10 Dec Everything Matters – The Truth About Sustainability
SEEING THE CHANGE NEEDED
There’s no planet B. Or a magical drain that leads to an invisible dimension where anything we pour down it just disappears; or a never-ending hole in the ground that just consumes anything we put into it; or a body of water that is not connected to anything around it.
The fact is that there is no getting away from ourselves, our habits, our beliefs or our lifestyle.
One could also get very deep and extend this to the revered spiritual law, first coined by Hermes Trismegistus, ‘As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul’ – which corresponds to the fact that everything is connected. We are all connected. Every reality we experience and create is all connected.
BEING THE CHANGING
And this is why, no matter what you believe, what anyone believes, we have to take responsibility for our actions and choices. Everything we do on this planet has an effect on this planet. Some of the potential environmental horrors that lie in store for us are just too much to comprehend and so we lie to ourselves, and suddenly believe in magic by way of the fact that problems will just disappear. That we can keep destroying the oceans and overfishing, but that in the future, there will still be life in the oceans. The reality is: if we do not change our ways, there will not be life left in the oceans, or in the forests. And so, we could carry on and on. But by virtue of you reading this, I am most probably preaching to the converted, so I will get to my point.
My point is that even with the incredible array of ethical products we stock, there is still so much room for improvement in the way we consume. While we are the first company in the world to sell our products according to the strict ethical guidelines that we have, such as palm oil, the very fact that we need to do this is because there is room for improvement. (Side note on the palm oil: we have a filter for palm oil because we still have a few products with palm oil in it, but are working hard at pushing back at suppliers to exclude it from their ranges).
We sell wooden products because they are better than plastic products. And even though the wooden products all come from sustainably managed projects to produce that wood, we are still cutting down trees for our consumption.
PARTNERING WITH GAME-CHANGERS
And this is why we have very carefully selected GreenPop to partner with during our festive celebrations this year. As a retailer, we feel it’s important to be involved in creating as much excitement and value for you as we can during these commercial events. We want the green choice to be the easy choice, but we want to be putting something back ‘in’, from all that we take ‘out.’
Greenpop is the much loved, award-winning registered non-profit organisation headquartered in Cape Town. They work to restore ecosystems and empower environmental stewards through reforestation, urban greening, sustainable development, and environmental art projects across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Greenpop was founded in 2010 and has since planted over 115,000 trees and inspired over 132,000 active citizens across South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania.
Greenpop aims to plant 500,000 trees to restore degraded forest areas, increase biodiversity, and expand ecosystem services across Sub-Saharan Africa by 2025 through their programme, Forests for Life.
Forests provide vital services to both people and the planet, bolstering livelihoods, providing clean air and water, conserving biodiversity and responding to climate change. They act as a source of food, medicine, and fuel for more than one billion people. In addition to putting trees in the ground, they also reduce threats to restored areas by providing locally relevant support services including alien clearing, wood lot development, and alternative livelihoods training to ensure the sustainable management of our forests.
Throughout November and December, we will be donating towards their Forests For Life project for reforestation.
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