Farming has been a backbone of American economy for much of this country’s history. But the duty of feeding the nation is changing, and farming practices are changing along with it.
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What if building codes actually required new projects to enhance a certain number of ecosystem services — such as sequestering carbon, building topsoil, enhancing pollination, increasing biodiversity or purifying water and air? Is it possible that a city could be functionally indistinguishable from the wild landscape around it? And what if companies ultimately built factories that truly enhanced ecosystem services? These were the big questions that biologist and biomimicry expert Janine Benyus posed during her keynote presentation at the recent International Living Future Institute’s 2015 unConference in Seattle.
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Mansi Prakash’s bright idea has helped light up more than 5,000 homes in one rural village. Most college students don’t know what they want to major in, let alone what their mission in life might be. But New York University student Mansi Prakash’s goals couldn’t be clearer: to bring clean energy to developing nations, support education, and fight poverty. Not bad for a 20-year-old economics major who first witnessed the energy dilemma on a 2010 visit to her grandparents’ village in India and later founded the nonprofit Brighter Today. Most families have light bulbs—they just weren’t turning them on and using them,” Prakash recalls of her trip. “I was intrigued by this, and as I interacted with them more, I learned that this living condition stemmed from low incomes and electricity costs. For someone who couldn’t afford food three times a day, paying the high electricity bills was not an option.” An idea clicked for Prakash: Do away with the energy-efficient 60-watt incandescent bulbs that only work for two months and replace them with 11-watt compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs, which—while initially costing more at $2 per bulb instead of 20 cents—would last significantly longer, averaging three to four years. In the […]
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Women Of Green community is all about celebrating the many women who are leading the way in green, sustainability and social justice — from authors and artists, chefs and lawyers, activists, journalists, mommies, policy makers and social entrepreneurs. These women are here to make a difference and use their voices and talents to create meaningful change on behalf of the planet and future generations.
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Only 7% of investor money goes to women-led startups. We’re going to help crush those stats!! Folks, the Women Startup Challenge is on a roll. In Round I, over $315,000 was raised by the startups. A panel of judges consisting of investors and tech experts reviewed the 25 startups that raised the most money in Round I for viability and promise. Twelve women-led startups were chosen to move to the final round.
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Ecouterre interviews Linda Greer, Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Linda Greer ranks among the fashion industry’s leading “toxic avengers.” As director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s five-year-old “Clean by Design” initiative, Greer is on the front line of a sector burdened by high energy and water use and endemic, often catastrophic, pollution. Her Sisyphean task? To leverage the purchasing power of multinational brands and retailers to chip away at the environmental impacts of their manufacturing abroad, beginning with the biggest offender: China. As NRDC prepares to, in its own words, “aggressively expand” the program’s reach, Ecouterre caught up with Greer to learn about her “win-win” strategy, what the early days of Clean by Design were like, and how we can differentiate the “true-gooders” from the “green-washers” in a post–corporate-social-responsibility world. E: How did Clean by Design get its start? LG: In 2008, the president of NRDC asked me to develop a project that would help to reduce the heavy industrial air and water pollution in China and serve as a model the country could use to accelerate its efforts. To do so, I first selected an industry with a heavy environmental footprint. Textiles distinguished itself as one […]
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Karen Warner founded Big Head Farm in 2009, located in southwest Michigan. After experiencing the challenges of starting a farm and creating a viable business, Warner began thinking through ways to support new farmers and to protect small to mid-sized farms from going out of production. Warner is currently working to advance a farm accelerator model that would give farmers the resources and support they need to succeed from start-up to retirement.
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Women Of Green is proud to be a media partner in the 6th Annual Women In Green Forum to be held August 26th in Los Angeles, California. Promoted as a unique conference experience set in the hills of Los Angeles, the Women In Green Forum has emerged as the premier conference series highlighting women’s impact on the environmental industry.
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About Being Extraordinary in the Age of Vulnerability. As more and more of us splinter away from the corporate grind and put ourselves out there in the freelance world, and as we aim to be known and hired for the value we bring to business and to the world, we face the challenge of overcoming the concept of commodity pricing in the marketplace, or rather, being the lowest common denominator. If your competitor charges X for her services, how can you possibly charge Y? Let me tell you how: It’s not about price point. It’s about value.
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This month we’re all about sharing stories of girls and women around the world who are beating inequality and empowering their communities along the way. Well, here’s one about a different sort of female empowerment—the kind that lights up the night, makes light bulbs shine bright, and literally powers communities. It also features donkeys lugging solar panels around the Kenyan savanna, which is not a sentence I get to write everyday.
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