Kemmangundi, Western Ghats, Karnataka
Embarking on a Path of Sustainability
I never expected to return to Costa Rica after finishing college, and much less, to fulfill a role that I only dreamed about. When I was offered the opportunity to help advance the sustainability projects at Xandari Resort in Costa Rica, I knew this was an opportunity that I could not let pass. From the first day that I selected Hospitality Administration as my major at Boston University (BU) and through my four years learning about and working in hospitality, I have grown to cherish the industry. Through my multiple work experiences in hotels and food and beverage companies, primarily in operations and guest relations, I experienced daily the joy of hospitality services. Continue reading
Most Eco-friendly Ad Campaign Ever?
French organic food retailer Biocoop claims to have come up with the most eco-friendly campaign ever. PHOTO: AdWeek
Welcome to the age of ‘organic’ being the marketing appeal of food production, design, crafts, consumer goods, and more. With it being a coveted USP and given the large planning and effort that go into taking the organic route, you might as well tell everyone who has a moment to listen. And that’s precisely what French organic food retailer Biocoop is doing. And doing it with a creative difference – rather than investing in commercials and monstrous hoardings, the company and its agency Fred & Farid Paris decided to make the medium their message. Marshall Mcluhan, you’d be proud! Organic by business and eco-friendly in their ad campaign, Biocoop’s message is crystal clear.
A Culture in Need of Safeguards
Chhau is performed in honor of the Cosmic God Shiva, known for his dance form Tandava. PHOTO: UNESCO
Kalbelia mimics the movements of snakes in some sense and was usually performed on joyous occasions.
India’s oldest theater form, Kuttiyattam is a synthesis of Sanskrit classicism and reflects the local traditions of Kerala. PHOTO: Kerala Tourism
Each year since 2009, UNESCO puts out two lists that closely look at indigenous practices across the world. The List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding is composed of heritage elements that require urgent measures to keep them alive. During the period from 2009 to 2014, 38 elements have been included on this List. These include Mongolian calligraphy, the Paach (corn-veneration ritual) of Guatemala, the male child cleansing ceremony of northern Uganda, practices of the Kayas of the sacred forests of Mijikenda in Kenya and more. The second list – Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity – comprises practices that help demonstrate the diversity of heritage and raise awareness about their importance.
All That Wine
Since its debut in October of 2014, Tender has become a neighborhood favorite, with wine on tap and small plates featuring cheese and charcuterie. PHOTO: Blair Czarecki / Hoodline
Our thought and work processes guided by the 3Cs – community, collaboration, and conservation – it’s encouraging when we find one of our ilk. And this time, our kin in ethos is living a dream in an apartment building at 850 Geary St, Tenderloin, San Francisco. Until a few years ago, the derelict building invited descriptions like ‘deplorable’ and the ‘Heroin Hotel’. That was before the Liptons arrived on the scene. The carefully renovated building now houses Tender, a tiny bar with wine on tap and an eco-friendly spirit at heart.
“My whole concept for this place was to create a home away from home, an unpretentious neighborhood wine bar that takes advantage of the technology of an eco-friendly business model of wine on tap,” says Lipton.
Raise Your Voice
We have all faced airline/airport delays, and it is always tempting to raise one’s voice in anger. What if your raised voice could make everything just a little bit better for everyone? Thanks to the New York Times and the root for bringing this to our attention:
…Facing a six-hour delay, the casts of “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” gave a spontaneous performance at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It appears that the “sing-off,” which occured in an airline waiting area, lifted quite a few spirits…
Plastic Aplenty
Forty per cent of the small turtles travelling through Moreton bay were recently found to have consumed plastics and more than two-thirds of the endangered loggerhead turtle, too. PHOTO: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
Queensland – said to be Australia’s dirtiest state (discarded rubbish recorded at levels almost 40 per cent above the national average). Also home to Moreton Bay, the only place in the country where dugongs gather in herds and which has a significant population of the endangered loggerhead sea turtle. Over celebrating its coastal flora and fauna on World Oceans Day, the state and its leaders found themselves mulling a ban on single-use plastic in the area. Here’s why.
Bird of the Day: Oriental White-eye
Bangalore, Karnataka
Casual Cultural Conservation Through Dance
The only working Danish windmill in the US.
A few weeks ago I visited a friend from Cornell whose family lives in Nebraska and comprises a good portion of the Scandinavian Folk Dancers of Omaha. I’d seen them perform before at the New England Folk Festival in April, held in Mansfield, Massachusetts, but unfortunately at that point my phone’s camera wasn’t the right tool for the job of documenting their great dancing. This time, when the group performed on a much more intimate stage at the Danish Tivoli Festival in Elk Horn, Iowa, (Elk Horn and neighboring Kimballton apparently make up the largest rural Danish settlement in the US) I was ready with my camera and was able to take some half-decent videos of several of the dances. The audio quality isn’t the best given the slightly windy conditions, but hopefully you can get a general feel for the experience in the video below.
We’ve featured some thoughts on dance on the blog before, especially given Kerala’s Continue reading
More (Offshore) Power to You, Germany
Germany is set to overtake the UK as the biggest installer of offshore wind globally. Denmark comes behind the UK by capacity, followed by Belgium and China. PHOTO: Reuters/Fabian Bimmer
We first discussed wind energy, as a viable resource to power the world’s needs, almost three years ago. Prior to that and in the time hence, Germany has done much about it. The country has chalked out a plan to replace nuclear power plants with offshore wind farms in a bid to use renewable energy round-the-clock. Importantly, the country is sticking to its plan. Above all, it is building on it.
Germany has hugely ambitious green goals. Five years ago it set a goal to produce 18% of its energy from renewables by 2020 (latest figures show it having reached 12.4%). The country also wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and by 80% by 2050. The transformation is knows as the Energiewende—literally “energy turn.”
A Ticket on the Eco-friendly Supersonic, please
Supersonic flight is one of the four speeds of flight. It has speeds up to five times faster than the speed of sound. PHOTO: NASA
Imagine flying at more than twice the speed of sound. At that speed, a London to New York flight lasts under 3.5 hours. And the last time that happened was in 2003, just before the supersonic Concorde ceased operating. More than a decade later, there are conversations on whether the supersonic culture can be revived. There are arguments for both sides and the latest is news about the talent at NASA working on making commercial supersonic flight eco-friendly.
Unless you have access to a F-22 fighter jet, you probably haven’t been able to fly faster than the speed of sound since the last Concorde flight in 2003. NASA wants to change this. The agency said that it is spending over $6 million to fund research into cheaper and greener supersonic travel. This isn’t NASA’s first attempt to bring back supersonic travel. It has been (literally) pushing the boundaries of flight for years. NASA’s predecessor was involved in building the first supersonic plane in 1946, and the agency has been working on concepts since 2006 with companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing that may one day lead to a new generation of planes that get you places very quickly.
Yoga And Its Contents
We have been intrigued by news reports that the leader of the country where many of Raxa Collective’s contributors are based, and where yoga comes from, is leading an effort to get his country more devoted to its practice, and thereby export more of one of India’s most important innovations.
This intrigue is piqued especially after listening to an interview with the author of a book on this very subject–how yoga came to be disseminated from India to elsewhere–which puts the book on the top of our monsoon season reading list.
If you happen to be in Delhi two weeks from today, join in:
…On 21 June – the new International Yoga day – Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, hopes the world will join in. The grass near India Gate will be transformed into the venue for what it is hoped will be the biggest single yoga session ever held, with up to 45,000 people running through a 35-minute routine.
The participants will include 64-year-old Modi, most of his government and, they hope, a range of celebrities. Officials have been sent to round up volunteers from scores of countries to reinforce the international credentials of the ancient Indian practice…
Meanwhile, listen to this interview to learn more about yoga’s journey to the West:
Fifty Shades of Black
Ivanpah, the world’s largest concentrating solar power plant, located just southwest of Las Vegas, can produce a whopping 392 megawatts of solar energy to power 140,000 California homes with clean energy PHOTO: Inhabitat
So we’ve all learnt, at some time or the other, that black absorbs light the maximum. And that the sun is one of the best sources of clean and renewable energy. Now, put two and two together. Yes, we are definitely talking tapping the sun’s light and heat. And we need a black surface to do so. The catch: the color needs to be as black as black can get.
The (Eco-friendly) Sound of Music
House of Marley
Jamboo
LSTN
Think Sound
Woodbuds
Eco-friendly and environment-friendly – the terms have become all too familiar now. From being used at green summits and in corners where the gatekeepers of conservation meet, they’ve entered mainstream vocabulary. The words are a call-to-action, they are rules, and have come to define a way of life. What is interesting is to see how much of this ‘eco-friendliness’ is thoughtfully designed for use, innovated and improved upon, and finally marketed and delivered as utilities. Over being mere concepts and terminologies, how much of this ‘friendliness’ can be used on a day-to-day basis. Yes, we heard about how biking can power phones but let’s hear more.
Humans At Their Best, In The Water, In The Extreme
Team Blackfish set sail Thursday morning in what organizers called the first human-powered boat race to Alaska. Credit Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
Too much dullness and dimwittedness recently. We need a break from that. We like the optimism of Team Blackfish and their fellow sailors:
A Race to Alaska: No Motors, but No Limits on Imagination
PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. — Scott Veirs and Thomas Nielsen have a little wooden plank mounted on their boat, just in front of the seat where they plan to take turns, for days on end, pedaling a bike-chain-driven propeller shaft all the way to Alaska.
“If in doubt,” the sign reads, “try some optimism.”
That could be the motto for the entire field of competitors in what is billed as the first race of its kind — human powered to Alaska — which set off Thursday morning from this city on the shores of Puget Sound, heading north across open water. The 54 entrants in the Race to Alaska— solo efforts and teams, novices and old-salt veterans — were fueled by a mix of determination, ingenuity and upward of 6,000 calories a day, but no motors. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Great Cormorant Food Fight
KaikondrahallI Lake, Bangalore
Mining Companies Gonna Mine
MAËLLE DOLIVEUX
We try to stay away from stereotypes, cliche, cute kitten videos and memes. But the editorial below will leave you with heightened awareness of just how low mining companies can go, literally, figuratively and spiritually to get what they want. Rio Tinto is a cliche, a nightmare about killing the earth and any cultural artifacts that get in the way of its profits. Let’s awake from this nightmare. Come on, Arizona, be better than this:
Selling Off Apache Holy Land
Lydia Millet
ABOUT an hour east of Phoenix, near a mining town called Superior, men, women and children of the San Carlos Apache tribe have been camped out at a place called Oak Flat for more than three months, protesting the latest assault on their culture. Continue reading
It’s About Bee-ing Alive
Must-watch: A stunning time-lapse video of the first 21 days of a bee’s life by photographer Anand Varma
Your first instinct when around a honeybee is to keep distance. But not for Indian American photographer Anand Varma. When he was asked to photograph a story on honeybees for National Geographic magazine, he knew he was going to have to take a different approach to capture new views of one of the world’s most photographed insects. And he did, his photographs forming a brilliant timelapse video of the first 21 days in a bee’s life. Over the video and the stellar photographs, the exercise addresses a key issue: the disappearance of bees and colonies dying quickly. Now why is this a problem?
Women of Their Worlds
In the small hilly Indian state of Meghalaya, a matrilineal system operates – but some men are campaigning for change PHOTO: Karolin Kruppel
What does the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya and a valley on the border of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of China have in common? They are home to a couple of the handful matrilineal communities that still exist. In an age where most important offices of power are held by men, it is critical to evaluate how these communities hold on to a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. Not to forget the challenges they face in continuing to look at women as the driving force and the soul of their existence.
The Indonesian Forests May Breathe Now
Loss of forest habitat through pulp and paper logging and palm oil plantations has pushed endangered species such as the Sumatran tiger, rhinoceros, elephants and the orangutan closer to extinction. PHOTO: Greenpeace
Indonesia has the third largest tropical rainforest in the world. The country is also the world’s largest producer of palm oil, fifth largest of coal, and tenth largest producer of pulp and paper. To say these industries are tied to resources of the land is to state the obvious. But to say that the activities are fast eating into forest cover is a matter of concern. Which is precisely why when a company like Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) – the country’s second largest paper and pulp company – announces that it will completely eliminate deforestation in its operations, the world takes notice.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific said the “good news” came after more than 40,000 Australians emailed Australian paper supplier Office Brands asking it to stop buying from APRIL because its paper was sourced from Indonesia’s old-growth rainforests. The announcement comes after rival Indonesian company Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) announced in 2013 it would cease logging in natural forests. This followed a decade-long Greenpeace campaign that cost APP more than 130 corporate customers including Disney, Mattel and Hasbro.
Organikos 