Your search for healthier, affordable organic and natural food for – that is nourishing, tasty and good for the environment ends here. Mother Earth is launched … for fashionable choices in garments and accessories that are natural and stylish as well as sustainable and fair, …for gifts and home décor that keep our green hand skills alive.
Industree and Future Group present Mother Earth, India’s first Store focusing on Sustainability, both environmental and social. Offering you sensible options, along with reputed partners like Sewa, Sasha, Cottage Industries Emporium, amongst others. Browse through three floors of exciting green choices – that combine the best of hand skills and natural materials with best of contemporary design.
When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.
But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not onepeer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.
Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say,the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled inhistory.
The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
India like the rest of the world has not escaped the impacts of the current downturn. The sudden rush in retrenchment and forced salary cuts is an indication of the prevailing financial meltdown the result of Corporate greed and irresponsibility. It needs to be emphasized that not all in the Corporate sector are to blame While middle level and junior staff have worked long hours expecting rewards for their efforts top management have given themselves unearned bonuses. What is needed now is leadership with vision to steer the country outof this situation. A vision that speaks to small and medium-sized businesses and at the same time one that attends to the pressing requirements of our community.
India fortunately has an active and growing social enterprises sector which is engaged in delivering the much required services to the community. Many of these social entrepreneurs have earned distinction and awards for the good work they have done and continue to do in the service of the people. Among these is Dr Harish Hande whose company SELCO, using Solar Technology, has lit up hundreds of thousands of households with ‘clean’ lighting. About 65 to 75 percent of the beneficiaries are small farmers who earn between Rs 100 to 200 a day After reaching 80,000 clients across Karnataka and Kerala SELCO moved into Gujarat. Solar electrification has brought in brought about a dramatic change in the social and economic lives of the beneficiaries. It has helped children secure better academic results since they can now study at night. It has increased livelihoods and incomes of night-time vegetable vendors. Additionally it has ended the use of dirty and dangerous kerosene lamps. For the environment, the 80,000 systems deployed avoid emissions of approximately 24,000 tones of CO2 equivalent per year that would have been released by the use of kerosene lamps.
Dr Hande’s efforts have earned him the ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year’ 2007 by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the Nand and Jeet Khemka Foundation Recently SELCO won the FT- ArcelorMittal ‘Boldness in Business’ award in the CSR category In Ahmedabad Rajendra Joshi’s Saath works with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to ensure that slum residents receive basic sanitation, water and drainage services at the household level and paved roads and street lights at a community level. It has created mechanisms through which the urban poor can save and pay the user charges. Saath is also demonstrating models of public-private partnership where the urban poor are key stakeholders. It tailored profit-based solutions for electricity supply in Ahmedabad’s slums by altering the user fee, increasing business volumes and bringing in government contribution. As a result, 200,000 slum households today pay for electricity with the business house, Torrent Power, reporting a 30% increase in profits.
In Bihar, Jharkhand, Delhi and Rajasthan. Arbind Singh’s Social Enterprise, Nidan is helping to build profitable businesses and ‘people’s organizations’ which are led by asset less, informal workers. Nidan, over the past years has launched a range of cooperatives, Self Help Groups (SHGs), trade unions, and individual and community businesses These have positioned unorganized workers as legitimate competitors in globalizing markets of India. In 12 years, Nidan has launched and promoted 20 independent businesses and organizations that are governed and owned through shares by 60,000 urban and rural poor members. The enterprises include 4618 SHGS, 75 market committees, 19 co-operatives, two societies and one company—all envisioned and led by a complex of waste workers, rag pickers, vegetable vendors, construction labourers, domestic helpers, micro- farmers, street traders and other marginalized occupation groups. The economic downturn is also hurting many of such enterprises. Social enterprises, however are not seeking charity; they want the support of business to complement their roles Business can play a proactive role in creating and promoting social enterprises. This they can do be creating social intrapreneurs within the organisation who, with the blessing of management, seek opportunities for their companies while using the core skills and resources of their employers as the basis for their projects.
Social Intrapreneurs are creating and delivering new products, services and business models. These not only generate business value but address some of society’s most pressing challenges. They compel their companies to look out of their comfort zone to see the strategic risks and opportunities that exist beyond the purview of traditional business units.
John Elkington, founder and chief entrepreneur at SustainAbility, believes companies should try to give employees space and permission to think about social innovations, and then mentor, coach and support the most promising intrapreneurs and initiatives. "They might need to select projects with the coldness of a venture capitalist and build a portfolio of projects with different levels of risk, accepting that some of them are bound to fail," he says.
To help to strengthen social intrapreneurs to counter the present recession Governments can also pitch in to fund part of the costs of social intrapreneurs This will provide the company a new source of income during the downturn, the community gets the benefit of much needed services and products.. It is now generally agreed that we need both the social entrepreneurs and social intrapreneurs. While ensuring societal change, social intrapreneurs are also necessary for a company’s survival in an environment of rising expectations of the role of business in society.
Vinay Umarji, Business Standard / Mumbai/ Ahmedabad May 05, 2009, 0:34 IST
As part of its focus on developing startups across the world, Goldman Sachs is looking at training and development of around 29 select women entrepreneurs in India. The effort is part of Goldman Sachs '10,000 Women' initiative, founded on the basis of a research conducted by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, and others, which found that educating women is one of the most effective ways to increase economic growth and improve living standards in developing economies.
According to Goldman Sachs, studies conclude that, on average, a one percentage point increase in female education raises annual GDP growth rates by 0.2 percentage point. Under the initiative, Goldman Sachs is selecting specific women entrepreneurs around the world including developing countries like India and Latin American countries.
"The public, private and non-profit sectors are convening around the idea that opening economic opportunity to women has a tremendous multiplier effect that leads to both social progress and economic growth. We are seeing a growing global movement for women’s economic empowerment. Armed with the research conducted by World Bank, the United Nations and others, we designed 10,000 Women with two goals: to provide business and management education to 10,000 Women and to increase the capacity of business education around the world by training faculty and creating 200 locally relevant case studies," said Dina Habib Powell, managing director and global head - corporate engagement at Goldman Sachs.
In India, Goldman Sachs has partnered with NEN, London Business School (LBS) and Indian School of Business (ISB). Having completed a 150-hour certificate program in entrepreneurship, including three weeks of classroom instruction and nine weeks of mentoring and on-the-job support, the select 29 women entrepreneurs have presented their business plans developed as part of the coursework which the organisation will help expand.
Powell added that in future, Goldman Sachs will be introducing a measurement system that will measure changes in participants' businesses such as revenue or employment numbers.
In the beginning there were small beginnings. Over the centuries these
grew into organizations with budgets larger than the national product
of many countries. The captains of these giant industries became lords
and masters of all that they surveyed. They became rich, arrogant and
uncaring. The financial success of their companies was their goal.
Peoples’ suffering, damage to the environment etc had no meaning for
them in their mad rush to collect and store wealth.
There was a Gandhi, the father of the Indian Nation, who realized that
independence would create a new breed of the rich and powerful. He was
aware that these neo rich will soon forget their days in poverty and
want and start behaving like lords. To caution them he came up with
the theory of Trusteeship He told the rich and the powerful that the
excessive wealth they have has to be held in trust for the welfare of
the poor and the needy.
The concept of Trusteeship was given shape as Corporate Social
Responsibility by western writers who realized, as did Gandhi decades
earlier, that wealth cannot exist in a desert of poverty. That
business has to think of the well being of fellow humans if it wants
to survive and grow. Many forward thinking businesses took to the path
of responsible business and were serious about the concern for their
fellow beings and the environment.
There were however many times more who went on doing business as usual
churning out wealth and claiming high profits, large salaries and
bonuses. They cared two figs for the impact of their business on
fellow humans or the environment. They created the makings of a
financial disaster. We are now in the midst of a disaster created by
greed.
The last World Economic Forum discussed the fact that Trust in
Business had hit rock bottom. The Edelman Trust Barometer revealed
that. 62 percent of those interviewed across 20 countries said they
trust companies less this year than last. Just 38 percent say they now
trust business. Only 31 percent trust banks. Trust in our third sector
NGOs rose by 12 percent to 54 percent.
Meanwhile all over the world business is cutting down costs by
indulging in large scale retrenchment. In many cases employees have
perforce to accept salary cuts ranging in some case up to 50 percent.
Big business is running around with the begging bowl asking for
government doles to bale them out of the mess of their own creation.
Most governments are offering doles in the mistaken belief that it
will save industry and cut unemployment. The good sign is that
government, particularly in the USA and UK, are realizing that big
business alone is not answer to the present crisis or to the growing
unemployment. Possibly for the first time ever the President of the
United States of America has taken steps to promote social
entrepreneurship through the Office of Social Innovation. He has
signed a Serve America Act that includes a Social Innovation Fund to
seed new social enterprises and expand existing ones. He has also put
aside tens of billions of dollars for green initiatives that will
undoubtedly cultivate more promising social ventures.
Perhaps most of all, he has used his bully pulpit to highlight the
stories of social entrepreneurs, inspiring young people to follow a
new model for making a difference.
Osama’s commitment follows a global trend among foreign leaders to
focus on social entrepreneurs as a key ally of government in
delivering services. Indeed, for years now, the Labour government in
Britain has made social enterprise a centerpiece of governmental
departments from health to the environment to social services.
Speaking at Oxford Jeff Skoll said “Social entrepreneurs have
arrived. It is hard to imagine that it was just two years ago when I
described social entrepreneurs as “one of the world’s best kept
secrets. The secret is out. Several weeks ago, a businessman gave a
keynote address at the World Economic Forum, in which he called for a
huge expansion of what he called Creative Capitalism—a concept that
draws liberally from social entrepreneurship.
Last April, a television host devoted a whole show to profiling three
groundbreaking social entrepreneurs and drawing attention to their
projects. And a few months ago, an American politician gave a speech
in which he proposed creating a national Social Entrepreneurship
Agency. If you’re wondering: how much influence can three people
have? Well, what if I told you that the businessman was Bill Gates,
the TV host was Oprah Winfrey, and the politician was Barack Obama?”
Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times after attending the World
Economic Forum in Davos, “Today, the most remarkable young people are
the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll
up their sleeves to address it in new ways. There is no limit to the
number of social entrepreneurs who can make this planet a better
place.”
Says Jeff Skoll “Social entrepreneurs have two kinds of power. One is
the power to bring specific change through the work that you do. The
other is the power to inspire - to bring other people and
organizations to work together; to scale solutions; and to find new
ways to solve problems. But it’s going to take people who are
passionate, who are creative, and above all, people who are completely
incapable of understanding any combination of the words “it’s
impossible,” “it can’t be done,” or “why bother even trying?” In
practice, social entrepreneurship often involves starting small and
leveraging scant resources to create change - whether in environmental
science, feeding the poor, or facing down disease.
The bottom line is: social entrepreneurs are on a roll and, despite
the relative small size of the field, offer considerable potential for
breakthrough solutions. But they need money, partners, and the TLC of
big business. And it would help if government policies lined up behind
them. Through a quantitative survey of 100 social entrepreneurs around
the world, SustainAbility learned about their challenges as well as
their perspectives on the opportunities - and barriers to progress.
The survey shows that entrepreneurs face a variety of limitations, but
access to capital was cited by 72 percent of respondents as a primary
challenge. Promotion and marketing of organizations and programs was
the second most frequently cited issue (41 percent). In addition, many
respondents noted the issue of developing their organizations and
balancing their need for talented professionals who also were
passionate about the mission and entrepreneurship.
Governments and business need to take a new look at Social enterprise.
Government needs to draw up new policies and programmes and create
infrastructure, financial and physical to encourage civil society
organizations to create more social entrepreneurs.
Yes the Social Entrepreneur has arrived.
Green Unplugged - The festival to contemplate, connect & celebrate Nature, Life & Culture. This week we will like to share a wonderful film "B.L.A.C.K.- An Aboriginal Song of Hip-hop" Please watch here:
Synopsis: B.L.A.C.K. is a cipher scribed by independent and Indigenous Hip-hop artist, Wire MC, who urges his audience to fathom what it might mean to be Black in contemporary Australia. Through interview and observation the song is visually and dialectically deconstructed to speak of contemporary Aboriginal blackness, politics and culture. The filmmaker with his own roots in Hip-hop aligns himself with Wire MC and through a rapped narrative unravels the empowering acronym, Born Long Ago Creation's Keeper.
wishing you peace & light,
Yogesh on behalf of, The Festival Team - Culture Unplugged Studios
If you're addicted to having the hottest new geeky gadgets, help is at hand. You can assist in saving the planet through sheer laziness, or if you want to put a positive spin on it, you can ethically choose to hang on to last year's gadget instead of upgrading. And if you need the support of fellow reforming gadget geeks, Last Year's Model is the networking site for you.
http://lastyearsmodel.org/
But there are some purchases that are unavoidable. The Good Guide might help you make choices on the basis of health, environmental, and social impacts. How does that toothpaste you're using compare with best practice?
If you're looking for an online community that can help with suggestions for practical action for greening the planet, CoolTribe is an international social networking site with a green conscience. In the future CoolTribe also hopes to provide a directory of ethical products and services.
http://www.cooltribe.com/
highlight this for world fair trade day
"A simple thing like buying a product has consequences far beyond feeding your family, making you feel good or giving you something new to talk about. Buying a product, whether it's the fruit of one person's labour or the result of super-efficient mechanization is a vote for the organization that provided you with the product. To you it’s just a banana, just a T-shirt, or just a bar of soap; to a business it's a response to consumer demand, and money in the bank for investors. But poverty, climate change and economic crisis are the result of the products we buy and the businesses we choose to support. If you buy Fair Trade products, change becomes inevitable."
Sounds fair? With this challenge the World Fair Trade Day organizers are encouraging you to start a local event, or join an existing one on May 9th. There's a nine-step guide to running an event, plus a listing of events already planned.
we believe that nature provies for all of us - as long we give back as much as we take.
MotherEarth [was known as Industree] is a design led craft based company and have been working with natural fibres for over 15 years in retail and in exports, operating out of Bangalore. We currently work with a large base of rural artisans and design, develop and market a wide range of furniture & home accessories hand-crafted in natural fibre. We have our own stores - one each in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore and also supply to major retailers in India like Home Town, Home Stop, Central, Landmark, etc. The aim is to work with craftspeople in a self-sustainable fashion – marketing rural skills to urban markets. With this intent Industree is now scaling up and broadening its product offering to include garments (woven, embellished or stitched by SHG’s or rural artisans), food (organic and natural) and a wider range of home linen apart from our range of natural fiber products as well as a large range of handicraft decor, furniture and gift items.
INDIA'S FIRST GREEN STORE in Bangalore
