Clean World

Wangari Maathai - Katherine Krizek

The holistic approach to sustainable development that Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement embodies embraces human rights and women’s right in particular. Her tree planting campaign empowered more than 300,000 women to plant more than 51 million trees, generating income for the rural women participants and promoting environmental consciousness in her native Kenya.

An accomplished scholar and a tireless political and environmental activist she was the first African woman to receive a Nobel prize.

Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.

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The interesting thing here is that it's not necessarily true that adding convenience adds cost. Pre-diced frozen onions might be more expensive in some places because there's an extra step... but they're also cheaper in some places, because it's easier to transport and store frozen food (and you can store it for much longer) than fresh food, and nobody's out there selling frozen whole onions. Pre-diced food also allows the use of unattractive vegetables, or damaged parts can be removed and the undamaged parts diced and sold, which you can't do with whole onions. The small amount of extra labour is one part of the equation re: what affects the total costs and benefits of pre-chopping, bagging and freezing onions.

There's a gut reaction to the idea that if something is more convenient for the end user, then it must be more difficult, expensive, or worse in some way to make, but that's not entirely true. It is true in many cases and false in many cases. Dishwashers use less water than sink washing, but you'll still see people hating on them because they take less labour and more labour is somehow righteous. Tumble dryers are a bad idea in many areas because they use so much electricity and damage clothing, and a good idea in others where electricity is abundant and the local weather and space availability isn't conducive to air drying. Those blender things that Americans have in their sinks look like an absurd sign of laziness and negligence to the rest of us, but if you look at how their waste disposal systems are set up, breaking down basic organics and flushing them in wastewater is actually a very convenient way of dealing with food waste in areas where composting is inconvenient and reduces the need for road transport to take away green waste in rubbish bins. Installing little electric blenders in all the sinks is a reasonable investment that reduces the need to transport and deal with waste in other ways.

this is not a dunk on you at all, i respect vegetarian and veganism. but i have bad news (in the literal sense not the meme phrase sense) about where a lot of (probably most, by some counts) foodborne illness comes from.

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Have you ever seen this breathtaking tree? The Grandidier’s baobab (Adansonia grandidieri), also known as the renala, may live to be 300 years old or older—but scientists are unable to confirm their exact age because baobabs don’t produce annual growth rings. This species of baobab is found only in Madagascar’s dry deciduous forests. It can grow as much as 98 ft (30 m) tall, and its trunk can have a diameter of up to 9.8 ft (3 m). Unfortunately, Grandidier’s baobabs are endangered due in part to habitat degradation, agricultural expansion, and exploitation for its fruit and bark.

Hats made from scraps from altered sweaters and strips of deconstructed fabric

A selection of men’s pants hemmed to fit shorter people

“To go” packs like you mentioned. All-in-one fix your pants, a basket of patches big enough to cover up old logos, re-dyed shoe laces with reformed aglets

Station with stamps and lino designs to stamp onto your own clothes

“Drop off” for custom repairs

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.