined by environmentalist Akshaya Devendra. Not only have they revived four more lakes since then, they have also managed to rope in local corporates to fund their work and volunteers to donate their time. “Some of the lakes we’ve worked on have been in really bad shape,” he says. “For example, Konasandra Lake was so full of sewage and runoffs from nearby pharma companies that instead of water, it had a stinky gel-like sludge.” With funds donated by one of these pharma companies, Malligavad and his team cleaned up the lake in under three months.

These experiences have helped Malligavad develop a lake revival model that can be quickly and cheaply replicated across different terrains. “First, one must view the lake in its context,” he says. This involves, among other things, planting of native trees and plants nearby and strengthening its banks with local grasses. “In the projects we’ve undertaken so far, we have afforested forty percent of the area around our intervention zone,” he says. “This improves the area’s biodiversity and bolsters its water-holding capacity.” Second, the rejuvenated lake must be able to sustain itself naturally after their interventions. To this end, Malligavad and his cohorts at Lake Revivers Collective plant water-purifying lotuses and lilies in the water, soil-binding grasses on the lake’s edge and intersperse these with Miyawaki plantations (a Japanese technique of plantation which enables native saplings to grow ten times faster and denser than usual). Third, they always involve local stakeholders – local communities as well as corporates. “When they reap the undoubted benefits of having a clean waterbody in their vicinity, they are further encouraged to keep it that way,” he says.

And benefits there are aplenty. In the long run, these revitalised lakes will increase the water table levels of a parched Bangalore and provide habitat for hundreds of bird, animal, insect and plant species. Meanwhile Malligavad has acquired quite the reputation as Bangalore’s Lake Man. “After 39 years of consuming so much on this planet, I’ve decided it’s time to give back,” he says. “Now I’ve dedicated my entire life to water, wildlife and afforestation and it feels good…”

Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Anand Malligavad, Bengaluru, India

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“How many lives has this purse saved?” says Isatou Ceesay, 48, toting a pretty, pale blue woven handbag.

Raised in Njau, a humble village in The Gambia, from a young age Ceesay was struck by the environmental degradation caused by the overuse and poor disposal of waste. The rivers in her rural region of the West African state were clogged with plastic bags, with the burning or dumping of toxic waste leading to a host of health implications for her fellow villagers, from respiratory illnesses to cholera, as well as sickening the livestock communities depended upon.

“The idea of recycling came to me very young, when I looked at the environment I lived in and people didn’t have the idea of taking care of their waste, “Ceesay says. “People were simply not aware of what I was talking about.” But Ceesay had social barriers to overcome in making the villagers understand the benefits of good environmental custodianship. “I was very young, I lacked money and I was uneducated,” Ceesay says. “But one thing I did have was commitment.” Plus, she adds, with a smile: “I wanted to prove them all wrong.”

What a difference two decades make. Today Ceesay’s revolutionary community recycling project, Njau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG), employs 1,100 people in four separate communities in the Gambia. The project proceeds on the basis that many of the items that are poorly disposed of by Gambian communities have reuse value. Using novel crafting methods, NRIGG employs marginalised women to make recycled bags, mats, purses and jewellery for resale at markets or via the charity’s site from reclaimed items, including plastic bags, and the plastic bottles that are the scourge of local waterways. The organisation also trains unemployed women to be community waste and recycling experts, training villagers in composting and recycling, kitchen gardening and the societal benefits in planting trees. This advocacy work, Ceesay says, has improved child and maternal weight and wellbeing in the communities her organisation works with. “When I return to a village and see there are vegetables growing, the environment is clean and nutrition has improved, that’s the best thing for me,” Cessay says.

NRIGG is now turning its attention to forest preservation, perfecting a simple method of making compacted cooking fuel from discarded kindling and coconut shells to prevent deforestation for charcoal. “This is important,” Ceesay says. “Without forests we cannot have a healthy life.”

For Ceesay, social justice goes hand-in-hand with good environmental stewardship. “If women and young people are not part of this work it will not have a future,” she says. She has recently launched a project that gives recycling work to disabled Gambian women who otherwise have little option but to beg. “They are some of the best workers we have,” she says, “but society sees them as having no worth.” Now Ceesay’s dream is to see more women taking leadership positions in African countries. “That is something we are really lacking,” Cessay says.

Apart from Ceesay, of course. In 2012, the environmental trailblazer was recognised with an award at The International Alliance for Women Difference Maker award in the USA. In her homeland, she’s popularly nicknamed the Queen of Recycling, a moniker she doesn’t mind one bit. “When I wake up every day I still have the heart to deliver a better life,” she says.

Isatou Ceesay was photographed for Climate Heroes, a documentary series about the women and men around the world who fight to protect our environment and mitigate climate change, climateheroes.org.

Learn how to recycle plastic bags into purses with Njau Recycling’s technique: Watch Here
Buy their creations at  One Plastic Bag

Author: The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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