A couple of days ago, Anna Pollock, who is currently engaged in a deep inquiry into what ‘regenerative tourism’ might look like, sent Michelle Holliday, Giles Hutchins and me a message alerting us to a recent ‘trend report’ on regeneration by a major marketing and communications firm.
Read MoreThere is a Kenyan saying that ‘he who goes to Mombasa may never return’, for the Indian Ocean port has many charms and opportunities. Today the city’s sprawling slums are witness to a more general challenge: rural-urban migration. Much of this is due to environmental degradation and the effects of climate change in the rural hinterland.
Read MoreSo many of us have been exploring, in multiple spheres of our lives, new ways of being, doing, having, relating, and giving. We realize that humanity has reached an inflection point, an evolutionary bottleneck, that requires we transform our society’s business-as-usual or face unthinkable catastrophe.
Read MoreEarlier this month the world’s leading climate scientists released the most urgent warning on climate change to date. It describes the implications of our current warming trajectory, including dire food shortages, large-scale human migration and crises ranging from a mass die-off of coral reefs to increasingly extreme weather events.
Read MoreMarc Ian Barasch describes himself as ‘a social entrepreneur, a communicator, a meditator, a networker’. A glance at Wikipedia shows he is also an international thought-leader and innovator. The titles of ‘founder’ and ‘co-founder’ recur regularly beside well-grounded green initiatives, and his books and films span topics from holistic healing through the science of empathy to the phenomenology of dreams.
Read MoreMiyani-Pesa is our second community currency being used to create sustainable environmental service funding. Greenworld Campaign Kenya has been utilizing community currencies since it began. Our first program Eco-Pesa enabled community members to surpass impacts and tree planting numbers by over 5 times what was possible with Kenyan Shillings. Recently we have begun Miyani-Pesa which is continuously circulating into tree planting, community farming and myriad economic activity.
Read MoreWe all know the clock is ticking. The world's leading climate panel has called for radical transformation in the way we live on this precious planet--change at a speed and scale with "no documented historic precedent.” Last year I co-convened ReGen18, a gathering of 500 leaders in green enterprise, eco-activism, food systems, urban planning, and media. Co-sponsored by GWC…
It's been a tumultuous year in Kenya, where Green World Campaign has its African regional headquarters. Hundreds of people have been killed and wounded in terrorist attacks, though largely unremarked by the international press. In keeping with our practice of "planting seeds of spirit in the soil of the world,"Green World Campaign brought groups in coastal Kenya together to plant hundreds of trees to protect a sacred forest and grow trust.
Read MoreThis is a guest post from my friend and champion of the environment, Marc Barasch. He is a best-selling author who created the Green World Campaign to find the best projects around the world to help create and restore the world's rain forests. Here he tells us about his innovative "Text TREE" campaign.
Read MoreAfter Dickson Kamau the chairperson for the Rumuruti Forest Association visited one of our coastal sites to train people on Green Charcoal production, he was struck by the oil being pressed and got a full lesson in how to press his own oil. Dickson has since brought this affordable cold pressing technology back to Rumuruti where he is helping local farms plant crop that don't attract elephants.
Read MoreThe first week of August this year was an amazing chance for our communities to learn from an expert in indigenous vegetables. Thanks to March Baracsh (GWC's Founder and Director) for having the foresight and reach to put this all together from afar in the US. Thanks so much to Prof. Mary Abukutsa for traveling so far and inspiring people to farm sustainably and nutritiously!
Read MoreAfter working for years in northern Kenya with the Rumuruti Forest Association, a community of 5000 farming families dedicated to preserving and conserving their endangered woodlands, we were delighted to have their chairperson Dickson Kamau come to visit GWC communities on the Coast. We had arranged to teach Dickson's group how to produce "green" charcoal from agricultural waste with awardwinning M.I.T.-based group Takachar, and now he was.
Read MoreAmazing: One Day...1200 People... 20,000 Trees! More People, More Trees, than Ever Before Last week found the office staff of GWC-Kenya anxiously watching the sky every day, hoping for a break in the rain and then a recommencement of the rain perfectly timed around Thursday, May 15 th . The reason for this precise request from the atmosphere?
Read MoreMisalimu Bakari is a shining example of the Green World Campaign School Program in Kenya. Every year, students at Mbweka Primary School take home at least two trees to plant in their homesteads. Through their partnership with the Green World Campaign, students successfully raise trees from seeds to mature organisms.
Read MoreAthman Macheso has lived near the Pungu watershed his whole life. He is now a sub-chief for that area and spoke with us as we mapped the watershed. As a boy, he played in Lake Tseha, swimming and snacking on raw “toro,” a tuber similar to cassava which grows in the marshy parts of the lake. He remembers the watershed being surrounded by trees, pointing to a tree several stories high (one of the few left in the area) as an example of those which…
Read MoreWe recently spoke with Kunyeta Beja, a 36 year-old mother of 10 from Miyani, Kenya, who, like many subsistence farmers in rural Kenya, leads a precarious existence. Her husband sells peanuts in Mombasa Town, a 2 hour journey, so she's often left to care for the farm and children alone. She never completed secondary school, so she struggles to ensure her family survives and thrives with minimal income from the farm products she sells and her…
Read MoreSofia Chizi Mtunda and Hadija Jibebe embody the typical participant in a GWC supported farmers’ cooperative. Both are mid-thirties women with large families—Sofia has four children and Hadija has six. Both women have embraced GWC’s messages about the benefits of moringa trees for leaf consumption and oil production and have integrated both into their daily lives.
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