Big Goals About Basic Things

March 29, 2015March 29, 2015 / Organikos / Leave a comment

In response to this successful project, the Gates Foundation recently approved a two-year grant to Kohler to design and fabricate five closed-loop flush toilet systems for field testing in developing world locations that do not have adequate sanitation. Kohler

Some of the things many of us take for granted in the “developed” world – access to toilets and clean drinking water among them, are daily challenges for many living in the “developing” world. India’s new prime minister set a challenge for a Clean India by 2019, which will include 100 million toilets across the country. The goals coincide well with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, and Kohler’s production of a closed loop toilet system design created by Caltech University that is already coming on line in test areas in India. Continue reading →

Thank You, Oxfam International

August 31, 2014August 31, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / Leave a comment

Photo courtesy of behindthebrands.org

The Oxfam International campaign Behind the Brands aims to address how little is known about supply chains of the top 10 largest food and beverage companies. Listening to the NPR Salt Chat provides a good explanation about how pushing for transparency from these big companies is a catalyst for on-the-ground change. The campaign has only been around for a year and a half and they’ve already seen great progress in terms of land rights for local community, government intervention, and women’s rights.

It’s not always easy to connect the dots between the food we consume and the people who grow it, or the impact of growing and processing that food on the health of our planet.

But a campaign called Behind the Brands, led by Oxfam International, an advocacy organization dedicated to fighting poverty, is trying to make the inner workings of the 10 biggest food companies in the world more visible…

We sat down to talk with Chris Jochnick, one of the architects of this campaign and Oxfam America’s director of private sector development. We touched on how social media is giving activists more power, why big food companies respond to pressure, and whether corporate executives are his friends or his enemies.

We also wanted to know: Will the promises that these companies make really translate into concrete changes on, say, cocoa farms in West Africa?

Continue reading →

The Marari Fruit Diaries

August 29, 2014August 29, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / 8 Comments

This is a picture of breadfruit, which actually tastes like freshly baked bread

I’ve been writing about the exciting biodiverse varieties of plants at the new property, Marari Pearl. I want to point out though that even before we started, the land has hundreds of coconut trees on it, as well as dozens of mango and cashew trees, which is exciting in its own right.

One thing about the coconut trees that makes them a win-win, is that it helps provide local jobs. There is a certain group of people whose legal right it is in Kerala to do the job of tending to coconut trees. Before Marari Pearl was there, no one was hiring them to take care of the trees. Now that we are utilizing them to provide coconuts for our properties, they get jobs and we get fresh coconuts.

We are adding a cornucopia of other fruits, both local and exotic. I mentioned that we have pomelos, rambutans, tamarinds, several types of jackfruit, lovi-lovis, mangos, and oranges as well as the infamous miracle fruit. There is also the hong kong guava, burmese grape bud, pomegranate, sapota, malayalam champa fruit, abiu fruit, jaboticaba fruit, langsat tree, and several varieties of avocados or ‘butter fruit’ as its called here. There are breadfruit trees as well as peanut butter trees. There is karonda fruit, nelli puli fruit, mangosteen, and mooty fruit. There are five pages of names, some I know, some I don’t, and some I can’t understand because it’s a handwritten list. Continue reading →

Beach Banana Genome Project

August 22, 2014August 27, 2020 / Kayleigh Levitt / 6 Comments

The next Xandari property that La Paz Group is developing is at Marari beach, and in my mind it could easily be called the “Beach Banana Genome Project” due to the 30 varieties of bananas being planted on site.

There are actually over 1000 varieties of bananas in the world, which is pretty crazy to think about since the main variety in global commerce is the Cavendish. There are red bananas, dwarf bananas, sugared-fig bananas, pregnant bananas, ice cream bananas, Popoulou bananas, the golden aromatic bananas, Macaboos, Thousand-Fingered bananas, and the list goes on. Out of the 1000+ types of bananas, grocery stores in the United States only offer one main type? Why?

That’s because our grocery stores are in a permanent global summertime, as Adam Gollner puts it in his book “The Fruit Hunters”. Because our fruits aren’t sourced locally in the United States, they must be able to endure the rigorous journey of international trade. If I hadn’t traveled to India for the summer, I would’ve probably never been offered the range of varieties I’ve gotten to taste here.

Most people in the United States won’t get exposed to a diverse range of options and therefore do not demand them. Big banana agribusiness makes is buck with monoculture. They can reliably deliver the same subpar banana.

It’s not as reliable though in the long run because monoculture invites disease. Thats why before the Cavendish banana was the world’s top banana, there was the Gros Michel banana. It was struck by a fungus called the Panama Disease, and now a mutation of that disease is threatening the Cavendish. Biodiversity acts as a natural buffer to disease but biodiversity isn’t conducive to agrarian capitalism. Continue reading →

Documenting the Conservation Story

August 10, 2014August 11, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / 3 Comments

This is a wall from the Spice Harbor property. A lot of the conservation story can be told in the design. The way they built this property is an example of historical/cultural conservation. The restaurant building was a “go down”, or waterfront warehouse, that used to store spices. They didn’t knock down the old building, they actually just built around it and framed pieces of the old wall to display it as art. This design concept has been passed on by word of mouth-taught to the workers here, but it hasn’t been documented yet.

I felt that this blog could better serve its purpose if the conservation story was told in one place. The stated purpose of the RAXA Collective site is to provide a space for people to learn about entrepreneurial conversation. It seems to me that highlighting the details of the property is less meaningful without context of the concept and history behind them.

The summarized version as stated in the RAXA Collective “About section” is to have a business whose profits are invested in conservation of natural and cultural patrimony. However, as I’ve been learning, the way this model manifests itself depends on the situation. Each story is pretty radically different than the next. So, we have a very general description (About section) and very specific descriptions (every day posts), but we don’t have the overall narrative of each property to show how “it depends” shows up differently in the field of entrepreneurial conservation.

I resonate with the initially stated goal in the About section about having this site provide a space for university students to learn about alternatives to mainstream occupations and career paths. As a university student myself, that is really what I am here as an intern to learn. I have been able to offer my skills and passions for organic agriculture and gain more practice in that field as an intern here. However, that is a skill I have picked up along my studies, which are driven by the bigger goals of conservation and environmental business models.

Continue reading →

Thank You, General Mills

August 1, 2014August 1, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / Leave a comment

Photo Credit: Grist Article

I came across this article on Grist.com about General Mills’s new action plan to reduce their contribution to climate change. After being called out by Oxfam International, Oxfam says that General Mills will be, “the first major food and beverage company to promise to implement long-term science-based targets to cut emissions.”

With both a mitigation and adaptation plan, I am pretty impressed by this corporations efforts to take responsibility of their role. On the official page of their website describing this policy, they cite the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers, which suggests to me that they have people on their team helping them make really informed decisions grounded in scientific evidence. I appreciate in the report the full acknowledgement of the IPCC’s call to action:

“Science based evidence suggests we must limit the global mean temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in order to avoid permanently altering the atmosphere and negatively impacting the environmental, social and economic systems that sustain us – both today and in the future.”

I haven’t seen a big corporation like this that would normally be considered a “dirty business” so blatantly speak to the environmental reality we face. To see a corporation cite this gives me hope that mainstream conversations around climate change are moving towards what we can do and away from whether or not its real. I hope more corporations follow their lead just for the sake of drumming the beat of awareness.

The true colors of this policy will show in how effectively it is implemented, because that will determine whether it is a fluffy ‘greenwashing’ tactic with loopholes built in.

Here are a few of the main points of the policy:

Set global targets and track progress related to reductions in GHG emissions, energy, water, transportation, packaging and solid waste.
Support the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy commitment to reduce fluid milk GHG emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Work with smallholder and conventional farmers to strengthen globally sustainable farming practices.
Address GHG emissions due to land use change through sustainable sourcing efforts in key supply chains and growing regions. Our aim is to achieve zero net deforestation in high-risk supply chains by 2020. We will regularly report progress towards the zero net deforestation goal.
Ensure responsible governance and oversight of all sustainability efforts, including climate mitigation and adaptation. Convene the General Mills Sustainability Governance Committee 3 times per year to review and approve strategies, programs and key investments.
Report progress against goals – our own as well as those in our broader supply chain – on an annual basis via our Global Responsibility Report, available on the General Mills website

For a more extensive look at the report, click here.

While I raise my eyebrows at some of the vague wording in their initiatives, like “support”, “work with”, and “ensure” that are less concrete objectives, I also see timelines and checkpoints to keep themselves more accountable to this than they had to. I have learned to appreciate initiatives that move in the direction of the ideal, rather than criticizing anything that doesn’t model the most perfect action. While it is good to remain skeptical, I think it is important to acknowledge leadership in the right direction when we see it.

Following the Paper Trail, Redux

July 14, 2014July 15, 2014 / Kayleigh Levitt / 1 Comment

I have been following the Paper Trail since I got here as an intern and got involved in this social entrepreneurship project Raxa Collective has been working on! There are some types of environmental action that focus on being inherently low-impact from the original design while other methods focus on closing loops from more poor designs that leave good material wasted, such as newspapers. Something is sustainable when it meets the triple bottom line: environmental, economic, and social. RAXA Collective has been meeting this triple bottom line with its newspaper bag initiative! Working with the group, PaperTrails, they have been able to provide a livable income for local people who are unable to get work for whatever reason. They have work based on creating useful bags or envelopes out of recycled newspaper. Paper Trails has been providing bags and envelopes for Raxa Collective’s properties from newspapers and other recycled material. Now, we are taking the newspaper bag initiative to the next level. Continue reading →

Controlling Invasive Lionfish – Update on Market Solutions: Part 2/2 — Lionfish Art

April 22, 2014November 26, 2014 / Phil Karp / 14 Comments

Array of dried lionfish spines and tails -ready for jewelry use Credit: ReefCI

In Part 1 of this post regarding market-based solutions to fighting the lionfish invasion that is threatening coral reef and other marine ecosystems throughout the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Southern Atlantic Seaboard of the United States, I wrote about the challenge of developing commercially sustainable strategies for undertaking the systematic removals that are needed to keep lionfish populations under control. I discussed the need to develop a series of vertical markets, pointing to promotion of lionfish as a seafood choice as the most obvious of these. Capture of juvenile lionfish for the aquarium trade as another. A third market, and one in which I’m personally involved, is use of lionfish spines and tails for jewelry and other decorative items. Continue reading →

Drink the Wild Air

November 30, 2013June 24, 2016 / Daniela Benavides / Leave a comment

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” Alejandra Benavides/conCIENCIA

Working for the balance and health of nature as a conservation biologist brought me to understand the importance of nature in the balance and health of communities. The great gap between the two inspired me to establish conCIENCIA, a nature-based education design program. We build environmental identity in fishing villages across Peru through nature-based integrated learning guided by play, creativity, curiosity and the senses.
As First Mermaid in conCIENCIA, I work with an amazing group of artists and scientist, to connect coastal children to the natural wonderland, since 2010.

Lobitos has some of the most beautiful beaches on the Peruvian coast. Its world-class surfing draws hundreds of surfers from all over the planet and is known far and wide. A lesser-known fact is that it also has 153 children enrolled in its elementary school. Walking down the beach we wonder where these kids are. We walk from point to point with not one in sight. There’s no laughter or splashing on the shores. Surfers and fishermen dominate our view. No mothers and children sharing the democratic fun the beach offers: a place with more attractions than we could ever finish exploring.

In Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro it is on the beach that rich and poor meet, crossing the giant social chasm that separates them, virtually identical in their bathing suits, covered in sand, sweat and salt. Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case in many of Peru’s coastal towns. Exactly why is hard to say. Our NGO conCIENCIA helps coastal communities develop an environmental identity and engagement through outdoor science-based learning. We hope to be able to answer the question ‘why’ through surveys, conversation and appreciation.

On the surface one could say it is cultural. Fishermen don’t bathe in the sea or lounge on the beach. This is their place of work, as for a New Yorker her office would be–of course, with greater hardships and demands. The sea is treacherous and fish stock is dwindling. Continue reading →