Bamboo Toothbrushes – a small step to eliminating daily toxic plastics?

We have  a huge plastic problem! It is literally everywhere and is a toxic problem as it is part of our daily lives.

Plastic pollution is an epidemic primarily because it never biodegrades and it never goes away. An astonishing 50% of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away. It is flooding our landfills, oceans and streets and does not solve the problem of long-term waste.

It’s also a huge problem for the health of wildlife, as many animals ingest it thinking it is food and can have problems thereafter breathing and digesting.

How do we make plastic more sustainable?

The bottom line is that there is simply too much plastic for our world to handle, and the problem is getting worse. Therefore today’s solution is less about recycling and more about minimizing plastic consumption and supporting brands that have innovative solutions to plastic production and waste.

Toothbrushes are detrimental too. 

If we listen to our dentists, we should replace them at least every three months. That means we all chuck 4 plastic toothbrushes into landfill each year because they aren’t recycled. That is 40 toothbrushes a decade. Say the average age we live to in the UK is 80 something. That’s around 320 plastic toothbrushes each, and then times that by 66 million. Feeling queasy yet and not just because maths makes your head hurt?

It takes about 200 to 400 years for a plastic toothbrush to actually decay, and scientifically plastic doesn’t decay. It just deforms and moves into either the soil level or the water level. So that’s 4 toothbrushes, per person per year, think about how many years worth of plastic each person is adding. So what’s a solution? Bamboo. 

Who would think, bamboo? If brands can work towards eliminating plastic straws, why not Toothbrushes?

Bamboo is sustainable because it is so fast growing, and it biodegrades. If it is a choice between a wooden handle and adding to the ever-growing pile of plastic toothbrushes in landfill I know what I’m choosing.

With plastic being such a massive detriment to society, switching out the first plastic thing you use in the morning, the toothbrush is a good approach for the average consumer to reduce plastic.

Bamboo toothbrushes are more expensive, in monetary terms alone. When you factor in the cost to the environment and the fact that plastic is made using oil, a non-renewable resource, the real cost of a plastic toothbrush becomes more apparent. If you are planning on bequeathing your plastic toothbrushes to your grandkids and they to their own grandkids, then you’ve eventually got your money’s worth environmentally speaking.

Switch to stainless steel bottles, and bamboo straws!

Grocery bags of course, there are so many natural options like Jute and Cotton bags.

Common land – the case of the Kalinago People.

The very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a means of managing resources because of the self-interest motive. The tragedy of commons develops in this way. Commons may loosely be defined as areas where certain people hold beneficial rights to use land that they do not own.

View along the east coast of the Kalinago Territory 

The Land

Commons are not merely a resource but a form of social organisation within the Kalinago Territory the land is communally owned.

The Kalinagos arrived along the island from South America with their families, plants an animals, and established a new life culture which was adapted from their mainland continent. The area covers 1,530 hecatres on the east coast of Dominica, from the village of Bataca in the north to the village of Sineku in the south. It was established in 1903 by Dominica’s first Crown Colony administrator, Hesketh Bell, who governed Dominica between 1899 and 1905. The Kalinago Territory is administered by the Kalinago Council, which is headed up by the Kalinago Chief. Both council and chief are democratically elected by residents of the villages within the Kalinago Territory every five years. The Kalinago Territory and its people are represented in government by the Ministry of Kalinago Affairs.

By law, the Kalinago Territory is communally owned. No one person can buy or sell part of the territory nor use it as collateral at a bank for a loan. This is often cited by Kalinago as a hindrance to both personal and business development and for this reason some are calling for statutory modifications or specific financial allowances to be enacted for Dominica’s indigenous people. Any Kalinago resident may stake a claim to a vacant portion of land, however, and so long as no-one else has already claimed it, and the Kalinago Council approves the claim, then that resident may build a house there and work the land. Any land which has been left untended for more than a year may theoretically be claimed by someone else, subject to approval by the Kalinago Council.

Within the definition of the commons people have the common right to use some good, and a law that defends this right, there is a cultural process presupposed in this – a process by which a group of people agree that such and such a set of goods and resources should be held in common, and act together in a way that preserves the commons. Each individual who participates in this cultural process undergoes a subjective transformation called: commoning.

Commoning is based in four broad principles. These principles shape the psycho-symbolic space that is sustained by people who participate in commoning.

1. Plenitude: Commoning proceeds from a place of wealth. We do not need to accumulate more than we possess. Together we have all that we require.

2. Mutual benefit: Commoning hinges on a spirit of reciprocity and justice. My gain does not need to mean your loss. Genuine success produces mutual benefit.

3. Spiritual abundance: Commoning challenges us to discover our inner abundance and to add it to a shared stock of potential. Commoning requires us to cultivate the overflowing generosity that represents true spiritual health.

4. Transition: Commoning is a threshold activity. To make common is to participate in an unfolding movement for social change, with positive implications for politics, economics, and the planet. Each act of commoning – be it a matter of collaborative consumption, peer-to-peer production, open space technology, or democratic assembly – is an experimental contribution towards a new social and economic paradigm.

The Kalinagos each play their part in managing the community, where every individual of the community exercise his rights and with responsibility to manage his community, which is participatory community planning in terminology of planning. This has worked for a long time however more recently, the Kalinago people have recognized the economic constraints from not having individual access to land titles. Nonetheless, the system ha still worked and continues to work for the Kalinagos.

Urban Commons – LILAC: Low Impact Living Affordable Community.

Emerging in the cracks of the ownership model are alternatives to state/market provision of affordable housing and public/private-led regeneration of declining urban neighbourhoods, centred on commoning and collective dweller control.

Urban communing is now becoming popular as privatization of cities with commonly owned and managed spaces and housing services become more unaffordable. These examples of urban commons focus on shared resources and responsibility as a way to make our cities more “public” and inclusive. From community land trusts, co-op supermarkets and co-housing projects to other community-run spaces and services urban commoning is slowly becoming the response to affordable living.

Mutual housing models provide a third option to the familiar dualist categories of public/private sector, state/market provision—as non-profit, voluntary, community-led, place-based membership associations (Bailey 2012). The key function of mutual models—which range from Garden Cities and tenant co-partnerships, through co-ownership societies, cooperatives, co-housing, mutual homeownership societies, and community self-build—is their capacity to “lock in” the value of land and assets, to protect commonwealth from private expropriation (Conaty and Large 2013). This is where they resonate with the notion of the commons.

Lilac is a co-housing community of 20 straw bale homes. The homes and lands are collectively owned by its residents who pooled resources together through a Mutual Home Ownership Society, a pioneering financial model that ensures permanent affordability. It is designed to bring the bottom rung of the property ladder back within reach of households on modest incomes in areas where they are priced out of the housing market. It is designed to remain permanently affordable for future generations. Members of the society are the residents who live in the homes it provides. The society and not the individuals obtain the mortgage and so borrowing is cheaper.

Low Impact Living
The houses are built  using a low-carbon modern method of construction with locally sourced straw and timber using super-insulated, prefabricated wall panels. In contrast to a conventionally built home which produces around 50 tonnes of CO2 during its construction, a home built using straw bale as insulation can actually store 12.25 tonnes of CO2!
The insulating materials and design of the buildings combine to store solar heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer, thus reducing the need to input heating energy.  The environmental impact of daily activities is strictly considered at the site, for instance through car sharing; pooling equipment and tools; sharing meals twice a week; and looking to the local area to provide as many needs as possible. Food is grown on allotments to ensure ‘eating locally’ is not just metaphoric. The site is based around the Danish co-housing model: mixing people’s needs for their own space in private homes with shared facilities and encouraging social interaction. The green spaces – allotments, pond, a shared garden and a children’s play area – are also important to community interaction. The common house is at the heart of the community, and includes communal cooking and eating facilities, laundry facilities, meeting space, play area, office and guest rooms.

Commoning

The community meets twice a week to eat together in the Common House: time is spent relaxing over meals, or working together to produce them creates spaces to talk and share and build the links that help sustain the community. The community also hosts a delivery hub for several cooperatives and smaller organic suppliers. In the Common House there is  a shared kitchen and a pantry for food bought in bulk. Skills share workshops are organized around food and learn new ways to source and prepare food.

LILAC is also part of a flourishing neighbourhood in West Leeds, as it aims to be a resource for the wider community for events and facilities. The common house is used for local meetings, film nights, meals and gatherings, workshops and has been used as the local polling station.

Umoja Center for sustainable Living- A community center dedicated to rural livelihood—and the future of humanity.

The future is in the past! 

The Umoja Center for Sustainable Living

Imagine a space dedicated to being, service and living in harmony with nature, to facilitate personal and collective healing, and demonstrate a not-so-new way forward for humanity.

Millennials today would probably find it difficult to adapt to a lifestyle that didn’t afford what would’ve been luxuries to our ancestors but now our basic necessities. A simpler way of life has been dismissed (attacked, in some cases) in favor of technological, urbanized living with ever increasing levels of complexity that don’t appear to have a correlation to the realization of human potential, or sustenance of vibrant community. In fact, evidence suggests the exact opposite. Our understanding of development doesn’t really have to get more complicated than that.

With the rapid escalation of environmental, political, and humanitarian crises around the world — and as ancient prophecies have long foretold — it is clear that our current industrial and consumption-based way of life is coming to the end of its due course. It has to. Without a fundamental change in our values, the way we conduct our human affairs, and relate to one another, the necessary planetary resources will not be available to sustain the human race for much longer.

If there is to be a future for humanity, it is going to be found in our past—in terms of cultivating the respect for Mother Nature and human dignity indigenous peoples throughout the world based entire cultures on, as well as undoing the physical and psychological trend of rural-urban migration.

The Umoja (trans. harmony) Centre for Village Sustainability (UCVS) is an experiment being conducted in the interest of humanity’s immediate and long-term welfare, with a mission to demonstrate sustainable, rural livelihood and a not-so-new way forward for us all.

Tea and banana trees around the village. 

Due to the area’s overall lack of “development” and modernization, Bwabene village maintains a remarkable degree of natural integrity. The air, water, and food are all pure. Noise and pollution, there is not. At night, a deep and profound silence descends upon the village, as the sky reveals a mesmerizing tapestry of bright stars and planets, which feel as though they are within arm’s reach.

The overall philosophy of the UCVS is, “simple living, high thinking.” Where thinking becomes “high” — where thoughts dwell on service, sustainability, and abiding peace — material wants become less, and less desired.The majority of the UCVS structures will be constructed in the traditional style of the village, void of most modern amenities, using only local building supplies.Thatched mud huts for guests. Eco-friendly toilets. A community fire circle, and many varieties of plants, flowers, and trees.

When each hour of each day is spent in direct contact with the natural elements, while participating in work that nourishes the soul, something curious starts to happen. Love begins to flow. An effortless peace arises, and kindness soon follows.

While money is easier to come by in urban environments, there is a steep trade off for it. Many times, “uneducated” villagers arrive to find they can only earn enough to live in a slum, which are prone to severe sanitation and security challenges not commonly found in villages. The paradigm of a city is one of hyper independence, where survival is your business alone. Being so, you can find a tragic breaking down of community and wide gap of separation between people, who become known as consumers. Humanity. That’s the trade off. The further we drift physically and figuratively from nature and the life that it engenders, the more of it gets lost.

The community will be sustained by donations and volunteering.

A poverty of spirit has emerged in the developed world where, even in the midst of material abundance, people often feel disconnected from one another and a larger purpose beyond career and retirement. Younger generations, especially, are seeking solutions. In this mutual exchange of giving and receiving, lives can change in extraordinary ways.

More sustainable cities – what about Vertical Forests?

Many governments have been taking action in order to clean messes of the past. Ecology has become one of the major philosophies of all our societies. As we have a goal to leave the Earth for our descendants in a better state than we have met it. If countries were to take example from some of the most eco-friendly cities, we would be well on our way to ensuring this goal is met.

 

Although these cities are well on their way to meeting sustainability city development targets set out by SDG 11; architects, engineers and developers are creating increasingly greener structures – and doing it in a more literal way than ever before. This is what happens when trees meet buildings.

The current revival of green architecture happened in the 1970s, when the energy crisis coupled with the growing awareness of human kind’s impact on the environment propelled architects and engineers to think more carefully of sustainable development through sustainable building designs into their projects. Willis Building in Ipswich United Kingdom was one of the pioneering buildings around this.

Willis Building – Ipswich UK

The country headquarters for insurance company Willis Faber & Dumas challenged accepted thinking about the office building while maintaining a sense of continuity within its urban setting. Innovations such as the use of escalators in a three-storey structure, and the social dimension offered by its swimming pool, roof-top restaurant and garden, were all conceived in a spirit of democratising the workplace and encouraging a greater sense of community.

Externally, the building reinforces rather than confronts the urban grain. Low-rise, with a free-form plan, it responds to the scale of surrounding buildings, while its facade curves in response to the irregular medieval street pattern, flowing to the edges of its site like a pancake in a pan. Conceived before the oil crises of the mid-1970s, and heated by natural gas, Willis Faber was a pioneering example of energy conscious design, its deep plan and insulating grass roof ensuring extremely good overall thermal performance. Recognising these innovations, over the years the building has attracted almost as many awards for energy efficiency as it has for its architecture.

https://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/willis-building/ 

Grass covered roof used a break out space

Other approaches advocate integrating trees and plants into the building often to soften the psychological impact of living in modern cities. Green space can have a substantial physical and psychological impact on our urban environments. Studies have shown that even a small park can reduce local surface temperatures by as much as 7 degrees celsius. Green roofs also perform well, their temperatures can be as much as 4.4 degrees Celsius cooler than the conventional roof finishes.

Arguably more exciting is the growing trend of incorporating entire trees into the build structures. One of the most impressive examples of this is Acros in Japan. The building is a success in Japan, constructed on the last remaining green space in the city center, so the architects created a design to preserve the green space as much as possible, while still fitting in a large office building. In addition, a green roof reduces the energy consumption of a building, because it keeps the temperature inside more constant and comfortable. Green roofs also capture rainwater runoff, and support the life of insects and birds.

ACROS Fukuoka

Buildings covered in trees sounds like a weird phenomenon but the concept is being widely incorporated in Singapore, China, Germany, Milan, Hanoi, Taipei and even here in the United Kingdom in Leeds. The designers and engineers working on the latest generation of tree capers have decided to push this concept in a fight for sustainable development.

The Garden City – Letchworth, Great Britain

For most city-dwellers, one of the great challenges they face is the high cost of living and housing expenses due to investor speculation. Some issues pertinent to the discipline of urban planning never seem to go away. For many decades since early planning pioneers sort mitigate the negative effects of urban living. Planners today continue to struggle with crucial tasks as reducing urban poverty, removing urban pollution and improving the health, safety, morals and welfare of the urban population. This has proven to be a momentous challenge as planners have found it difficult to garner the knowledge, community support and financial backing needed to tackle all these urban problems. Understandably, the planning community has questioned whether such tasks are feasible and have developed alternative models to the city life. Ebenezer Howard was once such critic.

Garden City Letchworth

The Industrial Revolution in the mid 1800’s led to uncontrolled growth and congestion due to overcrowding which caused deterioration to the cities. Migrants moved from rural areas and small towns became large cities. Industrial revolution stimulated more industries and the cities became dirty, bleak and more polluted. It was in response to the need for renewed urban life that Ebenezer Howard tackled this problem by proposing the idea of a “garden city” that would blend the benefits of both country and city living and be financed through collective ownership of land so as to give the working class an alternative to improve their working conditions. The central idea of Letchworth is to keep land ownership in the hands of the community while allowing housing and other buildings to be sold or leased to individuals. Howard’s concept of the garden city never took off large scale – it would have a garden in the center of the city, theaters, libraries, hospitals ad traffic would move along the edges.

Garden City Letchworth was started more than a century ago by ethical investors, Quakers and philanthropists and other socially concerned individuals. In 1903, founders Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker purchased 2,057 hectares of land near London at a reasonable price and then made it available to the members of the community for building. In this way, people came to own the roofs over their heads but co-owned the land on which their houses had been built. Despite low wages for many people, the community-oriented form of ownership made it possible to avoid high rents.

The collective ownership of the land also generated revenues through housing rentals and business leases. This in turn made it possible for the community to finance schools and hospitals. Everyone, not just investors, could benefit. Howard described his ideas in detail in his 1898 book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. For decades the economic value generated by Letchworth’s infrastructures – water, sewerage, gas, electricity, roads, schools, hospitals – were mutualized to benefit all of its inhabitants. This helped the city to become relatively self-sufficient. Inspired by the Letchworth example, other garden cities followed, such as the Welwyn Garden City in the 1920s.

At first, city officials resisted the idea of a neighborhood claiming a public space for itself by painting the pavement and creating small structures. But then they realized that the convivial neighborhood life at at Share-It Square was a great way for people to become more involved with city life. In 2000, the City of Portland passed an ordinance authorizing “intersection repair” throughout the city. With the help of City Repair volunteers, a neighborhood that obtains the consent of 80 percent of its residents within two blocks of an intersection, can design paintings and creative public spaces for the centers of the intersection.

Much of the inspiration for the City Repair Project has come from Mark Lakeman, the self-styled “placemaking coordinator” of the initiative. The group’s stated mission is to facilitate “artistic and ecologically oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. We are an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live.”

In practice, this means everything from “intersection repairs” to public installations, block parties and conferences, and educational events and festivals. The commoning catalyzed by City Repair allows people to make decisions about their own immediate neighborhoods and to actively shape the future of the community. Sometimes that amounts to finding out the name of the neighbor who’s been living across the street for the past twenty years.

Letchworth was the world’s first garden city ( Alamy )

‘Man of the hole’ – The Last of his tribe; The Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon

 

Brazil’s Amazon is home to more uncontacted tribes than anywhere in the world. There are thought to be at least 100 isolated groups in this rainforest, according to the government’s Indian affairs department FUNAI. FUNAI is responsible for mapping out and protecting lands traditionally inhabited and used by these communities and preventing invasions of indigenous territories by outsiders.

Brazil is home to more uncontested peoples than anywhere on the planet. Their decision not to maintain contact with other tribes and outsiders is almost certainly a result of previous disastrous encounters and the ongoing invasion and destruction of their forest home. The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and the largest river basin on the planet. Today, the Amazon is facing a multitude of threats as a result of unsustainable economic development; 20% of the Amazon biome has already been lost and the trend will worsen if gone unchecked. As Brazil forges ahead with aggressive plans to develop and industrialize the Amazon, even the remotest territories are under threat. Several hydro-electric dam complexes are being built near uncontacted Indian groups; they will also deprive thousands of other Indians of land, water and livelihoods. The dam complexes will provide cheap energy to mining companies, who are poised to carry out large scale mining on indigenous lands if Congress passes a draft bill that is being pushed hard by the mining lobby.

Ariel view of traditional Maloka, Yanomami communal dwelling in Roraima, Brazil

It is now thought that approximately 80 such groups live in the Amazon. Some number several hundred and live in remote border areas in Acre state and in protected territories such as the Vale do Javari, on the border with Peru. Others are scattered fragments, the survivors of tribes virtually wiped out by the impacts of the rubber boom and expanding agriculture in the last century. Many, such as the nomadic Kawahiva, who number a few dozen, are fleeing loggers and ranchers invading their land. As pressure mounts to exploit their lands, all uncontacted Indians are extremely vulnerable both to violent attack (which is common), and to diseases widespread elsewhere like flu and measles, to which they have no immunity.

It is not unusual for 50% of a tribe to be wiped out within a year of first contact, by diseases such as measles and influenza. Some uncontacted tribes are tragically down to their very last members.

Brazilian government representatives travelled to the territory of a solitary uncontacted Indian – the last known survivor of his tribe. They wanted to find out if he is still alive and how to best protect his land.

Imagine living on your own, in complete silence, always on the run, always fearful, invisible to the world. This is daily life for one solitary man in the Amazon. He’s the sole survivor of his tribe. His name is unknown, there is no knowledge of his language, what tribe he belongs to or who he is.  His people were probably massacred by cattle ranchers who are invading the region at break neck speed. He is sometimes known only as ‘the Man of the Hole’ because of the big holes he digs either to trap animals or to hide in. He totally rejects any type of contact even attacking a FUNAI representative who he recently came in contact with.

A hole dug in the Amazon forest by the uncontacted Indian ‘Last of his tribe’, which he used to trap animals when hunting, Tanaru territory, Rondônia state, Brazil.

FUNAI has set aside a small patch of rainforest for his protection. This is entirely surrounded by cattle ranchers. In late 2009, the man was viciously targeted by gunmen. In the past, many ranchers have used gunmen to kill uncontacted Indians in Rondônia. Some of the ranchers have their eye on his land and there are plenty of trigger happy gun men who would think nothing of bumping him off for the cost of a night on the town. FUNAI has decided not to contact the ‘Last of his Tribe’, but to enlarge his tiny territory by 3,000 hectares to give him more space and more game to hunt.

By law they are still considered minors. The most important goal for tribal peoples in Brazil is control over their lands – Brazil is one of only two South American countries that does not recognise tribal land ownership.

How can I help?

• Donate to Survival.
• Write a letter to your MP or MEP (UK).
• Write to the President, your senators, congressmen or other elected officials.
• Write a letter to your local Brazilian embassy – addresses are listed at www.embassiesabroad.com.

 

 

Dominica striving towards climate resilience – A Plastic ban.

Dominica, also known at the Nature Island of the Caribbean prides itself of its natural beauty. Nestled in the Windward islands of the deep blue waters of the Eastern Caribbean, Dominica boasts of its 365 rivers, warm sea waters, volcanic black sand beaches, cascading waterfalls, lush green forests, the second largest boiling lake in the world and off course its beautiful friendly people. Dominica is exposed to high level risks due to meteorological and geophysical hazards as is the case with most small island states in the Caribbean, and with increased vulnerability to weather and climate related disasters, climate change poses an increased threat to sustainable development strategies.

 In September 2017 the island nation was scarred unprecedented by the fury of Hurricane Maria; tearing off roofs, smashing through walls, uprooting trees, lifting roads and even claiming lives of innocent people. In a few short hours this tropical paradise with a burgeoning tourism sector was reduced to rubble and abject poverty. With 90% of the buildings destroyed, 226% of the country’s GDP lost , over 70 deaths and complete power and water outages for months. Some households are still without electricity today. In that moment many thought that Dominica was finished.

As a result of catastrophic climatic events, to protect its greatest assets and consistent with its vision to create the world’s first climate resilient nation, the government of Dominica took an ambitious step to ban plastics and styrofoam single-use containers by January 2019. This decision builds on an earlier intitiative to become the world’s first climate resilient country on the front line of tackling climate change.

“We have a unique opportunity to be an example to the world, an example of how an entire nation rebounds from disaster, and how an entire nation can be climate resilient for the future” Skerrit said at a press conference in Dominica last year. According to estimates from a 2015 study published in Science, eight million tonnes of  plastic flow into the world’s ocean’s every year. But Dominica hopes that its pristine waters will continue being a refuge for some of the ocean’s majestic animals.

Pristine Hampstead beach in the north east coast of Dominica. 

This ban will not only protect the island from excess garbage, but it will also protect its surrounding seas and marine life as it adopts measures that will help in the preservation of the environment and safeguard the country against future natural disasters.

What is your country doing?