PDF - Ever Manifesto

EVE R CON SC IOUS
i
EVER MANIFESTO
WALK UP AND DOWN THE AISLE OF ANY
SUPERMARKET OR STORE, AND WE ARE PRESENTED
WITH MORE CHOICE THAN EVER. GO ONLINE,
AND ANY WORLDLY DESIRE IS JUST A CLICK AWAY.
WE’RE QUITE USED TO GETTING WHAT WE WANT, WHEN WE
WANT IT. YET ARE WE AWARE OF WHERE AND
HOW OUR DESIRES ARE MADE? THAT EVERY TIME WE BUY
SOMETHING, WE’RE ENDORSING A MEANS OF
MAKING THAT HAS AN IMPACT ON OUR EARTH AND
ALL THAT CALL IT HOME?
Being aware of the power of our choices is
what we call conscious consumerism. Whether
it’s a garment, a gadget or even a sandwich,
every time we buy, we are making a declaration of the kind of world we would like to live
in now and in the future. It’s to recognise that
with more choice comes more responsibility.
taking better care of what we already have, or
whether there are new methods of designing
and making things that could even help the
Earth and its economy.
Nobody is saying it’s easy, for businesses
or their customers — though we’ve discovered a number of things that could be put in
motion which would help make it easier for
us to decide how we spend our money. The
most important being a labelling system that
makes clear how and where our things are
made — for both brands and the buyer.
Yet nobody’s perfect — we live busy lives, and
quite often the best option isn’t the most convenient, or the most affordable. Sometimes,
you may question whether your choices
even have an impact in the grand scheme of
things. One of the paradoxes of living in an era
with so many of our voices swirling between
the satellites that frame our planet, is that
we have little time to consider our sense of
self, or our intentions. With that in mind, Ever
Conscious is a call for self-reflection around
these issues — a pause to stop to consider
how these choices could be made easier for
us, what we could improve in our day to day
lives, and how these decisions could determine the change we want to see in the world.
As an industry worth $1.5 trillion to the world’s
economy, employing millions of people across
the globe in a supply chain that reaches into
the farthest corners of our planet, Ever Conscious has a specific focus on fashion, the
design discipline that defines our identity more
than any other. Yet we also reach out to food,
flying and the financial system, a game we’ve
invented with one principal directive — to maximise profits no matter the consequences.
Within the pages of this magazine, we explore
some of the complexities and challenges of
this consumer conundrum. We survey the
opinions and experiences of environmental activists, business leaders, retail gurus,
designers and tastemakers, and debate
whether responsibility lies with customers or
businesses. We question if sustainability is
linked to making and buying less, if it’s about
Ever Conscious believes it’s time to reinvent the
game. Businesses become successful by listening to their customers. Through making our
voices heard and voting with our wallets, we
can bring about change — let those businesses
know your desire for a more transparently produced and ethically responsible product on
your backs. As after all, is the current situation
something we really want to sustain?
#everconscioushm
CONTENTS
Seeing Double Carsten Höller
6 Honesty is the Best Policy Bruno Pieters
8 The Avocado Dilemma Elettra Wiedemann
10 You Can Have It All Lewis Perkins
14 The Power of Now Amber Valletta
16 CEASE AND DESIST Dianna Cohen
18 Trade Not Aid Liya Kebede
20 Searching for Solutions Yves Béhar
22 The Kale Lobby Cecilia Dean & David Selig
24 The Future of Fashion Julie Gilhart
26 Less Me, More We Mimi Xu
28 Live Large, Live Smaller Graham Hill
30 A Stitch in Time Pharrell Williams
32 the Violence of Creation Pamela Love
34 The Four Seasons Daniel de la Falaise
36 A Green Industrial Revolution Ben Goldsmith
38 Love Your Clothes,
Look After Them Eva Kruse
40 The Bigger Picture Daniel Pinchbeck
44 What Lies Beneath Claire Nouvian
48 CULTURAL EXCHANGE Lafcadio Cortesi
50 The Revolution will be Televised Fabiola Beracasa
52 Apathy is Over Matthew Stone
54 Nothing is Impossible Lily Cole
56 Nobody’s perfect Elizabeth von Guttman & Alexia Niedzielski
58 Further Reading
4
Seeing
Double
by Xerxes Cook
WHEN EVER MANIFESTO APPROACHED
CARSTEN HÖLLER TO CREATE AN ARTWORK
WHICH EXPLORES NOTIONS OF
CONSCIOUSNESS FOR THE COVER OF THIS
MAGAZINE, THE BELGIAN-GERMAN ARTIST
SUGGESTED RECREATING A FAMOUS
SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT TO GAUGE LEVELS
OF SELF-AWARENESS IN ANIMALS.
The experiment, originally devised in the 1970s, saw Carsten draw a dot on the forehead of
Sina, a 14-year-old chimpanzee who is somewhat of a celebrity in her native Germany.
He then positioned a mirror in front of Sina to see whether she would try to rub
the dot off. If she did — and Sina did — it would indicate that the animal recognised her
reflection. That raised a further question: if is she is aware of herself, can an animal
be held responsible for its actions?
For Ever Conscious, Carsten devised two
we have a brain, and that consciousness is
distinct set-ups for his experiment. The first
a phenomenon related to it, but despite all
was a close recreation of the conditions of
that, the experts can’t pin consciousness
the original 1970s experiment, conceived
down to a mechanistic principle. “The ‘mateand conducted by the evolutionary psychol- rial’ of it is unknown,” as Carsten puts it.
ogist Gordon Gallup Jr, in which a mirror was
placed in the hands of the chimpanzee. The “Consciousness, personality, and the ways
second set-up involved embedding a lens
in which we develop our sense of self is
into a hole cut out of the mirror, in order to
something that both science and philosophy
capture a direct point-of-view image of any
have struggled to define,” he continues. “It’s
moment of self-recognition.
something that’s unsayable, untranslatable
— and so it may be better to embrace our
With the dot on the great ape’s forehead
incapacity to comprehend through looking
echoing the bindi of Hinduism — a sign that
at an ape, who is so far and so close.” As an
a person is in touch with the “concealed
artist, creating works that have taken the
wisdom” of the third eye — Carsten’s image
form of 60 foot tall slides in the Tate Modis loaded with meanings that are as hard to
ern’s Turbine Hall, and a half-Congolese,
define as the nature of consciousness itself. half-Western nightclub with décor from
Carsten has a longstanding expertise and
each country presented on opposite sides of
interest in perception and the way non- each other, Carsten is interested in explorhuman animals think and interact: before
ing this mystery of the mind as a means to
he became an artist, he had trained and “get out of the rationality system” we live in.
practiced as an agricultural entomologist
specialising in olfactory communication — While acknowledging the benefits this sysi.e., he studied how insects smell. In one
tem has brought us to date and the technolsense, his work with Sina is an exploration
ogy we have created that’s made our lives
of “the double,” the way the ‘other’ is so
so much easier, our concept of the self is
often also a reflection of ourselves.
something we usually take for granted.
Carsten believes we have the opportunity
Gallup’s original 1970s experiments found
to see what lies beyond this utilitarian logic.
that other animals, like dolphins and Afri- “Consciousness and its opposites are our
can grey parrots, also demonstrated levels
tools to explore what else could there be,
of self-awareness and “a proper concept
and where we could get to.” It’s time to think
of themselves,” but it’s the great apes with
outside the box.
whom we share 98.5 percent of our DNA that
reveal the most about the nature of what
we call consciousness. It is an observable
fact all humans experience, but the concept
remains an enigma to current methods of
thinking. Modern science understands that
BRUNO
PIETERS
Higg Index — Taking its name from
that of the elusive particle present
in all of life — the Higgs boson —
the Higg Index is an open-source tool
for the clothing and footwear industry
to measure sustainability across
international and often very complex
supply chains. Launched in 2012
by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition,
a non-profit organisation founded
by a group of fashion companies,
academic experts, non-governmental
organisations and the American
government’s Environmental
Protection Agency, the Higg Index
not only provides a standard for
companies to assess the
environmental and social impact
of their products, in the future, it will
also be used to communicate a
product’s sustainability and impact
to consumers. So far, the index
has enabled more than 100 companies
— over a third of the global apparel
and footwear market — to identify
opportunities to reduce environmental
and ethical harm, and improve
long-term sustainability throughout
their supply chains.
www.apparelcoalition.org/higgindex
by Rana Toofanian
THE FORMER ARTISTIC
DIRECTOR OF HUGO BOSS,
TOOK A ONE-YEAR
SABBATICAL FROM THE
FASHION INDUSTRY IN 2010
WHICH HE SPENT EXPLORING
SOUTH INDIA. There, he noticed how
people wore clothes that were grown, woven and
sewn from sources they could identify around them, and
wondered if such transparency could be applied
to high fashion on an international scale. His epiphany
led him to set up Honest By.
Honest By is the first company in the world
to share the full cost breakdown of its products in addition to how, where and by whom
each item was made, even to the point of
listing the origins and the price at which
constituent elements such as yarn or buttons were sourced, and their subsequent
point of sale mark-up. Honest By offers not
only clothing by Bruno Pieters but a number
of designers that share Bruno’s transparent ethos, and has become a model platform for how brands can share their design
processes so customers can shop in a completely conscious way.
Are you politically engaged? Do you vote?
I haven’t voted in the last few years. No.
Would that change if there was a candidate
or party who shared similar views on sustainability issues? It would affect my voting definitely, but I don’t believe in politics. I
believe it starts with the individual — that you
can really create what you want to see happen. If you say, ‘I’m against child labour,’ then
you don’t buy brands that would be involved
in that, or are not transparent about it.
Big brands can
get anything
done if there is
the demand. they
can order
thousands of
metres of a
sustainable fabric
and still turn
a profit.
So it’s more about individuals than systems?
Right now, it’s about an individual’s choice. Yet
there is frustration because there are people
who would love to vote every time they shop
and send out that signal, but they can’t afford
it. Or they haven’t found out how to do it with
the budget that they have — I understand
that. For brands then, they shouldn’t look at
their numbers and think, ‘Oh, the public is still
enjoying our product.’ They should think about
what’s going on with that frustration. It’s not
true that if their sales are good, the public
doesn’t care whether their products were produced in an ethically conscious way. There’s a
difference between being in a state of shock
and not caring. Before I became conscious
about the state of the world, it was overwhelming what was happening to the animals,
to children, to the environment. I just didn’t
know where to begin. I was in a state of shock.
When I woke up from that, the first thing I did
was stop shopping from those brands.
Yet if you are a struggling student, you may
not be able to afford that sustainably produced white t-shirt that is three times the
price of another that looks exactly the same
but was produced in troubling conditions.
In order to be conscious of your actions, and
your relationship with others and the environment, you need to have time to think. People
in India can be very enlightened about these
issues, but they don’t have a dime. That’s why
I always say: ‘The life we are choosing.’ We
are so busy, and we don’t have the time to sit
down and think about what’s going on or to
decide, ‘I’m going to take a sabbatical.’ or ‘I’m
going to change my job because I don’t want
life to pass me by.’
Is there anything you feel guilty about? Do
you have any regrets for changing your
life so dramatically? I’m not guilty. I’m more
grateful. Grateful for the incredible life I have,
the choices I’ve made and the awareness
I have — because of that, I made different
choices. I went in a different direction with my
career, my life, my personal life. I’m grateful for
the dark moments that made me aware.
Ethicallyproduced fashion
is like organic
food: if you taste it,
it’s better than
industrial food; It
has more flavour.
What do you look for in a product or a service? I look for transparency. I want to know
where the product was made and who made
it. I don’t want to support child labour and animal cruelty. And for the environment, I would
like to see an organic certification. I’m not
impressed by a brand name at all. Today, all
the famous brands have been bought by conglomerates. Their heritage is the price point,
not how their products were made. I’ve been
in the business too long to live in the illusion.
So how do you define success? I realised
A lot of brands and designers don’t believe
what’s most important in life is to know who
that sustainable materials are as good or
you are. I’m a human being, and my purpose
alluring as traditional textiles. That is not true.
is to be a human being and to build my life
But right now there is not enough demand for
around the awareness that there is nothing
it. If tomorrow a big brand were to say, ‘We
out there that will punish or save us. And if I
want all of this fabric,’ or a designer would
am to enjoy this life, it’s up to me to make the
say, ‘These are my designs. Give me this in
right choices. I believe in the sentence: ‘Be
a sustainable version,’ they would get it. And
the change you want to see in the world.’ And
the end product would be as good or better
my lifestyle is that way — I won’t buy leather [than if they were using traditional textiles].
and fur anymore, or eat animals. I recycle. If I
It’s like organic food: if you taste it, it’s better
buy furniture, it will be vintage. My energy at than industrial food. It has more flavour. And
home — the electricity and gas — is all 100
it’s the same thing with fashion, but right now
percent renewable. If I can do it, so can you. the choice for the consumer is limited. If conIt’s just about changing your contract with life. sumers were to demand that all products be
For instance, becoming vegan was important
manufactured and sourced from sustainable
because I couldn’t stand those images of ani- materials and production processes, then the
mals getting slaughtered for meat or fur. And
big brands will get it done and can order thouI used to use fur in my collections. So basi- sands of metres of a sustainable fabric. They
cally I was lying to myself year after year, and
can get anything done if there is the demand
it’s such a habit to lie to yourself. I did it in my — and still turn a profit.
career and in my relationships when I said yes
but meant no.
www.honestby.com
I don’t believe in
politics. I believe it
starts with the
individual — that
you can really
create what you want
to see happen.
BRUNO
PIETERS
Higg Index — Taking its name from
that of the elusive particle present
in all of life — the Higgs boson —
the Higg Index is an open-source tool
for the clothing and footwear industry
to measure sustainability across
international and often very complex
supply chains. Launched in 2012
by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition,
a non-profit organisation founded
by a group of fashion companies,
academic experts, non-governmental
organisations and the American
government’s Environmental
Protection Agency, the Higg Index
not only provides a standard for
companies to assess the
environmental and social impact
of their products, in the future, it will
also be used to communicate a
product’s sustainability and impact
to consumers. So far, the index
has enabled more than 100 companies
— over a third of the global apparel
and footwear market — to identify
opportunities to reduce environmental
and ethical harm, and improve
long-term sustainability throughout
their supply chains.
www.apparelcoalition.org/higgindex
by Rana Toofanian
THE FORMER ARTISTIC
DIRECTOR OF HUGO BOSS,
TOOK A ONE-YEAR
SABBATICAL FROM THE
FASHION INDUSTRY IN 2010
WHICH HE SPENT EXPLORING
SOUTH INDIA. There, he noticed how
people wore clothes that were grown, woven and
sewn from sources they could identify around them, and
wondered if such transparency could be applied
to high fashion on an international scale. His epiphany
led him to set up Honest By.
Honest By is the first company in the world
to share the full cost breakdown of its products in addition to how, where and by whom
each item was made, even to the point of
listing the origins and the price at which
constituent elements such as yarn or buttons were sourced, and their subsequent
point of sale mark-up. Honest By offers not
only clothing by Bruno Pieters but a number
of designers that share Bruno’s transparent ethos, and has become a model platform for how brands can share their design
processes so customers can shop in a completely conscious way.
Are you politically engaged? Do you vote?
I haven’t voted in the last few years. No.
Would that change if there was a candidate
or party who shared similar views on sustainability issues? It would affect my voting definitely, but I don’t believe in politics. I
believe it starts with the individual — that you
can really create what you want to see happen. If you say, ‘I’m against child labour,’ then
you don’t buy brands that would be involved
in that, or are not transparent about it.
Big brands can
get anything
done if there is
the demand. they
can order
thousands of
metres of a
sustainable fabric
and still turn
a profit.
So it’s more about individuals than systems?
Right now, it’s about an individual’s choice. Yet
there is frustration because there are people
who would love to vote every time they shop
and send out that signal, but they can’t afford
it. Or they haven’t found out how to do it with
the budget that they have — I understand
that. For brands then, they shouldn’t look at
their numbers and think, ‘Oh, the public is still
enjoying our product.’ They should think about
what’s going on with that frustration. It’s not
true that if their sales are good, the public
doesn’t care whether their products were produced in an ethically conscious way. There’s a
difference between being in a state of shock
and not caring. Before I became conscious
about the state of the world, it was overwhelming what was happening to the animals,
to children, to the environment. I just didn’t
know where to begin. I was in a state of shock.
When I woke up from that, the first thing I did
was stop shopping from those brands.
Yet if you are a struggling student, you may
not be able to afford that sustainably produced white t-shirt that is three times the
price of another that looks exactly the same
but was produced in troubling conditions.
In order to be conscious of your actions, and
your relationship with others and the environment, you need to have time to think. People
in India can be very enlightened about these
issues, but they don’t have a dime. That’s why
I always say: ‘The life we are choosing.’ We
are so busy, and we don’t have the time to sit
down and think about what’s going on or to
decide, ‘I’m going to take a sabbatical.’ or ‘I’m
going to change my job because I don’t want
life to pass me by.’
Is there anything you feel guilty about? Do
you have any regrets for changing your
life so dramatically? I’m not guilty. I’m more
grateful. Grateful for the incredible life I have,
the choices I’ve made and the awareness
I have — because of that, I made different
choices. I went in a different direction with my
career, my life, my personal life. I’m grateful for
the dark moments that made me aware.
Ethicallyproduced fashion
is like organic
food: if you taste it,
it’s better than
industrial food; It
has more flavour.
What do you look for in a product or a service? I look for transparency. I want to know
where the product was made and who made
it. I don’t want to support child labour and animal cruelty. And for the environment, I would
like to see an organic certification. I’m not
impressed by a brand name at all. Today, all
the famous brands have been bought by conglomerates. Their heritage is the price point,
not how their products were made. I’ve been
in the business too long to live in the illusion.
So how do you define success? I realised
A lot of brands and designers don’t believe
what’s most important in life is to know who
that sustainable materials are as good or
you are. I’m a human being, and my purpose
alluring as traditional textiles. That is not true.
is to be a human being and to build my life
But right now there is not enough demand for
around the awareness that there is nothing
it. If tomorrow a big brand were to say, ‘We
out there that will punish or save us. And if I
want all of this fabric,’ or a designer would
am to enjoy this life, it’s up to me to make the
say, ‘These are my designs. Give me this in
right choices. I believe in the sentence: ‘Be
a sustainable version,’ they would get it. And
the change you want to see in the world.’ And
the end product would be as good or better
my lifestyle is that way — I won’t buy leather [than if they were using traditional textiles].
and fur anymore, or eat animals. I recycle. If I
It’s like organic food: if you taste it, it’s better
buy furniture, it will be vintage. My energy at than industrial food. It has more flavour. And
home — the electricity and gas — is all 100
it’s the same thing with fashion, but right now
percent renewable. If I can do it, so can you. the choice for the consumer is limited. If conIt’s just about changing your contract with life. sumers were to demand that all products be
For instance, becoming vegan was important
manufactured and sourced from sustainable
because I couldn’t stand those images of ani- materials and production processes, then the
mals getting slaughtered for meat or fur. And
big brands will get it done and can order thouI used to use fur in my collections. So basi- sands of metres of a sustainable fabric. They
cally I was lying to myself year after year, and
can get anything done if there is the demand
it’s such a habit to lie to yourself. I did it in my — and still turn a profit.
career and in my relationships when I said yes
but meant no.
www.honestby.com
I don’t believe in
politics. I believe it
starts with the
individual — that
you can really
create what you want
to see happen.
ELETTRA
WIEDEMANN
by Rana Toofanian
WINNER OF 2011’S YOUNG
ENVIRONMENTALIST AWARD, ELETTRA IS
THE FOUNDER OF ONE FRICKIN DAY,
AN INITIATIVE THAT MATCHES A
PERSON’S DONATION OF TIME, SERVICE
OR money WITH A CHARITY IN NEED.
She believes the Internet has changed the way people relate to
the environment and others — that once we are aware of the person that’s
paid peanuts to stitch your sweater, it’s very rare for us not to care.
Are there things you shouldn’t do that you
keep doing? I keep eating avocados in the
winter, and I probably shouldn’t.
The internet is really
changing the way people
relate to these issues —
the woman who is being paid
two cents an hour to
make your sweater, even
like twenty years ago
was very far away,
but now she can be on your
screen every morning.
These people are real.
How can the actions of an individual inspire
collective change? I try to get my immediate
sphere of family and friends involved. When I
had people over for Thanksgiving at the end
of last year, I spent a couple of weeks sourcing the entire meal from the local economy.
That’s not like changing the world, but for
those 16 people that are going to be eating
my food it is, and for the farmers who are
getting that money, it is. Those are the little
things I try to do.
Where do you think we are right now in terms
of being aware of how our actions impact
the environment? I think that right now we
are at the dawn of a new age. I think the Internet is really changing the way people relate to
these issues — the woman who is being paid
two cents an hour to make your sweater, even
20 years ago was very far away, but now she
can be on your screen every morning. These
people are real. These problems are closer
to everyone. Once people are made aware of
problems, it’s very rare that they say, ‘I don’t
give a shit.’ Instead, they have that moment
when they say, ‘My actions are affecting other
people in this way, so I’m going to change.’
Are you optimistic about the future? I think
I’m a realist. People don’t change their ways
until they have food in their mouths and
money in their pockets. Though I am optimistic in the sense that I think societies and people are moving in the right direction.
What do you think is holding us back from
living more harmoniously with nature?
Nature is a cruel place. We are very used to
these urban landscapes that are hygienic,
sterilised and easy to understand. But for
years, centuries and generations, the world
was a pretty scary place full of diseases and
threats. Nature was this thing that had to be
conquered and overcome, so people could
live beyond the age of 40. Nobody wants to
go out and pollute the air or the oceans, but a
system has developed over time where people are like, ‘Oh, shit. This is damaging, but
now we’re making money’. And these people want these products because we’ve told
them they need these products. The system
will just keep on going, going and going until
one day, you have a disruptive technology
that changes that.
How can people avoid apathy? I think apathy
comes when people try to take on too much.
I think it’s important to pick things which you
feel you can sustain for yourself — such as
the decisions we have to make when it comes
to the food we put in our bodies every day.
What daily act do you think people could do
to make society better? I think people could
for one day a week support a local farmer,
market or local butcher who sources from
local slaughterhouses. I’m not a big believer
that you have to be vegan to save the world
because, guess what, that soy is coming
from Brazil where they chopped down the
Amazon to plant it.
I keep eating
avocados in
the winter,
and I probably
shouldn’t.
[Interruption] Matthew Stone: People eating tofu is not the issue — 95 percent of soy
is grown to feed animals. I’m a vegetarian,
and it’s one of the best things to do for the
environment. But are you a seasonal, local
vegetarian? I was a vegetarian too for many
years for the exact same reasons, but when
I did the research I found out because I was
eating avocados in the winter, I was doing
the same amount of damage to the environment in terms of carbon emissions as eating
a steak. Health is a separate issue, and there
are various shades of grey. But if your choice
is between an avocado that has been grown
organically in Israel and a steak that has been
reared 40 miles away from organic feed, the
steak is actually better.
www.goodnesspopup.com
THE
AVOCADO
Dilemma
An American model who once got Lancôme
to plant a tree for every bottle of serum her
image helped sell, Elettra is also the founder
of GOODNESS, a pop-up restaurant serving
organic and ethically sourced meals. She
believes the easiest decision an individual
can make to decrease their carbon footprint
is to source the ingredients of their food
locally. Whether you are vegan, vegetarian,
pescatarian or an omnivore; locally and by
extension seasonally sourced organic food
not only tastes better, it removes harmful
pesticides from agricultural ecosystems
and our body, and above all, has consumed
less energy in its journey from the farm to
your fork.
The carbon footprint of out
of season food — On average,
in the West, a fifth of a person’s
carbon footprint comes from the
food they eat. While transport
emissions contribute a lot to the
carbon footprint of food, other
factors make it a little more complex
to calculate than simply ignoring all
imported fruit, vegetables and meat.
If we zoom out to view the issue
on a global perspective, the United
Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organisation recently calculated that
18 percent of global carbon dioxide
emissions are a result of raising
livestock — with the industrial
rearing of beef causing particular
stresses to the environment.
However, a locally produced steak
will still have a smaller carbon
footprint compared to one from
Argentina [unless you are reading
this in Argentina]. And the same
applies to vegetables too. Simply put,
the best way to cut down on
your carbon footprint is to eat locally
produced ingredients in season,
preferably sourced from farmers’
markets or grocery stores than
in supermarkets. Websites such as
the U.K.’s www.foodcarbon.co.uk
help calculate your carbon footprint
and gives suggestions on how to
reduce it.
12
EVE R CON SC IOUS
Lewis
Perkins
by Elizabeth von Guttman and Rana Toofanian
THE CRADLE TO
CRADLE APPROACH
TO DESIGN PROVIDES
A PATH TO PLENTY. Here, Lewis Perkins,
Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute’s Senior Vice-President
of Development and Textiles and Apparel explains how we can
redesign the industrial manufacturing system in a way that feeds
back productively and beneficially to the environment.
In 2002, William McDonough and Michael
Braungart published one of the most important environmental manifestos of all time,
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We
Make Things. The book seemed to offer an
answer to the environmental and economic
dilemma: do we need to stop making stuff
in order to stop polluting the planet? Outlining a framework of design and production
which seeks to create systems that are not
only efficient but essentially waste-free, the
Cradle to Cradle approach takes inspiration
from nature. So, for example, when a tree
falls, it isn’t thrown away but goes through
a process of decomposition in which its
component parts provide nutrients to the
surrounding environment.
­­
Learning from nature’s lesson, it proves
possible to create, say a pair of shoes
where the uppers are composed of infinitely
recyclable polyesters and the soles from
biodegradable natural rubber. You can also
colour them with dyes which, when they
come into contact with water, contribute
helpful enzymes, instead of harm, to the
wider environment. There is no finish line
— you wear your old shoes in and your new
shoes out — and there is no waste; these
non-toxic materials can be used over and
over again. So the answer to that dilemma
is no. Whether it be a skyscraper or a skirt,
we can continue to make and consume as
much as we want just as long as they are
produced in a manner which has no negative effects on the natural environment.
With the aim of bringing about a “new
industrial revolution that turns the making of things into a positive force for society, the economy and the planet”, William
McDonough and Michael Braungart set up
the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation
Institute to advise brands, businesses and
governments around the various ways in
which they could improve their design and
manufacturing processes. One of the ways
they do so is by assessing products and
factories in five categories: the health of
the materials used, whether these materi-
als can be re-used safely by nature or industry, whether these products were produced
using renewable non-polluting energy, their
impact on the water supply, and whether
they were made in ways that benefit the
lives of those that made them. The goal is
not to simply reduce the human and environmental impact of a product, but instead
to combine the “progressive reduction of
‘bad’ with the increase in ‘good’.”
tion of materials. And the reason we have
to innovate is because we’re under constraints — and sometimes humanity really
produces the most amazing creations under
the terms of constraint. Our goal is to help
companies create that continuous map to a
destination, a platinum standard where you
can drink the water coming out of manufacturing, or where the fibres in materials are
endlessly renewable.
You don’t seem to like to use the word ‘sustainable’ to describe the Cradle to Cradle
approach to design and production. Well,
do we really want to sustain what we’re
doing right now? We’re not in a good place
right now. I believe the modern environmental movement, or the current one for the last
40 years or so has a shaming element to it
— you should feel guilty for that shower and
that plane ride you took. You should use less.
You should feel bad that you went shopping
today. Or you should feel bad about the packaging that came with the shopping, and even
though they did the packing, it’s still your fault.
It’s almost damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
And then the polar bears — I care about them,
but what do they have to do with me?
Sometimes Humanity
Really Produces the
most amazing creations
under the terms of
constraint.
What Cradle to Cradle says, is that if we’re
producing in an endlessly renewable way, all
the materials are vetted for material health
and made with clean energy, clean water,
good social practices, and all the materials
get absorbed into the biological and technical nutrient systems, then you can produce
as much as you want. It’s a regenerative,
biomimetic concept that’s behind Cradle to
Cradle. We like to talk about creating clothing
and apparel — and products from all design
disciplines and uses — where the chemicals
used in their production are not only harmless,
but they also have nutrients that are good for
your health. And that all sounds a bit George
Jetson, but that really is the path for a lot of
what we’re doing.
The real belief we have at the Cradle to
Cradle Products Innovation Institute is a
design revolution that looks at the innova-
Do you think design and manufacturing processes that create no waste are something
we’re going to see within our lifetimes?
What we’ve seen with technology in our lifetime — and even in the last ten or 15 years —
is insane. Imagine where our children or our
children’s children are going to take the next
50 to 100 years of technology and how it integrates with humanity. And it’s a very similar
situation to what we’re looking at around the
revolution in materials. We can no longer be
producing where you are boxing people into
hazardous situations like what happened in
Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza. I think the development of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition
[a trade organisation representing more than
a third of the clothing and footwear market
that aims to reduce the environmental and
ethical impact of their products] is very interesting because while the manufacturers
and brands who have joined might not know
where they’re going just yet, they’re on board.
These are major brands [such as Nike, Levi’s
and H&M] and design houses [for example,
Gucci and Burberry] who are saying: ‘We
know we have to be at the table. We know
we have to be participating. We need to be
using their internal indices to find out where
I:CO — To promote sustainable
consumption, I:CO provides the
infrastructure for consumers to
easily give back the clothes, shoes
and accessories they purchased
— valuable resources that would
otherwise end up in a landfill.
Customers can go to any I:CO retail
partner such as H&M, Puma,
The North Face and Foot Locker,
and find a machine that collects
discarded garments, weighs them
and prints a voucher to be spent
in store. Once your old clothes
are collected, they’re reprocessed
and repurposed into shiny new
toys, clothes or insulating down
in a cycle that uses only five to
ten percent of the water used and
CO2 emitted during conventional
manufacturing. By rethinking,
recycling and rewarding consumers
for returning materials back into
the natural cycle, I:CO hopes to avoid
the rubbish heap.
www.ico-spirit.com
A shirt shouldn’t
necessarily become another
product until it has
been a shirt as long as it
can possibly be a shirt.
we are.’ And then what Cradle to Cradle does,
using a certification program which grades
manufacturing according to its environmental and social impacts, is allow companies to
benchmark where they are, so they can at
least figure out where they’re going. Cradle
to Cradle takes companies along this path.
So I take it you’re quite optimistic about the
future? When I started my personal environmental journey in 2005, I had been working with an interactive marketing agency,
and before that I was doing digital strategy
consulting with a tech firm. I had just kind
of burned out. I was like, ‘All I’m doing is
increasing the shareholder value of our clients.’ When I went off to business school, I
really wanted to help companies find their
‘soul’. But after about five or six years, I realised I was helping a lot of companies market
and brand what they were doing, but there
was no real peace or soul to it. So I went
back and worked for an environmental nonprofit. When I came into this conversation,
it seemed that there were the environmentalists on one side and then the capitalists
on the other, and there wasn’t really a lot in
between. I then got hired by the president of
Mohawk as he wanted somebody who had
that kind of heart, but who also has a business degree and understands that side.
Polar bears —
I care about them,
but what do
they have to do
with me?
with human rights, ensuring the chemicals
and chemistry you’re using are positive, then
you really can continue to make as much as
you want as long as it’s not designed to end
up in some waste landfill.
chain has been assessed against a certain
criteria. Currently, the burden — though it’s
not necessarily a burden but a responsibility
— is on the consumer to be more sustainable,
and I’d like to see that shift.
Talking about capitalism — how do you
define conscious consumerism? My advice
for everybody would to be to engage, and
have an intimate relationship with the products they have. It wasn’t really until I started
recycling and composting that I started to
think differently when I go into a store: ‘Do I
really want to bring this home because that
packaging is going to end up going…Can I
compost it? Can I recycle it? Or is it going to
go into my landfill bucket?’ Sometimes I’m the
obnoxious guy who might return the packaging and leave it at the store and say, ‘No. This
is yours. I didn’t buy the packaging. You figure
that out.’ But I don’t think everybody’s going
to do that. Most people are price-sensitive
and time-sensitive.
Where does Cradle to Cradle fit within the
debate around consumption — should we
buy and make less stuff, should we just buy
less, or take better care of what we already
own? In the broader sense, if you’re making
a product according to the Cradle to Cradle
methodology, then you can make as much
of it as you want, and you can consume as
much as you want. Obviously, that’s not
entirely true until we can get to a world where
everything is being produced to run off clean
energy and be recycled and collected under
clean energy. And until we’re there, we’re
going to use a lot of fossil fuels. So there’s a
lifecycle burden for any product to just exist
in the world today. In order to scale to what
the future vision is, we have to look at the longevity of products. How long can you keep it?
What is the pathway for where it’s going to go
next? A shirt shouldn’t necessarily become
another product until it has been a shirt as
long as it can possibly be a shirt.
Sometimes even organic brands don’t pay
attention to their packaging. You know, in
Organic Avenue, some of their bottles are
glass and some are plastic. I used to live
upstairs from one in SoHo, and I would buy
glass bottles. I asked whether they wanted
me to bring the bottles back when I was done,
and they were like, ‘Yeah, if you want.’ No, no,
no! Here’s how that conversation should go:
‘Yes. If you bring that back, we’ll knock ten
percent off your next purchase.’ That’s what
Puma are doing; you bring back a Puma product you have no use for anymore to the store
and put it in the ‘Bring Me Back’ bin, and you
get a percentage off your next purchase.
You touched on the fact that most people
don’t have the time to research ethically or
environmentally responsible products, nor
the money to buy them. How does Cradle
to Cradle help? Well, it is a burden on the
consumer to actively be sustainable today,
there’s no doubt. That’s where we feel the
Cradle to Cradle certification mark is a great
way we can begin to educate. As the mark
gets used on more consumer-facing packaging, there is an understanding that ‘Oh, so this
says bronze, so I know that it looks at these
five areas: material health, material reutilisation, renewable energy and carbon management, water stewardship and social fairness.’
The evolution since 2005 has been pretty
dramatic. We’ve gone from a place of having
those two polarised views to merging into this
conversation of conscious capitalism. So for
me, optimism comes from the fact that they
don’t have to be at odds anymore, and in fact,
they’re not. You can do right, do well, make
money and have impact. And we’re starting
to see a lot more impact of the work that’s
So should the burden lie more heavily with
being done. What also makes me optimistic
brands and businesses? This is where we’re
is the idea that if things are made in a way
positioning Cradle to Cradle in the fashion
that is healthy and safe for both humanity and
industry. We almost need to be the intel inside
human endocrine and reproductive systems, — that business to business player. In order for
for the planet’s endocrine and reproductive
brands and designers who, for example, want
systems, then you can almost produce end- to use a better dye which has the Cradle to
lessly. If you’re running production on clean
Cradle mark, they know what’s in it down to
grids, paying a fare wage, treating women
the parts per million because their supply
Currently, the burden —
though it’s not necessarily a
burden but a responsibility —
is on the consumer to
be more sustainable, and I’d
like to see that shift.
And what is the role of politics in this? Do
you vote? I support politicians that are looking
out for the planet. I hate to say it, but we kind
of have thousands of years to get the other
things right. The economy can crash or fall,
but if we screw the planet and our ability for
us to live on this planet that’s the end.
www.c2ccertified.org
Ocean Acidification — Ocean
acidification is the ongoing decrease
in the pH levels of the Earth’s oceans
caused by the uptake of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. Nearly
half of the CO2 released by man into
the atmosphere is absorbed by the
oceans where it dissolves in seawater
to form carbonic acid, which over
time decreases the alkalinity of the
oceans’ pH. The pH of the ocean
has already decreased by 30 percent,
and studies suggest that if we
continue emitting carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere at the same
rate, ocean acidity will have increased
by 150 percent by 2100. Such
a monumental change in the ocean’s
equilibrium, one that has not been
experienced on Earth for 400,000
years, has potentially devastating
consequences for all marine life —
and is something to consider next time
you leave a light on in a room you’re
not using.
www.oceana.org
AMBER
VALLETTA
by Alexia Niedzielski and Elizabeth von Guttman
WHETHER IT’S ON THE COVER
OF VOGUE, IN THE CINEMA
OR FRONTING H&M’S CONSCIOUS
COLLECTION, CHANCES ARE
YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN THE FACE
BEFORE, but what we don’t always hear is how Amber
How did you become interested in sustainability? I grew up in Oklahoma on my grandparent’s farm, and my mom was an activist.
She was protesting to stop a nuclear power
plant being built in my state on AmericanIndian land. And I think because I saw her
approach to activism, fighting for people and
the environment, it kind of instilled in me the
value of what is important. Growing up on a
farm meant I was always outdoors, and I think
because of that, I know how much it means
for our children to inherit a healthy planet
— it’s the natural birthright of every single
human being, plant and animal.
Do you have children? Yes. I have a son, Audley.
Have you tried to raise him in a similar way?
Absolutely. Unfortunately for him, he lives in a
city. But that city is Los Angeles, so nature is
right there. And I talk to him a lot about how
we treat and respect the Earth, animals and
people. I think the education children are having today is much different from what we had
— now, they are taught about the environment, recycling and about reusing and composting. It’s part of their culture, this younger
generation; it’s really ingrained in them. And
it’s necessary, quite honestly. He’s used to
it. We have solar panels. We have an electric
car. He sees I’m not excessive with what I buy
and how I live.
Whether it’s by virtue or
simply trying to save money,
there are a lot of people
who are more sustainable
than they know — people
who walk or ride a bike, or
take hand-me-downs.
And are you all vegetarians? I always say,
‘we’re just animals dressed up in clothing.’
We think we’re greater than these animals,
yet the only difference between them and
us is that we can raise them. Though I’m not
quite certain that they can’t raise us! [Laughs]
I was vegetarian for a long time, but at home,
nope, we’re not vegetarian, but we don’t eat
a ton of meat either. We’re very careful and
like to eat organic, grass-fed meats. There’s a
lifecycle and a food chain. While I don’t believe
in torturing or the way they are manufacturing
animals, I don’t think I’m meant to be a vegetarian either.
Do you believe money makes it easier to
live a more sustainable lifestyle? Whether
it’s by virtue or simply trying to save money,
there are a lot of people who are more sustainable than they know — people who walk,
ride a bike, or take hand-me-downs. And then
there’s that middle zone of people who are
turning a blind eye. But no matter what, it’s up
to the individual to take actions and to take
steps to change. It can be as small as buying food from a farmers’ market or not using
plastic bags. Sometimes it’s just about being
conscientious of ‘do I need that?’ or ‘can I buy
one BPA-free plastic bottle and keep refilling
it?’ And the answer to the first question will
more often be no, and to the second, nearly
always yes.
Talking about plastic — how did you get
involved in campaigning for cleaning up the
oceans? I’ve worked with a few groups, but
after a friend was diagnosed with mercury
poising while she was pregnant, I started to
work with Oceana on issues like mercury poisoning — which is also found in fresh water, not
just in the sea — and the acidification of the
oceans. As the oceans become contaminated
with chemicals, we risk losing many of these
great animals. There are also other issues. In
the United States, we have this horrible sonar
radio frequency that’s a huge blast sent into
the ocean which is used to look for oil. It’s like a
sonic boom for big mammals. It’s devastating.
How have you addressed issues of sustainability within the fashion industry? I recently
launched an online store called Master &
Muse, which I hope is an answer to some of
the fashion-related environmental problems.
Sometimes it’s about
being conscientious of ‘do
I need that?’ or ‘can I buy
one BPA-free plastic bottle
and keep refilling it?’ And
the answer to the first
question will more often
be no, and to the second,
nearly always yes.
I think that people are still going to want
to consume. We all love beautiful things —
beauty is essential to life. We’ve been creating art since the beginning of time when
people began drawing on walls. People need
to express themselves, so you’re not going
to stop that. But I believe that great design
and great innovation go hand in hand — it’s
the future. It seems stupid to not be more
responsible, even in economic terms for big
companies; later you are going to pay for
your mistakes.
What kind of products are you offering on
Master & Muse? So right now we have about
20 different designers and 200 different products. I partnered with Yoox, where we have a
pop-up store in the Yooxygen section. Next
spring, we’re going to have 30 designers and
almost 400 products — and the designers are
great! I’ve found the fashion community to be
really supportive and willing to collaborate. It
feels like everyone in the industry is excited
to see some real change.
www.masterandmuse.com
The Power
of Now
is an eco-fashion entrepreneur, and a Tesla driving hockey mum who
grew up on a farm in landlocked Oklahoma and now dedicates a lot
of her time campaigning for cleaning up the oceans.
DIANNA
COHEN
by Xerxes Cook
AN ARTIST WHO WAS FIRST DRAWN
TO PLASTIC BAGS FOR THEIR LINKS
TO MARKETING AND COMMERCE,
TURNED ACTIVIST WHEN SOME OF THE
WORKS SHE HAD MADE WITH THEM HAD
BEGUN TO FISSURE AND TRANSFORM. In her search
to find out why some of the plastic material used in her art pieces had started to crack into
smaller bits, Dianna Cohen became aware of the enormous challenge of plastic pollution and
its impact on our environment, health and well-being.
we should recognise for what it really is – as
something that only works if you have a system and infrastructure in place.
The majority of plastic we all use ends up in
landfills, or in the ocean. Or the plastic is incinerated, which creates particulate pollution and
major health problems for the workers who
are tasked with incineration, and the communities nearby. Burning plastic results in exposure to dangerous toxic chemicals known to
be carcinogenic and endocrine disruptors.
Dianna’s realisation sparked a dramatic
change. She shunned plastic in her day-today life; at home she replaced her plastic
products with glass, metal and ceramic,
and when on the go, started to carry metal
flasks for her morning cups of tea, and
bamboo knives and forks in her handbag. In
2009, she co-founded the Plastic Pollution
Coalition, a global alliance working on ending the pollution and toxic impacts of single
use plastic — drinks bottles, food containers, lids, cups, straws, and of course, shopping bags — which we use often for just
minutes, but then leave lying around for
thousands of years.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
and refuse — This year, the Plastic
Pollution Coalition launched its
campaign #resolve2refuse, urging
consumers to stop using single-use
disposable plastics like bottles,
grocery bags, straws, cups and lids.
By asking people to sign the
Resolve to Refuse pledge and follow
the 4 “Rs” of sustainable living —
refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle —
the goal is to create awareness of the
amount of unnecessary and harmful
plastics that end up in our ecosystem
and food chain. For a start, replace
certain daily products with their
non-plastic alternatives — an easy
one is to carry a reusable canvas bag
like a tote. In one year, a single person’s
dediction to this small act will keep
between 400 and 600 plastic bags out
of the landfill. Decide to only buy
juice and milk in reusable glass bottles.
Every little step makes a difference.
#resolvetorefuse
The Plastic Pollution Coalition takes the
position that “recycling is not a sustainable
solution.” Please could you tell us why? The
reason plastic recycling is not a sustainable
solution is because we’re producing such
massive quantities of it and most places in the
world have no infrastructure to recollect the
plastic. Most countries do not have extended
producer responsibility, which would demand
that businesses are responsible in a Cradle to
Cradle model for the packaging they use for
their products. Therefore, what we find unfortunately, is that the onus to deal with this stuff
is left to the public.
If you travel to various parts of the world, even
in many highly developed parts of the world,
there are entire regions that have absolutely
no recycling infrastructure set up. So recycling is a really nice idea, and it’s not something we should stop doing, but it’s something
That’s very disturbing. We’re used to talking
about recycling, but you also have issues
with downcycling. What is that? Downcycling
is when you convert waste materials into new
materials of lesser quality and reduced functionality. For example, when plastic is used
to package food or beverages, it is tainted by
touching or interacting with the substance
inside, say a sugary beverage or a juice, and
you can’t then take it and use it for the same
thing again. Now Germany is an exception to
this; they have the highest recollection rates
in the world. Germany takes these thicker
density plastic bottles back, then washes,
sterilises and refills them and puts them back
in the market place. They’ll put a notch on the
bottom of the bottle and you can count these
notches and see how many times a bottle
has been recycled. The bottle will start looking shadier and shadier on the exterior with
more scratch marks from going through the
machine which sterilises it. However, I personally don’t recommend drinking out of
those. Studies by Dr Frederick vom Saal show
that each time you wash a plastic bottle or a
plastic item, incrementally larger amounts of
the EDCs [endocrine disrupting compounds]
leach from the plastic. I’m not a scientist, but
this information is enough to convince me to
find alternatives.
When someone notices
I ordered a drink without a
straw and they want to
know why, I’m like ‘have you
heard about the great
Pacific garbage patch?’
As an artist using plastic bags in your work,
were you first interested in them for their
associations with consumerism rather than
any specific environmental focus? Was the
revelation of their environmental impact
something that came later? Yes. I started
working with plastic when I was in Belgium a
little over 20 years ago. In the homeopathic
pharmacies there, the bags they give have
certain botanical flowers and plants printed
on them with their Latin names. I thought
these were really beautiful, but that there was
also a deep irony, printing images of the natural world onto plastic bags which are made
primarily from petroleum byproducts. I just
had one of these bingo moments of ‘Plastic,
wow! What a loaded material.’ It represents
the future, technology, and man’s harnessing of technology through us taking a total
byproduct and refining it into something that
can be shaped and coloured, or if you add BPA
or phthalates to it, made hard or supple.
I think plastic is the most remarkable material
of the past century. We can use it for so many
things. It was able to replace so many more
finite materials like wood, glass or metals
which were being used in aircraft, cars and
war machinery. Suddenly lots of them or parts
of them could be replaced by plastic that
could be formed and shaped and coloured to
make it look like it was metallic, wood or ivory.
It’s pretty fascinating.
nesses and individuals who are all looking at
different components around the issue of disposable single-use plastics. Because plastic
pollution is a crisis that is so spread out all
around you, and so ubiquitous, no one sees
it — or rather, we’re just beginning to recognise it. On the most basic level, the concept is
to raise awareness, to empower and encourage the everyday citizen to reduce their plastic footprint on a personal level — because you
really have to do this first on a personal level
before you can bring it out into the world. The
first thing to do is to start at home.
The thing about plastic
pollution, is that you can do things.
You can make small changes
in your own life, extend them
to your school, or your place of
work and beyond.
From your personal experience, what gives
At this point, I have a love-hate relation- you hope for the future? When it comes to
ship with it. After about the first eight years
this issue of plastic pollution, people are getof using it in my artwork, some of the bags
ting bad news all the time, but often people’s
began to fissure and break into smaller reaction to someone who’s explaining global
pieces. I thought this meant the plastic bags
climate change to you is to ask: ‘But what can
are ephemeral like us, and I decided to look
I do?’ That’s our human reaction to bad news
into that a little more. And what I learned — ‘What can I do?’ And the thing about plastic
was that plastic will photodegrade through
pollution, is that you can do things. You can
light or heat degrade — which means they’ll
make small changes in your own life, extend
break into smaller bits — but they won’t go
them to your school or your child’s school,
away. It’s not organic, so these bits of plastic
your place of work and your business, and
are not going back go the earth; they’re not
if you want to take it on more than that, you
really breaking down. And in the ocean, they
can try pressuring companies to become
attract other persistent organic pollutants
engaged in a Cradle to Cradle model for the
to their surfaces, and are then ingested by
packaging used for their products. We list
the marine chain. That was a kind of horrific
a number of ways people can do so on our
realisation for me. And at that point, I began
website. If you want to take it higher than that,
to make some personal changes in my life. I
you can push for government legislation. That
began to not take plastic bags any more and
allows for things like Rwanda banning plasto bring my own reusable canvas bags eve- tic bags or Ireland adding a tax to the sale of
rywhere with me. I even have these tiny ones
plastic bags which had great results. I woke
that fold up into teeny tiny pouches which I
up on January 1st in L.A., and there are no more
tuck into the corner of my purse or my bag.
plastic bags in the big supermarkets! It’s wonderful because it’s the tip of the iceberg. In
fashion, the Anya Hindmarch ‘I’m Not A Plastic
Bag’ had tremendous attention, generated a
lot of excitement and allowed people to talk
about an issue. It was also free advertising.
I think plastic is the
most remarkable material
of the past century…
I have a love hate
relationship with it.
Plastic is something I associate with the
nuclear age, with post-war innovations and
1950s modernity. Ever Manifesto is really
interested in the innovations that are coming
about today: we see Nike making basketball
courts in deprived communities from old
plastic bottles and Pharrell Williams’ Bionic
Yarn making versatile textiles and so on. What
is the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s approach
to these new developments — can they not
come soon enough? I would say we’re working on a multi-prong approach. We created the
coalition first and foremost to bring together a
lot of different disparate entities, NGOs, busi-
Successful businesses listen to their customers. Are you trying to bring about a critical mass through educating the general
public that they are in a position to vote for
the world they would like to see with every
purchase? I think that’s the most important
thing. Frankly, women have a lot of power
through where they decide to put their dollar. They really do. And I would say one of the
most disenfranchised groups may be teenagers. Young people feel disenfranchised from
the political process, but they are voting every
time they make a decision to buy something.
It’s about taking all the information you have
about what’s going on in the world — chemicals, the safety of our food or whatever you
are able to educate yourself about in regards
to environmental toxins — and putting it into
action. And the way we can put it into action is
not to get depressed from the bad news, but
to actually feel empowered to make decisions
based on this knowledge. I’m not saying that
everyone needs to be as intense as I am about
it, but it’s kind of fun trying to communicate
to people, you know, when someone notices I
ordered a drink without a straw and they want
to know why. And I’m like, ‘Have you heard
about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?’
www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org
www.diannacohen.com
Trade n0t Ai
Liya
Kebede
by Kamin Mohammadi
THE LEMLEM
CLOTHING LINE NOT
ONLY HELPS PRESERVE
TRADITIONAL CRAFTS AND
COMMUNITIES THAT COULD BE
LOST IN THE RUSH TO WESTERNSTYLE MODERNISATION, but since its
inception in 2007, it has also empowered hundreds of workers to lift
themselves and their family out of poverty and into prosperity.
As one of the world’s top supermodels — Forbes magazine named her as one of the 15
highest earning models in the world — Liya
Kebede could be forgiven for resting on her
fashion laurels. But instead, the Ethiopian
born fashion icon devotes herself to philanthropic work and running a fashion label
rooted in sustainability and the empowerment of traditional craftspeople in her
native country.
The Little Sun — Another great
example of a socially conscious
business initiative is Olafur Eliasson’s
The Little Sun. A work of art that
works in life, Olafur’s attractive,
high-quality solar-powered lamp in
the shape of a hand-sized sun was
launched at the Tate Modern — where
the artist famously installed a giant
30 foot wide artificial sun in the
middle of a typically gloomy British
winter — in July 2012. Revenue from
the €20 light is invested into the
sustainable distribution of lamps to
some of the 1.6 billion people that
live without electricity in a business
model that helps create off-grid
jobs, support local entrepreneurs
and generate local profits.
www.littlesun.com
Appointed a World Health Organisation
Goodwill Ambassador for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in 2005, the motherof-two was so appalled by the rates of preventable deaths in Ethiopia, she set up the
Liya Kebede Foundation to focus on international advocacy efforts to improve access to
maternal health services in her home country. As the foundation’s mission statement
puts it, “there is something desperately
wrong about dying while trying to give life.”
It’s this urge to improve the lives of those living in Ethiopia that continues with Lemlem,
the clothing line she started in 2007. Lemlem
means ‘bloom’ in Amharic — and with it, Liya
is helping a group of traditional weavers in
Ethiopia to do just that — bloom. “I grew up
with people wearing hand-woven clothes —
that’s our culture,” she explains. “I was working in fashion in New York when I went home
to Ethiopia and visited an area of weavers.
They make incredible work but don’t have
the market to sell their clothing. So I thought
I would see how I could help…” Lemlem soon
expanded from patterned scarves to coverups, dresses and skirt-pants, and now shoes
and home accessories.
Although they are designed in New York,
Lemlem’s pieces are made from handwoven materials crafted by traditional
weavers in Ethiopia. “They are incredible
craftsmen, and we are taking the weavers
While providing aid is an
important aspect of international
development, employment creates
sustainable economic
change by empowering people to
help themselves.
somewhere they haven’t been before, in
terms of design and shape,” she says. “At
first there was some resistance, but now
they think how cool it is that they are part of
something that’s such an innovation. We’ve
created products that appeal to consumers worldwide, thereby providing them with
steady work. Supporting the weavers and
their craft has remained our central mission,
and we’re proud we can sell beautiful products while also helping these artisans thrive. ”
Liya’s ambitions are not to build a fashion
empire. Instead, as a social business, Lemlem has given employment to hundreds of
weavers over its seven years, and profits are
channelled directly back to the business so
they can “grow the company, hire more weavers, and expand our impact.” Discussing the
pros and cons between trade and aid, Liya
tells Ever Manifesto that, “while providing aid
is an important aspect of international development, employment creates sustainable
economic change by empowering people to
help themselves. When a person has a way
to provide for their family, their loved ones
are more likely to have access to health and
education, and the circle of prosperity grows.”
She aspires to inspire other brands to follow
her path of engaging with the highly skilled
manufacturers and craftspeople of Africa. “I
want to show them that they can have confidence to go and make clothes in Africa, so
that they [people of the African continent]
can get more employment. That’s the only
way you can have an impact in a bigger way
than I am doing.” In her vision, fashion can
be a positive force for empowerment and
sustainability. “The industry is unique in that
it impacts just about everyone — after all,
everyone wears clothes. So, if we push for
new industry standards that promote ethically made goods, it will have an enormous
impact worldwide.”
Lemlem’s products are already available at
boutiques around the world from Bahrain to
New Zealand, and at retailers like Barneys,
Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale’s. But
the best moment for Liya Kebede is indisputable. “When I see someone wearing
Lemlem in New York, it’s just mind-boggling
because I know that this piece came from
a little man sitting in Ethiopia and weaving
this little product.”
www.lemlem.com
by Xerxes Cook
A FOUNDING MEMBER
OF THE CRADLE TO
CRADLE PRODUCTS
INNOVATIONS
INSTITUTE, YVES BÉHAR IS ONE
OF THE MOST CELEBRATED PRODUCT
DESIGNERS WORKING TODAY. The design brains
One Laptop Per Child — While
clean water, food, shelter and clothing
are fundamental needs, education
is also a top priority for the developing
world. With the understanding that
knowledge is power, chief designer
of One Laptop Per Child, Yves Béhar
created a computer that is portable,
rugged and inexpensive: the XO
laptop. Over three million children
and teachers around the world use
an XO laptop today — exploring,
creating, sharing and connecting to
the world. Government and ministries
of education are working together
with One Laptop Per Child to give their
future generations opportunities for
growth that have not been previously
imaginable. This year, the Rwandan
government recognised the effort by
putting XO laptops on the country’s
500 franc bill.
one.laptop.org
behind One Laptop Per Child (which has put three million $100 laptops in the
hands of children across the world), Yves’ company fuseproject is also responsible
for designing recycling systems for Coca Cola, wearable technology for
Jawbone, and perhaps the most high profile Cradle to Cradle product to date;
Puma’s Clever Little Bag — a biodegradable shoebox with a handle that
negates the need for a store to issue the customer with yet another piece
of packaging (i.e. a plastic bag).
We’ve had quite a lot of focus on Cradle to
a negative perspective. So in many ways it
in the consumer environment and it will also
Cradle within this edition of Ever Manifesto. continued to spur the notion that I could look
bring their industry into a new place. BusiHow did you initiate Puma’s Clever Little Bag, at the world in a way that is a world of pos- nesses need to be retooled every few years
and what did you learn along the way? The
sibilities. And I could forgive myself for not
based on change.
Clever Little Bag was a tremendously chal- being perfect, but every step I take could be
lenging product. It took two and a half years
progress — a step towards a better product.
to see it go from intent and idea to a product
in stores. And it’s incredibly successful in the
In evolutionary biology, there’s a theory
sense that people of every age all around the
that during times of punctuated equilibrium
world really connect with it — they see the — a disruption to the natural balance of an
difference immediately, they experience the
ecosystem — that organisms experience
outer box of the shoes differently, and they
a spontaneous evolutionary leap in order
remember it. I think about 80, 90 million pairs
to address this imbalance. As a designer,
of shoes are sold in the Clever Little Bag a year, where do you think the next stage of our
so it was very difficult as it had to be global. It
development and use of technology will take
had to work for the retailers themselves, who
us? I think designers and entrepreneurs not
have to run downstairs, get five boxes and run
only have a responsibility, but also an opporback up from the storeroom to the front of the
tunity because the change will come from us
store. It had to work with the manufacturing
creating the next compelling solution that’s
plants, which are on every continent in the
going to address the imbalance you describe.
world. And it had to work for the customer. I see so much pent-up demand across the
The combination of all these elements made it
world for these types of solutions. So many
complex to satisfy everyone, especially when
people are ready to switch, but they’re not
it had to also be low cost. So it took a while to
given an opportunity to do so. The alternaget it out there. In the end it was the decision
tives are either too expensive or require too
Do you believe we are experiencing an enviof the then CEO to really make a statement — much extra work. And you can’t really blame
ronmental crisis? I think we’ve been in a state
to show in actuality how to reinvent part of the
the public for not adopting more sustain- of crisis for a while and that we’re coming into
world of fashion and stick with it. And I have to
able solutions if they’re more expensive or if
a partial consciousness about it. I do think
say, I feel there are very few actual examples
they’re a burden in their lives. It’s really our that it’s not a matter of stopping consumpof sustainability in fashion that people expe- jobs as designers and entrepreneurs to give
tion, as economically I don’t think that’s viable.
rience every day. It’s very surprising to me
these solutions.
But I do think that it’s smarter consumption
that with a progressive mindset and a finger
— or more conscious consumption — that’s
on the pulse, the style and fashion industry You could say that currently the burden lies
absolutely necessary today. Plastic bottles
hasn’t realised how compelling it is for people
with the customers, but the responsibility
are something we should never use unless
to have sustainable solutions in their lives.
lies with the brands. It’s interesting how
we’re crossing the desert or very thirsty while
you’ve challenged the CEOs of big corpora- on the go. I’m surprised by how little breaktions who didn’t understand that there’s a
through there has been in rethinking the plasreturn on their investment in good design. tic bottle; we banished plastic bottles from
At forums like Davos, you’ve brought to their
our office now five years ago, and I’ve never
attention that companies with good busi- heard any of our clients coming in saying,
ness practices are more successful with ‘Rather than water in a pitcher, I want my own
their customers. Most large companies sim- plastic bottle.’ And now we give them water,
ply don’t have access to someone who will
sparkling from the SodaStream machines
As a designer, how did the Cradle to Cradle
push or challenge. They’re doing things par- we’ve designed. If they want a soda, we can
manifesto affect your approach? I think the
tially by habit, or there’s no reward system for even make it right there.
reason why the book affected me deeply is
risk or for failure, and they have responsibility
because it wasn’t a depressing view — the
to shareholders [to deliver profits]. But when
Every designer seems to be obsessed with
statistics can be depressing. The impact
the opportunity presents itself, I think most
designing a chair, and you’ve created a few
chemistry has had on the world and on peo- CEOs will explore it. I do think transformation
yourself — yet aren’t there enough in the
ple can be depressing. But the solution isn’t
is possible, and I believe in the next 20 years, world already? I used to have this converdepressing. And I think that’s really impor- every business and every service is going to
sation with Ross Lovegrove [a celebrated
tant, because entrepreneurship and thinking
have to recast and recreate itself in ways that
industrial designer who has worked with
about innovation have to come from a posi- meet what customers want, which are more
Sony in creating Walkmans and in the design
tive spirit. They have to come from hopeful
sustainable ways of living and consuming. of Apple computers]. And I think as designers,
energy, as you can’t think of new things from
And by doing so, it will save ourselves, both
our answer is that the world doesn’t need
The world doesn’t need
another chair just the way
a chair was built in the
1950s — but the world needs
a chair that is lighter,
uses less materials, uses
less resources, and
takes up less room when
it’s shipped.
The statistics can
be depressing, but the
solution isn’t.
another chair the same way a chair was built
in the 1950s or ’60s — which is pretty much
the kinds of chairs we consume. The world
needs a chair that is lighter, uses less materials, less resources and takes up less room
when it’s shipped. And this is how the Herman Miller SAYL Chair was conceptualised. It
has a smaller carbon footprint with a Cradle
to Cradle certification; it weighs half as much
as a regular chair and takes up half as much
volume. And is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is
it better than most office chairs out there?
Absolutely. Is it a lot better to build millions
of SAYL Chairs than the stuffy, full-of-toxicfoam chairs of yesteryear? Absolutely, as
you’re still going to have to put butts in chairs
to have people work in offices. And they’re
gonna have to be very comfortable, as you
don’t want to hurt humans. So through Cradle to Cradle, I can look at change and innovation in a way that gets us a step closer to
a better world.
As a designer, how you do approach the
every day? For me, I don’t want to walk the
world with a sense of defeat. One of the things
that has worked the best for me was to take
on projects that were difficult, that weren’t
easy, that were humble like the shoebox.
Most designers would want to design the
shoe itself and see people wearing their own
designs, but a shoe line is something that
lasts only a season or two. Looking at humble
problems, but designing them with a worldview and radically rethinking them, is sometimes a good place to start.
And what gives you hope? People. The
human spirit will eventually get to the right
place. I think better choices is what is lacking — but there’s no lack of direction where
people want to move towards. For me, it’s a
very simple equation: If there’s will and direction, then as a human species we’re going
to be innovative and creative enough to set
ourselves on the right path. We’re always
going to be selfish, and we’re always going to
be altruistic. I’m always going to want things
for myself, but then I get more and more conscious that the things I want can also benefit
others. It’s a balance.
www.fuseproject.com
I’m always going to want things
for myself, but then I get more and
more conscious that the things I
want can also benefit others.
by Xerxes Cook
A FOUNDING MEMBER
OF THE CRADLE TO
CRADLE PRODUCTS
INNOVATIONS
INSTITUTE, YVES BÉHAR IS ONE
OF THE MOST CELEBRATED PRODUCT
DESIGNERS WORKING TODAY. The design brains
One Laptop Per Child — While
clean water, food, shelter and clothing
are fundamental needs, education
is also a top priority for the developing
world. With the understanding that
knowledge is power, chief designer
of One Laptop Per Child, Yves Béhar
created a computer that is portable,
rugged and inexpensive: the XO
laptop. Over three million children
and teachers around the world use
an XO laptop today — exploring,
creating, sharing and connecting to
the world. Government and ministries
of education are working together
with One Laptop Per Child to give their
future generations opportunities for
growth that have not been previously
imaginable. This year, the Rwandan
government recognised the effort by
putting XO laptops on the country’s
500 franc bill.
one.laptop.org
behind One Laptop Per Child (which has put three million $100 laptops in the
hands of children across the world), Yves’ company fuseproject is also responsible
for designing recycling systems for Coca Cola, wearable technology for
Jawbone, and perhaps the most high profile Cradle to Cradle product to date;
Puma’s Clever Little Bag — a biodegradable shoebox with a handle that
negates the need for a store to issue the customer with yet another piece
of packaging (i.e. a plastic bag).
We’ve had quite a lot of focus on Cradle to
a negative perspective. So in many ways it
in the consumer environment and it will also
Cradle within this edition of Ever Manifesto. continued to spur the notion that I could look
bring their industry into a new place. BusiHow did you initiate Puma’s Clever Little Bag, at the world in a way that is a world of pos- nesses need to be retooled every few years
and what did you learn along the way? The
sibilities. And I could forgive myself for not
based on change.
Clever Little Bag was a tremendously chal- being perfect, but every step I take could be
lenging product. It took two and a half years
progress — a step towards a better product.
to see it go from intent and idea to a product
in stores. And it’s incredibly successful in the
In evolutionary biology, there’s a theory
sense that people of every age all around the
that during times of punctuated equilibrium
world really connect with it — they see the — a disruption to the natural balance of an
difference immediately, they experience the
ecosystem — that organisms experience
outer box of the shoes differently, and they
a spontaneous evolutionary leap in order
remember it. I think about 80, 90 million pairs
to address this imbalance. As a designer,
of shoes are sold in the Clever Little Bag a year, where do you think the next stage of our
so it was very difficult as it had to be global. It
development and use of technology will take
had to work for the retailers themselves, who
us? I think designers and entrepreneurs not
have to run downstairs, get five boxes and run
only have a responsibility, but also an opporback up from the storeroom to the front of the
tunity because the change will come from us
store. It had to work with the manufacturing
creating the next compelling solution that’s
plants, which are on every continent in the
going to address the imbalance you describe.
world. And it had to work for the customer. I see so much pent-up demand across the
The combination of all these elements made it
world for these types of solutions. So many
complex to satisfy everyone, especially when
people are ready to switch, but they’re not
it had to also be low cost. So it took a while to
given an opportunity to do so. The alternaget it out there. In the end it was the decision
tives are either too expensive or require too
Do you believe we are experiencing an enviof the then CEO to really make a statement — much extra work. And you can’t really blame
ronmental crisis? I think we’ve been in a state
to show in actuality how to reinvent part of the
the public for not adopting more sustain- of crisis for a while and that we’re coming into
world of fashion and stick with it. And I have to
able solutions if they’re more expensive or if
a partial consciousness about it. I do think
say, I feel there are very few actual examples
they’re a burden in their lives. It’s really our that it’s not a matter of stopping consumpof sustainability in fashion that people expe- jobs as designers and entrepreneurs to give
tion, as economically I don’t think that’s viable.
rience every day. It’s very surprising to me
these solutions.
But I do think that it’s smarter consumption
that with a progressive mindset and a finger
— or more conscious consumption — that’s
on the pulse, the style and fashion industry You could say that currently the burden lies
absolutely necessary today. Plastic bottles
hasn’t realised how compelling it is for people
with the customers, but the responsibility
are something we should never use unless
to have sustainable solutions in their lives.
lies with the brands. It’s interesting how
we’re crossing the desert or very thirsty while
you’ve challenged the CEOs of big corpora- on the go. I’m surprised by how little breaktions who didn’t understand that there’s a
through there has been in rethinking the plasreturn on their investment in good design. tic bottle; we banished plastic bottles from
At forums like Davos, you’ve brought to their
our office now five years ago, and I’ve never
attention that companies with good busi- heard any of our clients coming in saying,
ness practices are more successful with ‘Rather than water in a pitcher, I want my own
their customers. Most large companies sim- plastic bottle.’ And now we give them water,
ply don’t have access to someone who will
sparkling from the SodaStream machines
As a designer, how did the Cradle to Cradle
push or challenge. They’re doing things par- we’ve designed. If they want a soda, we can
manifesto affect your approach? I think the
tially by habit, or there’s no reward system for even make it right there.
reason why the book affected me deeply is
risk or for failure, and they have responsibility
because it wasn’t a depressing view — the
to shareholders [to deliver profits]. But when
Every designer seems to be obsessed with
statistics can be depressing. The impact
the opportunity presents itself, I think most
designing a chair, and you’ve created a few
chemistry has had on the world and on peo- CEOs will explore it. I do think transformation
yourself — yet aren’t there enough in the
ple can be depressing. But the solution isn’t
is possible, and I believe in the next 20 years, world already? I used to have this converdepressing. And I think that’s really impor- every business and every service is going to
sation with Ross Lovegrove [a celebrated
tant, because entrepreneurship and thinking
have to recast and recreate itself in ways that
industrial designer who has worked with
about innovation have to come from a posi- meet what customers want, which are more
Sony in creating Walkmans and in the design
tive spirit. They have to come from hopeful
sustainable ways of living and consuming. of Apple computers]. And I think as designers,
energy, as you can’t think of new things from
And by doing so, it will save ourselves, both
our answer is that the world doesn’t need
The world doesn’t need
another chair just the way
a chair was built in the
1950s — but the world needs
a chair that is lighter,
uses less materials, uses
less resources, and
takes up less room when
it’s shipped.
The statistics can
be depressing, but the
solution isn’t.
another chair the same way a chair was built
in the 1950s or ’60s — which is pretty much
the kinds of chairs we consume. The world
needs a chair that is lighter, uses less materials, less resources and takes up less room
when it’s shipped. And this is how the Herman Miller SAYL Chair was conceptualised. It
has a smaller carbon footprint with a Cradle
to Cradle certification; it weighs half as much
as a regular chair and takes up half as much
volume. And is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is
it better than most office chairs out there?
Absolutely. Is it a lot better to build millions
of SAYL Chairs than the stuffy, full-of-toxicfoam chairs of yesteryear? Absolutely, as
you’re still going to have to put butts in chairs
to have people work in offices. And they’re
gonna have to be very comfortable, as you
don’t want to hurt humans. So through Cradle to Cradle, I can look at change and innovation in a way that gets us a step closer to
a better world.
As a designer, how you do approach the
every day? For me, I don’t want to walk the
world with a sense of defeat. One of the things
that has worked the best for me was to take
on projects that were difficult, that weren’t
easy, that were humble like the shoebox.
Most designers would want to design the
shoe itself and see people wearing their own
designs, but a shoe line is something that
lasts only a season or two. Looking at humble
problems, but designing them with a worldview and radically rethinking them, is sometimes a good place to start.
And what gives you hope? People. The
human spirit will eventually get to the right
place. I think better choices is what is lacking — but there’s no lack of direction where
people want to move towards. For me, it’s a
very simple equation: If there’s will and direction, then as a human species we’re going
to be innovative and creative enough to set
ourselves on the right path. We’re always
going to be selfish, and we’re always going to
be altruistic. I’m always going to want things
for myself, but then I get more and more conscious that the things I want can also benefit
others. It’s a balance.
www.fuseproject.com
I’m always going to want things
for myself, but then I get more and
more conscious that the things I
want can also benefit others.
CEcilia Dean
& David Selig
by Xerxes Cook
THE co-foundER OF THE
FORMAT-DEFYING STYLE BIBLE
VISIONAIRE, AND ownER
OF SOME OF NEW YORK’S most
loved eco-conscious
RESTAURANTS HAVE A KNACK
FOR SPOTTING TRENDS. Here, Cecilia Dean
and David Selig discuss the rise of biofuel powered flights,
farmers’ markets accepting food stamps, and what’s motivating
Brooklynites to grow kale on their rooftops.
The restaurateur David Selig wakes up
early every morning to surf the swells of
New York’s Rockaway Bay. “I’m used to
the rhythms of the ocean’s tide, but nothing prepared me for the power of Hurricane
Sandy which washed away the boardwalk,”
David tells Ever Manifesto. “I was lucky my
little taco stand survived.” He describes the
event as an example of “global weirding” —
a term popularised by the author Thomas
Friedman to describe the unpredictable
and increasingly volatile consequences of
climate change. Yet well before Hurricane
Sandy threatened David’s Rockaway Taco
stall, he and Cecilia were driving around
town in an old Mercedes running off the
waste oil from his restaurants. “A no brainer,”
as Cecilia puts it, “as you would typically
have to pay someone to take it away.”
Having grown up in California — the “epicentre of sustainability” — as a teenager,
Cecilia initially felt the urge to rebel against
such earnest thinking. Today, she’s one of
fashion’s most respected tastemakers, and
her expertise is in demand all over the globe.
Yet, Cecilia finds it “ridiculous in the age of
Skype to get on a plane just for a meeting.”
When it comes to clothes, she is increasingly drawn to “authentic companies who
produce limited numbers of hand-crafted
products (as opposed to mass produced
in China, for example). They usually have a
history, a heritage and tend to be expensive.
But these are products that you save up to
buy, use for the rest of your life and can even
pass down from generation to generation.
It’s preserving quality in a disposable world.”
However even she finds navigating the
ever-changing waters of sustainability to
be “overwhelming”. “Nothing is ever black
and white,” Cecilia says. “Even if you’re just
trying to buy a t-shirt, you always have to
think twice of how and where the t-shirt
was made. It’s impossible to know everything all the time.” They believe if we are to
vote with our dollars, trust and transparency
are the keys to conscious consumerism. As
David elaborates, “That t-shirt doesn’t have
to be sold at a premium if sustainability was
part of the exercise of manufacturing, selling, buying and disposing. It’s not just the
responsibility of brands, but the manufacturers that supply them and the consumers
themselves. Sustainability is more available
than we think.”
Moving back to food, they both point out
a couple of “funny trends” that indicate
a growing awareness of the impact our
choices as consumers have on the environment. One is Richard Branson’s 2008 stunt
of fuelling a Virgin Atlantic flight with a percentage of vegetable oil as an example of
how science may have the answer to something we all feel “guilty” about. Or, “take the
suburban kids growing kale on their front
lawn or in the city on their rooftops. Why
is kale the most popular green in America
right now?” David asks. “There isn’t a ‘kale
lobby’ promoting it. Growing food is not even
a commercial transaction. It just so happens
that kale is one of these superfoods, high in
nutrients and minerals. It’s not just elitists
who can shop at a fancy farmers’ market.” In
fact, Cecilia points out, farmers’ markets in
New York have been accepting food stamps
for three years now, taking in $4 million in
revenue from them the past year alone.
Urban bee HIVES — Cecilia Dean
and David Selig have been keeping
bees on the rooftop of their Red Hook
apartment for the past six years.
“They are amazing creatures to
observe; especially when visiting
them on New York rooftops that offer
expansive views of the cityscape
and its waterfront,” David tells Ever
Manifesto. “The honey is a direct
link to the terroir, though I did not
start keeping them for that pleasure
alone.” Through pollinating different
plants in a search for nectar, bees
play a key role in the inception of as
much as 40 percent of the human
food supply worldwide. Yet in recent
years, a combination of pesticides,
air pollution, habitat destruction
and global warming has led to a
dramatic reduction of bee colony
numbers worldwide — a phenomenon
that has led Harvard to create a
colony of flying robotic bees as an
artificial countermeasure. David’s
approach is much more traditional;
by breeding “generic, hardworking”
American honey bees that have
since “intermarried with some Italian
Carniolans” and with “a wave of
Russians [having] jumped into the
genetic pool,” David’s ultimately
created a “stronger queen bee for
the environment.”
What do you consider to be the most important moments of sustainability within the
high fashion world? Stella McCartney saying
‘yes’ to making an all organic capsule collection — she was the first major designer to take
on the challenge. Now, a good portion of her
ready-to-wear incorporates some of these
principles. In 2008, Earth Pledge’s FutureFashion hosted a show during New York
Fashion Week at Barneys where we asked
noted designers to create one complete sustainable runway look. Many designers, from
Ralph Lauren to Oscar de la Renta to Martin
Margiela, did designs for the show. It was the
first time some of them had ever tried to produce something with sustainability in mind.
What is your personal interpretation of conscious consumerism? Conscious consumerism is a reminder that consuming affects
humanity and the world at large. We need
to remember our purchases have power to
express our beliefs.
We need
to remember our
purchases have
power to express
our beliefs.
You’ve previously said that eventually, customers “will not just be seduced by the
‘fashion’ but also by how the fashion is made.”
What are the factors in play that would help
customers awaken to this benevolent curiosity? The fact that news is broadcast and consumed on an almost instantaneous basis. The
rise of young, worldly, conscious consumers
who are deeply sensitive to the issues of others will cause a ‘pause’ where there was none
before. For example, it’s exciting to know the
traditional beading on your handbag may be
helping a family sustain themselves. Or, perhaps the bead itself is made from a material
that already exists — the way the product is
made adds value. The mindset of the consumer is changing in the sense that they are
becoming more aware that buying a product
that has no regard for environmental or social
impact is no longer attractive to them.
Do you feel that people are becoming more
aware of the connections between their
spending habits, or lifestyle, with events
such as the Rana Plaza disaster, or our
increasingly strange weather? As long as
we’ve been consuming, there has been very
little, if any, awareness or information of what
we shop for and how it’s produced. Until
recently, people didn’t put any connection
of what they are purchasing with its source
and source ingredients. I feel transparency of
information is a key factor, and not just from
the traditional news sources — s
ocial media is
having an effect on our collective consciousness. Images of loss of life at Rana Plaza, and
wasteful depletion of natural resources, will
have an impact on shopping patterns. It may
take time but I believe change in shopping
patterns is happening at a faster rate.
From your experience of working in fashion,
are we right to assume huge brands are able
to swallow the initial small loss in profit to
produce their clothing in a sustainable way?
Maybe there could be an initial loss from
switching from old ways to the new ones, but
in the long term, actively engaging in production with sustainable materials and methods
can actually increase profits. In essence, it’s
all about smart decisions made by smart,
aware people.
And do you believe this change will come
from customer demand, or should brands
be leading the way? The responsibility lies
with both, but at present, brands should be
answering the call. Consumer thoughts in
this arena are changing quickly. If I were a
brand, positioning myself now… I strongly
believe that when this consumer awareness becomes more prevalent, brands will
be forced to change. In fashion, the ones that
lead and innovate are always the ones, that if
managed correctly, are the most successful. In a future characterised by an a amalgam
of clicks and mortar, bits and bricks, what
kind of benefits can big data technologies
bring to the shopping experience? The rise
of big data allows for the clever interpretation
of shopping habits, needs, wants, and more.
By effectively, respectfully, and consciously
mining data, retailers can strategically plan
wholesale orders to allow for less waste,
thereby affecting the future of production
so there’s less wastage — it’s a very positive
future for the environment in that capacity.
In a perfect world, what does our future
shopping landscape look like? Ideally, the
retailers who will rock the commerce landscape will be completely focused on sustainability through their construction methods,
electricity usage and packaging needs etc…
They’ll focus on consciously produced products without having to forego seductive style.
The Future o
Fashion
When was the first time you merged your personal passions for environmental issues with
your professional life, and what prompted
that specific moment? It was at a couture
show in Paris that someone told me it cost
over a million dollars to produce. At the time,
there were an increasing amount of discussions happening on the environment and the
negative impact that we were having on the
planet. Poverty, especially in certain regions
of Africa where food and water were scarce,
was a hot topic in the news. I was looking at
the clothes, none of which were available for
sale as everything was based on fantasy, and
all of a sudden it did not make sense for me. It
was a moment of change for how I would do
and see things.
The norm will be that a percentage of profits are given back to effect change in some
regard. It will be so fun and sexy, that anyone
who is not participating in this way will look
out of date and won’t be able to make their
business work. They will be forced to change.
AS ONE OF THE FASHION
INDUSTRY’S MOST INFLUENTIAL
CONSULTANT’S, JULIE GILHART
TAKES JOY IN CONNECTING DESIGNERS
AND RETAILERS TO CREATE
CONCEPTS THAT OFFER MORE THAN
MAKING A SIMPLE SALE.
The former fashion director of America’s most influential
department store, Barneys New York, Julie has been working
with Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, for the
past three years in advising them on how they can begin to
engage with luxury e-commerce. Here, she discusses the
most significant developments in high fashion’s approach to
sustainability and what’s in store for fashion’s near future.
Eventually,
customers will
not just be
seduced by the
‘fashion’, but also
by how the
fashion is made.
What do you look for in a product or a service? What comes into play when you’re
weighing up whether to splash the cash?
I’m pretty diligent about that. When it comes
to clothing, I try to find out where it was made,
what is it made of… I think of all of that. And
sometimes it may just boil down to the fact
that I know that person, and I know the potential of that person. I will not buy anything that
I don’t have some sort of connection to. It’s a
really good way to edit things.
What daily act could you we all do to make
the world a better place? If everyone would
meditate, the whole world’s vibration would
change. And actually when you think about
it scientifically, it would. I think that from trying to centre yourself, be more conscious
and make better decisions, you may land on
something that’s quite impactful. Even the
intentions of doing that is really good.
Are there things you know you shouldn’t do
that you keep doing? What are they? Oh my
god, there are so many. I think something that
really bothers me is that every time I drink, it’s
from a plastic bottle. Just try living for one day
without single purpose plastic, whether it’s a
bottle or a straw, and you’ll probably only last
about an hour. It’s crazy how much plastic is
in the world.
It’s exciting to know
the traditional beading
on your handbag
may be helping a family
sustain themselves.
GreenQloud — In 2007, it was
reported the I.T. industry produces two
percent of the world’s greenhouse
gases, an amount comparable to the
aviation industry. As information
technologies are set to ever more rule
our world, these huge banks of servers
use tonnes of energy to keep them
running, so finding a sustainable way
to meet our online needs shall become
increasingly important. Iceland’s
GreenQloud servers, powered by 100
percent renewable energy sources —
hydropower and geothermal energy
— and cooled naturally because of
their location near the Arctic Circle,
offers a glimpse of a fully sustainable
I.T. industry. For a small data solution,
trying switching to Blackle for your
internet browsing needs. Offering the
same search functionalities as Google,
except against a less energy hungry
black background, set Blackle as your
homepage to save that little bit extra.
www.blackle.com
Julie
Gilhart
by Xerxes Cook
MImi
xu
MEET THE FRENCH-CHINESE DJ
WHO SPINS RECORDS UNDER THE
MONIKER MISTY RABBIT AND
MEDITATES EVERY MORNING. A few years
Biofuel powered flights —
In the making of Ever Conscious,
our contributors have frequently
cited flying as the single act they feel
most guilty about. Since 2008’s
Virgin Atlantic flight fuelled with five
percent coconut and babassu palm
oil, Air France have been flying
from Toulouse to Paris-Orly on a
50/50 blend of refined cooking oil
and conventional jet fuel supplied
by the Dutch biofuels company
SkyNRG, cutting in half the CO2
emitted compared to a conventional
flight. SkyNRG has since supplied
biofuels to KLM, Finnair and Thomson
Airways for medium and long-haul
flights. As more airlines adopt
biofuels, the economies of scale
shall result in the price of their
production dramatically decreasing,
and biofuels could become
a commercially viable option for
airlines to power their planes.
www.skynrg.com
ago, Mimi became aware of the many elderly French people often living
very lonely lives and so joined forces with the Parisian organisation
Voisin-Age which arranges regular visits and sends cheery postcards with
personal messages every morning to brighten up their day.
Mimi Xu believes that little gestures, like
helping those you don’t know, can lead to
large changes. Or as she puts it: “It should
be less about me, me, me, and more about
we — together we can create the world of
tomorrow.” She spent her childhood living between Shanghai and Copenhagen
and eventually ended up in Sydney. Since
moving to Paris eight years ago, Mimi has
been cutting the soundtracks to fashion
shows for brands like Miu Miu, Acne and
H&M, and DJ’ing at art and film events in
Cannes, Milan, Moscow and beyond. Yet
after a while something snapped and Mimi
realised that there is more to the world than
this “hip, self-involved, based around travelling a lot and having-a-good-time way of
life” and so began meditating, an internal
journey that led her to become more aware
of her surroundings. “Whether it’s the environment, people, animals, friends or family
— it’s only when we all become more conscious of these little gestures and positive
vibes, that big actions can happen, even
if it’s something as simple of encouraging organic farming by purchasing organic
food as often as we can.” When it comes to
music, Mimi respects the actions of Atoms
For Peace, the musical project put together
by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who only travel
by boat or train. “Of course, I can’t afford to
do that — though I do feel guilty for not dedicating enough time to the elderly who I’ve
committed myself to help, as I’m always on
the road. So instead, I send them a postcard
whenever I can or give them a call and leave
a message if they don’t pick up, just to keep
in touch. I think that’s a real first step in contributing to a more positive society at large.”
LESS ME,
MORE WE
by Xerxes Cook
www.voisin-age.fr
EDIT YOUR LIFE TO INCLUDE MORE
MONEY, HEALTH AND HAPPINESS WITH
LESS STUFF, SPACE AND ENERGY. For one
innovator, sustainability is about scale. Having founded the eco-news website
Treehugger — often described as the “Green CNN” — four years ago, Graham bought
two tiny apartments in New York City and crowdsourced a competition for an interior
design that would let him hold dinner parties for 12, work from home and still have
enough space for an overnight guest or two. Dubbed Life Edited Apartment #1,
the 420-square-foot apartment’s clever design gave birth to a website of the same
name, showing the world how to “live large in small spaces.”
A former industrial design student, Graham
thinks that “if we’re smart enough about
how we design and use technology, we can
create smaller lives that are really compelling and allow us to live within our means,
both environmentally and mentally.” Currently in a long-distance relationship (his
girlfriend lives in Los Angeles), Graham’s
biggest environmental challenge is flying.
“It’s a tricky one — I’m the son of an airline
pilot — but I do think there is a scale.” As
a “weekday vegetarian” (and author of
an ebook of the same name), he gives the
example of worrying about keeping the tap
running while you’re brushing your teeth.
“If you want to save water on a yearly basis,
then skip two steak meals instead. Meat
production is an immense drain on water.”
While he applauds the efforts of those who
do turn the taps off in the morning, “if you
really want to make a difference, it’s not
going to be about the fine calculations of
using a reusable cup, it’s going to be putting new windows in your house, adjusting
your heating by a few degrees less, or yes,
skipping an airline flight.”
www.lifeedited.com
www.treehugger.com
“The easiest way to go green is to go smaller,”
Graham Hill tells Ever Manifesto. “America
has really super-sized itself in the last sixty
years, and it’s just not working for us on an
environmental basis, nor on a happiness
or mental basis.” With more than half the
world’s population now living in cities, Graham’s home is a savvy solution to the competition for space and resources that defines
our urban present. With his home receiving
a hugely positive response — the New York
Times labelled it “the apartment of the future”
— Graham set up lifeedited.com in order to
create a movement around small living. “We
talk about less, but better,” as he puts it.
“We have to have stuff — you’re not going to
be running around in a loincloth. But, on the
clothing side, we have thirty times the clothing we used to. It’s crazy.” While buying sustainably may appear to have a higher price
tag — “as you’re not taking advantage of
people, and/or the environment” — Graham
We have to have stuff —
you’re not going to be running
around in a loincloth. But,
on the clothing side, we
have thirty times the clothing
we used to. It’s crazy.
LIVE LARGE,
by Xerxes Cook
believes “sometimes the more expensive
things are actually the cheaper things: a
pair of shoes that are more expensive but
last four times as long are actually half the
price.” The aim of LifeEdited is to help people “become conscious about what they’re
bringing into their life, to make sure it’s great
stuff that’s going to last a long time, stuff
that you’re really going to love, instead of
just having lots of it.”
A Stitch in Tim
Pharrell
Williams
by Kamin Mohammadi
A NEW HIGH-PERFORMANCE
THREAD MADE ENTIRELY FROM
RECYCLED PLASTIC BOTTLES,
BIONIC YARN OFFERS HIGH
FASHION AND THE HIGH STREET
A BRAVE NEW WORLD OF
POSSIBILITIES. It all began when the music
and style superstar stepped off the stage of the Brazilian edition of
Live Earth in 2007, and had a revelation. “I thought about it and
said you know what, maybe I shouldn’t just do something one time,
I should do something on a continuous basis.” His first move was
to invest in this innovative thread.
There’s not enough
emphasis placed
in the media on the
consideration of
Earth being our home.
For now, it’s the
only one we have, so
there’s no other
solution but to take
better care of it.
One of the most successful record producers of our time — in 2003, it was estimated
he was responsible for one in every five
songs played on British radio — Pharrell is
also the co-founder of two clothing lines,
Billionaire Boys Club and ICECREAM with
Nigo of A Bathing Ape fame. He has also
designed a jewellery line for Louis Vuitton
and collaborated with the Designart duo
Domeau & Peres on a range of chairs in which
the legs take the form of a couple copulating.
So it’s good news for Bionic Yarn founders
Tim Coombs and Tyson Toussant that mutual
friends introduced them to the pop polymath, with a view to using their eco-thread
Bionic Yarn as part of his Billionaire Boys
Club and ICECREAM lines. Pharrell went one
better — he became creative director and
brand ambassador for Bionic Yarn, because
“I want to make sure I’m putting something
positive back into the universe, a universe
that’s given me so much.”
Billed as “the world’s first high-performance
eco-thread”, Coombs and Toussant started
to develop Bionic Yarn after noticing the
amount of plastic bottles strewn about
New York’s streets. They realised that when
these plastic bottles are melted down, they
form the same molecular structure as polyester, from which they could develop an
eco-thread that was stronger and more
resilient than anything on the market following a three-step process. First the bottles are melted and then shredded into tiny
fibres. These are then woven together to
make a core yarn, which is then spun into a
‘helix’ which forms a protective outer layer
and transforms the yarn into a versatile fabric that Moncler has used for winter coats,
replaced the canvas uppers of Timberland
boots, and has been integrated into a variety of products for TopShop in the U.K., and
Gap in Japan.
Pharrell’s desire to promote “conscious consumerism” is the driving force for his involvement. “There’s not enough emphasis placed
in the media on the consideration of Earth
being our home,” he says. “Not everyone
understands the scientific facts about the
damage being done, but everyone understands the importance of having a roof over
our heads. Our planet is just an extension of
that concept. It’s our home and for now the
only one we have, so there is no other solution but to take better care of it.” Describing
happiness as the ultimate luxury, Pharrell’s
various endeavours are united by an urge
to create products and experiences with “a
purpose — not just an aesthetic value, but a
holistic balance.”
As the creative director of Bionic Yarn,
Pharrell has made it his mandate to enlist
as many brands as possible to make the
sustainable choice and “go Bionic”. And it
seems to be paying off — having recently
announced RAW for the Oceans, a collaboration with the denim label G-Star RAW, where
the collection will be made of Bionic Yarn
created from plastics retreived from the
ocean and shorelines. “We’re in the middle
of another great conversation,” he tells
Ever Manifesto. “But it hasn’t been officially
announced, so I can only give you a hint; It’s
with a company based in Germany famous
for using three stripes...” Bionic Yarn is going
places, just watch this space.
www.bionicyarn.com
The Violence
Of Creation
Fairphone — As the world becomes
more prosperous, and increasingly
more digital, our appetites for
electronics show no sign of abating.
Metals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten
and gold are a vital component for a
vast array of electronic devices,
especially mobile phones and laptops.
They are also increasingly the source
of conflict in countries such as the
Democratic Republic of the Congo,
which possesses 80 percent of the
world’s supply. In response, earlier
this year Intel and Apple announced
that their microprocessors and
consumer electronics will be
conflict mineral free and many other
companies are following suit.
Ever Manifesto is a fan of Fairphone,
an Amsterdam-based startup that
has developed a conflict-mineral-free
smartphone running on Android’s
operating system — perfect for taking
that shameless #selfie.
www.fairphone.com
PAMELA
LOVE
by Xerxes Cook
TAKING INSPIRATION
FROM NATURAL PHENOMENA,
ARCHITECTURE AND THE
MYSTERIES OF THE COSMOS,
THIS BROOKLYN-BORN
JEWELLERY DESIGNER REALISES
THAT SOMETIMES YOU NEED
TO DESTROY BEAUTY TO
RECREATE IT. That being said, Pamela Love is
intuitively aware that it’s through her design process and ethical
choices she can educate her customer.
In her 2014 resort collection, Pamela interpreted the iconography and architecture of
the Maya — revered for their unique calendar,
the Long Count, a 5125 year sequence recognised as a waveform that guides humanity
through its processes of historic change and
development, and came to an end on December 21st, 2012 — through motifs of the pineal
eye and ziggurats on pendants and bracelets. All of these were manufactured locally
in New York City from ethically sourced metals and gemstones. On a recent trip to Suriname, to connect with the energies of the
Amazon, Pamela spent time in an indigenous
village where she flopped out on a hammock
surrounded by the amazing greenery of the
We have to stop making
things that are designed
to be used twice and then
thrown away.
forest and had a chance to reflect: “Beautiful objects quite often come from such an
ugly process. It comes from the destruction
of something even more beautiful — nature.”
In order to counteract that, “It’s really impor-
tant to use as much recycled material as possible, such as recycled stones or metal. Or if
you’re using mined metal, making sure the
mines are clean and that they’re not poisoning the environment or leaching mercury into
the water system.” She finds the main challenge not to be in making her jewellery, but
in being able to present it at a price that’s
attractive to the customer. “It is important
to educate people about the importance
of the environment and the natural world
around us, so they would be more engaged
with caring,” she says. However, a more sustainable lifestyle need not mean an expensive one. “There are loads of everyday ways
to be more environmentally conscious that
can slowly change the system — like trying
to recycle and upcycle as much as humanly
as possible.” However, the act of creating
something in our cluttered world raises a
few dilemmas for the designer: “We have to
stop making things that are designed to be
used twice and then thrown away; stop making things by taking advantage of people that
are less fortunate than us to make profit, and
stop making things that involve the destruction of our physical environment. Maybe we
should just stop making things in general?”
www.pamelalovenyc.com
www.communitymining.org
by Rana Toofanian
The Four Seasons
DANIEL DE
LA FALAISE
HAVING HAD THE PRIVILEGE
TO BE BORN AND BROUGHT
UP ON A FARM ON THE WELSH
BORDERS, ONE RADICAL
CHEF IS TRYING HIS BEST TO
BRING THIS REFERENCE FOR
HOW INGREDIENTS SHOULD
TASTE TO OTHERS. Today, Daniel de la Falaise
works from his farm in a desolate pocket of Southwest France,
and travels to London or Paris when necessary to cook for private
clients and events like Kate Moss’ wedding in July, 2013.
FarmerS’ market and food
delivery — While Daniel’s
admission that he only eat tomatoes
in the summer months may come
as a surprise to some — studies have
shown that tomatoes grown in
hothouses in the U.K. generate more
emissions in terms of energy used
than transporting a truckload of
outdoor tomatoes over from Spain.
For modern urban dwellers, the
farmers’ market is the surest way to
connect directly with the food they
are buying, and tracking where it
comes from. Whether they be large or
small, farmers’ markets bring food
direct from the producer to the
consumer, cutting out the middle man
and therefore many potential transport
miles, and encourage the seasonal
consumption of local produce. If you
can’t find one near you, there are many
companies who now deliver weekly
organic vegetable boxes direct
from the farms to your door, giving
consumers the weekly challenge of
cooking seasonal vegetables they may
never have bought before. Either way,
once you have tasted the freshness
of a vegetable or fruit plucked from the
earth that very morning, you won’t
want to go back.
An advocate for high-quality organic and
seasonal food, Daniel de la Falaise has nurtured strong relationships with local producers, allowing him to source the purest ingredients at their peak. Daniel’s style of cooking
is simple and focuses on bringing out the natural flavours of the ingredients themselves.
“It’s not a cooking about transformation,” he
says “but more about underlining the inherent qualities of an ingredient, assembling
them and celebrating the natural synergies
that occur between them.”
What’s your guilty pleasure? Elettra Wiedemann said hers would be eating an avocado
in the winter. [Laughs] That’s tricky, isn’t it? It
never occurred to me to eat a tomato until July.
On my farm in Southwest France, sometimes
you get the first frost as late as late October,
so by some miracle you can have tomatoes
until then. But I don’t think about them again
until the beginning of July when the first
tomatoes ripen. Then you savour them for
three or four months, and you get to August
and get a massive glut of tomatoes that you
transform into something: a sauce that you jar
and keep in the larder so that in the depths
of miserable grey winter you can reach into
the larder and bring summer to your table.
What I feel very strongly about is scale. I work
with a bunch of producers; one of the largest
ones I work with is a peach producer. He has
55 different varieties and 15,000 trees which
enable him to have perfect peaches — white
peaches, yellow peaches, nectarines — from
mid-June to September. It’s a family business
which he runs with his parents, his sister, his
children, his nieces and nephews — that’s it.
Every year, he sells out. He’ll go to a market
with a tonne of peaches, and he’ll sell out
within two or three hours. He runs a very successful business. He knows his trees. He has
time to be with his trees. He looks after his
trees nine months a year in order to have a
perfect three-month harvest. That bespoke
care really makes the difference.
In terms of food, what is your understanding of conscious consumerism? You want
to know what you’re eating. So when it is an
avocado in the middle of November that’s
been on an airplane that was picked unripe, it
doesn’t really ring true. And I think that is the
most important and fundamental thing to get
into kids when they’re young. The difference
between a kid being encouraged to get a foot
stool to reach the sink to peel a carrot or to
swig a fish in a sink and work out what the gills
are, and leaving a kid to mong out on an iPad in
the corner because mum’s doing something
else and can’t be bothered is huge. Children
are just so wonderfully playful and curious.
The effort to be doing
good for oneself is
going to have a contact
high on others.
In terms of taste or nutritional benefit, what
effect would eating more sustainably have
on me? The awareness that you’re just doing
good by eating like that would just put you in
a good mood and have a physiological effect
upon you. The effort to be doing something
good for oneself is going to have a contact
high. It’s going to have an effect on one’s
outlook and one’s being. It’s going to change
how the body functions. Just that adjustment
in itself is inherently positive. And of course
there’s the difference of eating a vegetable
that has come out of natural live soil, which
has been manured and composted. A teaspoon of that soil holds more life than there
is on Mars — it’s extraordinary. Land that’s
farmed industrially is pretty much dead. They
spray it with artificial fertilizer and artificial
nitrogen, and as soon as things begin to grow
and come up, it’ll be sprayed again. It’s like
somebody in a controlled coma, and they’re
just feeding it, tweaking it, harvesting it and
doing another cycle until it’s dead. Then they
move onto something else.
As beautiful as
it is hurtling
across France and
seeing the evolving
landscapes
through the
seasons, I do long
for the day of
a really efficient
electric car.
Let’s talk about supermarkets because
as a consumer, I personally feel I’m doing
okay when I’m buying healthy, organic or
free-range food from the supermarket…
Although they’ll be talking about organic, their
organic section is not often from the local guy.
They’ve worked out that if they have a squillion acre ranch somewhere where they pay
people nothing, make somebody else grow it,
and fly it halfway across the world, they can
market it as organic produce and sell it to a
‘label-sensitive’ public. I much prefer the idea
of natural food. And that applies to wines too.
‘Organic’ wines are allowed to use organically
certified products in the vineyard, and once
they get it to the cellar, they have a whole
bunch of other shit that they twist around and
into it. A natural wine is recognised by no certified body — because you can’t scale it. It’s
really produced by a philosophy rather than
a regimentation; it’s minimum intervention in
the vineyard as well as in the cellar. But it’s not
certified, it’s not recognised, it’s not given a
stamp, and it really remains the realm of the
independent producer. You go back to the
quality of the rock, the soil, the roots which
feed off of the soluble minerality of the rock.
Do you think there should be a qualifying
body? That’s just more fucking paperwork.
Yet because of time and money, eating
organic and seasonal food bought direct
from the producer, as opposed to from the
supermarket, is out of the reach of most
people. If you’re in a big city and you go to an
area where there’s an ethnic minority, that’s
where you’ll see people using raw ingredients
and cooking from scratch.
Does your personal philosophy about food
and agriculture dictate how you vote? Yes.
But if how people voted had more effect,
then I don’t think we’d be about to pollute our
whole water table by fracking. There’s nothing sustainable about fracking. It’s absolutely
unbelievable. It’s money. It’s a greedy pig
frenzy for crack in a pig trough and it’s going
to poison the water supply. The groundwater is already diminished by agricultural and
industrial pollution. This is another whack on
the head for it. Who’s doing it? It’s the people
who have been voted into power to move the
country forward.
Are there any things in your life that you’d
like to improve or change with regards to
being more sustainable, and what’s been
stopping you from making these changes?
There’s something that doesn’t make much
sense for me in respect to sustainability: I
move around a lot. I’m in Southwest France, I
have my farm, and I’m surrounded by my producers. Everything is picked from the branch
and brought to the table, but often times the
table is a thousand miles away. As beautiful
as it is hurtling across France and seeing the
evolving landscapes through the seasons, I
do long for the day of a really efficient electric car. I’m happy to travel. It’s amazing being
able to whisk things from some place where
they’re at the height and top of their game to
some unsuspecting tables around the world,
but I’m aware of how often one is filling up
an increasingly expensive petrol tank full
of something which is running out and has
caused such defining havoc in the last hundred years on this planet.
What are some everyday solutions for people
looking to eat more sustainably? You can find
out where the local farmers’ market is. There
are more and more of these markets. You
can try and build bridges and relationships
with producers. If your city, town or wherever
you are has a farmers’ market, and if the producer is able to get there by eight o’clock in
the morning once or twice a week, then he’s
not that far away. To engage in where things
come from, I think is the simplest thing.
If you’re in a big city and you
go to an area where there’s
an ethnic minority, that’s
where you’ll see people using
raw ingredients and cooking
from scratch.
IF ALL OF OUR ECONOMY RELIES
ON OUR ENVIRONMENT, HOW CAN
BIG BUSINESSES BECOME A FORCE
FOR GOOD? Conventional business wisdom decrees
BEN
GOLDSMITH
a company’s priority is to maximise their profits through keeping
their costs as low as possible — often at the expense of environmental
restrictions or ethical regulations that stand in the way of their
margins. However, what if that profit motive is what’s spurring big
corporations to start thinking of their environmental impact?
by Xerxes Cook
What all companies
need to understand is that
everything they do is
reliant on the environment.
Ben Goldsmith, founder of WHEB, an investment group backing green businesses
and infrastructure projects, believes it’s
often the “simple mathematics” of using
resources more efficiently and reducing
waste that delivers the cost savings all
companies seek. That simplicity, he says, is
believes, is that “everything they do is reliant
what’s driving the “green industrial revolu- on the environment.” He cites the brewing
tion.” In terms of costs — to both business
conglomerate SAB Miller’s restoration of the
and the environment — it doesn’t get much
rainforests around Bogota in order to mainbigger than energy. “People don’t quite
tain the water supply for their brewery in the
realise firstly how fast the equipment of
Columbian capital as an example of a large
renewable energy has come down in price,” corporation recognising that their business
Ben says. “Solar power is even 90 percent
is dependent on a healthy ecosystem.
cheaper than it was in 2008; so solar is
becoming the cheapest energy option for Another is in Vietnam, where 40 percent of
a lot of places in the world, and the price
the country’s energy supply comes from
for wind is coming down and down also.” hydroelectric dams. The discovery that the
With this technology competing with con- flow of their rivers have begun to drop and
ventional energy sources, it’s not difficult
their expensive dams have become silted
to see how countries such as the Philip- up with mud as a result of deforestation led
pines, Austria, Croatia, Norway and Brazil
to Vietnamese power companies teaming
will achieve their goals of a 100 percent
up to pay for the protection of millions of
renewable energy supply in the next 15 or 20
hectares of the country’s rainforests. And
years. Even Saudi Arabia, the world’s larg- it’s not just electricity and alcohol, Ben tells
est exporter of fossil fuels, is getting in on
Ever Manifesto, but a principle that can be
the act. “On the face of it, you wouldn’t think
applied to all industries. “Tourism is another
they would invest in renewables, but every
one as well. There are studies which have
barrel of oil they burn for generating domes- shown a dead manta ray is worth $50 to
tic electricity could have been sold for 120
the Costa Rican economy, but a manta ray
bucks,” Ben comments. “Saudi Arabia plans
during the course of its 20-year life is worth
to build more photovoltaic power generat- $180,000 through people coming to see it.”
ing capacity in the next ten years than the
whole world has built to date.”
“I think corporations, as they realise this,
become potentially forces for good — and
A nature lover who grew up “looking for
those that don’t get it will be left behind.”
bird’s nests in the forest,” Ben’s great- He continues, “Companies that behave well
est passion remains for the outdoors. The
are more popular with customers, employscion of one of Britain’s wealthiest families, ees and investors — which lowers their cost
he describes his green investment busi- of raising capital. Young people coming out
ness as a “social mission.” Because, “If we
of university today, the smartest talent in the
succeed in delivering returns for investors, world, don’t want to work for the bad guys.”
we’re mobilising private capital into areas
When it comes to trying to live a carbon neuthat badly need it if we are to avoid the total
tral life, Ben admits he’s “no saint”, but tries
breakdown of the environment.” WHEB’s
to be a responsible as possible, taking public
investments fall into two camps: First are
transport and cycling to meetings in London
the “evolutionary, rather than revolutionary” and buying local food as often as he can. “I
ventures, focused in efficiency — “smart
don’t think the answer is to preach to people,
energy meters for homes and offices, effi- as I think it is out of the hands of most.” The
cient LED lighting, new types of refrigeration
nephew of the UK’s Green Party co-founder
and air conditioning, and PVS and polypro- Teddy, and brother of English Member of
pylene waste recycling technologies that
Parliament Zac, Ben believes “the most
are economically viable.” The other is in
effective way people can make a difference
renewable energy infrastructure, such as
is through how they vote [both politically
wind farms, solar parks, biomass power
and] in the way they spend their money.”
stations and hydroelectric dams. What
all companies need to understand, Ben
www.whebgroup.com
by Rana Toofanian
Clevercare — To remind
consumers that their actions can
have an environmental impact, the
clevercare.info symbol was introduced
by GINETEX, the International
Association for Textile Care Labelling.
Considering that 40 percent of the
environmental impact of a garment
occurs after purchase, when it’s in the
owner’s hands, the clevercare.info
symbol, found on the inside label
of clothes, is an easy reminder of the
ways you should look after your what’s
in your wardrobe. By following
clevercare’s tips of washing at lower
temperatures, washing garments
only when they are dirty, using
eco-friendly detergents, cleaning lint
filters in the dryer, drying laundry
outdoors if the weather permits and
to iron your clothes at a lower
temperature, ensures the longest life
for your garments with as little impact
on the environment as possible.
www.clevercare.info
CAN A SELF-PROCLAIMED
FASHION LOVER TRULY
BE SUSTAINABLE WHEN ALL
SHE WANTS IS STYLE? Eva Kruse
struggles with this dilemma herself. Working on a number of initiatives
to wake up the fashion industry, Eva believes that by
changing the mindset of the world’s second most polluting industry,
style and sustainability can go hand in hand.
LOVE YOUR CLOTHES,
LOOK AFTER THEM
eva
Kruse
Over the past seven years, Eva Kruse, president of the Danish Fashion Institute has been
trying to stimulate and drive her country’s
fashion industry. An expert in her field, Eva
was quick to recognise the global challenges
that our love of clothes has been placing on
our Earth and the people who live on it, and
so set up the biannual Copenhagen Fashion
Summit, the world’s largest conference for
sustainable fashion, and NICE, the Nordic
Initiative Clean and Ethical commitment
to sustainable solutions across Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland.
Do you think being green or being a conscious consumer is a luxury? Your clothes
will last longer if you wash them less — which
saves you money. It’s about understanding
that everything you have in your life has a
value. If you don’t want to wear that shirt anymore, give it to somebody else. 60 percent
of the environmental impact of a garment
is during the production phase; 40 percent
lies when it is in the hands of the consumer.
We wash our clothes too often, and we dry
clean too much. It’s a change of mindset. So
together with H&M we’re launching clevercare.
differentiate. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition is a coalition that represents 40 percent
of the world’s shoes and apparel including Timberland, Nike, Patagonia and Adidas.
They’re coming out with something called
the Higg Index; it compares the retail value
of what something costs to what it costs the
environment. If there’s a jacket that you want,
even if it has a low score, you probably will buy
it, but at least you think. That’s the beginning
of the process, an educational process to
start with. This will also help encourage other
companies to become more transparent.
What are the main motivations of someone
browsing a rack of clothes? I don’t think we’re
ever going to buy fashion to save the world;
we’re always going to be driven by style and
the feel. Buying fashion is something we do
because we like the colour, the fit or the brand
or because you want to go out on Saturday,
and you want to look good. And therefore
there’s a huge responsibility that lies on the
industry to give us a sustainable choice that is
equally desirable, sexy and fantastic as conventionally produced fashion. Fashion is one
of the world’s largest industries. It’s also the
second largest polluter worldwide, second
only to oil. Cotton is one of the world’s most
water-consuming crops, and the dying processes and many manufacturing processes
in fashion require a lot of water. Yet we live
on a planet with fewer and fewer resources,
an ever-increasing population and one billion people without access to clean drinking
water. The industry needs to wake up to the
reality that we need to think differently about
how we produce and manufacture fashion —
not only because we want to save the planet
but also because it’s more expensive when
we do the conventional production.
We are all
going to want
something new. We
can’t stop that.
On a personal level, how sustainable do you
consider your lifestyle to be? I do as much as
I can, but I’m not a saint. I drive a car — I even
drive more than I bike. Actually, my bike is
stolen at the moment. [Laughs] And I do consume, but I care for what I have and wash my
clothes less and use a less harmful detergent.
Your clothes will last
longer if you wash
them less — which saves
you money. It’s about
understanding that
everything you have in
your life has a value.
Do you think we vote with our money? I think
we vote with our money and our feet. It [buying consciously] doesn’t have to be more
expensive. Of course organic food is initially
somewhat more expensive, but if more people buy it then prices will go down. The same
applies to fashion. Consumer power is interesting. If we all decide to not do something
for a while, these companies would suffer. If
we decide to follow other companies, they
will grow. So we do determine a lot by where
we spend our money. It’s been hard for us
to get fashion companies to wake up to this
agenda. What they want to do is focus on
surviving, getting through the year and keeping their employees.
What are the obstacles keeping fashion
brands from switching to more sustainable modes of operating their business?
The complexities of production make it difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Often they don’t know where their products
are produced. Often they’re through agents
which complicates things. They search for the
lowest price, and that determines the choices
they make — even for luxury production.
Is it a different scenario for the bigger highstreet brands and the high-fashion houses?
The luxury conglomerate Kering — Saint
Laurent Paris, Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Stella
McCartney — have incorporated sustainability as one of their four core values for the
entire group. And I feel that’s super important
as they are an industry leader. Other companies will follow; it’s a chain reaction. We have
to have the cool designers, but also the mass
producers like the Gaps, the H&Ms, the Timberlands, the Walmarts and Marks & Spencers
of the world also moving ahead with this. And
it doesn’t have to mean that things become
much more expensive.
So how can someone be a consumer of fashion and be environmentally conscious? It’s a
mindset. Obviously it turns out to be an action
as well, but initially it’s so important of us as
individuals to feel what we do is important. It
starts there. For such a long time we’ve had
governments that have taken away our sense
of influence. We have a media that presents
us with global challenges that sometimes are
so big that we feel paralysed almost, where
you sometimes think, ‘What does it matter if
On a personal level, what are the determinI divide my trash, if I put the batteries in the
ing factors when you buy a garment? I still
right box?’ — but it does. I think the conscious
buy fashion for the style. I fall in love with
consumer knows that we as global citizens
pieces, and I have no clue how they’re made
have an effect on what happens. And the cool — even if I try searching for the knowledge, I
part is if a lot of people make small changes
can’t find it. Transparency would be great.
in our world and daily lives, it’ll matter a whole
But for the time being, it’s also the compalot. We don’t have to compromise on design
nies that don’t communicate what they do
or colour — the solution is actually to manu- because they’re afraid that the media will
facture, source and put together a collec- come after them and say, ‘Ok, you say this
tion in a different way, but the design can be
coat is sustainable, but what about the jeans
equally attractive.
or what about the lining? Where does this button come from?’ We need to make this a bit
To paraphrase our photographer Matthew
more positive.
Stone, apathy is so over. Completely! Apathy
is over. You have to act. Even the small things
No finger pointing. Yes. We need to encouryou do matter. Turn off the lights when you
age them, and say, ‘Ok, great! You managed
leave the apartment, take shorter showers, to do 20 percent of your collection in organic
dry clean less, iron less, tumble dry less, buy
cotton. Where is this leading? What else are
organic, save leftovers for the next day. It’s
you going to do?’ They also need to commujust small things in your life that matter.
nicate to consumers what they do, so we can
Is fashion your guilty pleasure? I love fashion. And I still buy a lot of it, but I don’t throw
any clothes out; I give it to somebody or sell
it. Another thing that might be interesting,
maybe on a governmental level, is to create
a return system for textiles within cities. In
Copenhagen, I have one bin for cardboard,
one for paper, one for plastic, one for glass,
one for mixed rubbish and one for batteries —
but I don’t have one for textiles. You can shred
textiles, you can grind them, you can make
new thread out of the fibres. It would help to
not grow so much virgin cotton or virgin fibres
but to use fibres that already exist.
In this manifesto, Lewis Perkins from the
Cradle to Cradle Products Innovations Institute said he goes to the store, buys a product,
and if it’s over packaged, takes it out then
says, ‘You deal with it.’ That it’s the brand’s
responsibility to take care of the packaging.
That’s a good idea. Vivienne Westwood proposed to make a fabric label that says: ‘Wash
every second time.’ But buying an organic
avocado coming from Argentina in a plastic
wrapping — how sustainable is that? It might
have been grown organically, but it’s been
flown all the way to Copenhagen!
Do you believe we should just consume less?
Some people say it’s a contradiction to talk
about fashion being sustainable — that we
should just stop consuming. We have a lot of
clothes in the world. But that’s just not how
the world is going. We are all going to want
something new. We can’t stop that motion. I’m
okay with mass consumption; it keeps jobs
and keep families alive — we just have to do
it in a less harmful way. And fortunately there
are so many innovative solutions, like creating
new fibres made out of leftover products from
the food industry, or how the enzymes used
in the dying and manufacturing process can
diminish the chemicals that leach in the water.
If we continue to have a positive focus on the
solutions that lie ahead, then we can make a
huge difference.
www.copenhagenfashionsummit.com
www.nordicfashionassociation.com
DANIEL
PINCHBECK
by Xerxes Cook
AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AND
AUTHOR WHO BELIEVES THE
ECONOMIC SYSTEMS HUMANITY HAS
CREATED HAVE THE POTENTIAL
TO ACT AS REMEDIES TO THE
ENVIRONMENTAL CHAOS OUR PLANET
IS WITNESSING TODAY, here, Daniel Pinchbeck
discusses ideas of corporate alchemy and whether the ecological crisis is an
initiatory process that will lead to the next stage of human evolution.
It’s been seven years since you wrote
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which
you concluded that the end of the Mayan
calendar would mark a period of transition
from “ego-based materialism, alienation
and individuation” towards the next stage
of human evolution which recognises the
interconnected nature of life… Please could
you tell us how these ideas have developed
in the book you are working on now? In my
new book Metamorphosis: A New Operating
System for Human Society, I am thinking about
the process of how we move from our current
civilisation, based on hierarchy and ecological
decimation, to a new social operating system
based on mutual aid, with an integrated world
view. One of the big inspirations is Buckminster Fuller’s work. In Utopia or Oblivion, Fuller
argued that humanity has a choice: either we
construct a situation where we maximise our
efficient use of resources, and redesign our
socio-technical industrial systems to support
and educate everybody to become comprehensively successful as a species. Or we fail
together and annihilate ourselves. And I think
if we look at what’s happening with the ecological crisis, Fuller’s ideas make sense. My
view is that the ecological crisis is potentially
an initiatory process for humanity, that’s going
to force us to awaken to our inherent solidarity
as a species, and shift from our sense of separate identities to being aware of ourselves as
constituting a planetary super organism that
is in a symbiotic relationship with the planetary
ecology as a whole.
My question is,
can you do alchemy on
the Corporations to
turn them from poisons
into medicines?
If cash rules everything around us, how can
we redesign the financial systems we’ve
created? Corporate alchemy. It is this idea
drawn from the alchemical principle that poisons can be medicines if taken at the right
dose, and that the more powerful a poison is,
the stronger a medicine it might be. So if corporations at the moment are extremely disruptive and often have a negative impact on
the planet, it is because they are so powerful,
because they are such incredible machines
My view is that the
ecological crisis is
potentially an initiatory
process for humanity,
that’s going to force
us to awake to our inherent
solidarity as a species,
and shift from our sense
of separate identities to
being aware of ourselves
as constituting a planetary
super organism that is
in a symbiotic relationship
with the planetary ecology
as a whole.
Gaia theory — Much of Daniel
Pinchbeck’s philosophy of the
ecological crisis being an initiatory
process for humanity — a rite of
passage we must endure in order to
“awaken our inherent solidarity
as a species” — is based on James
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia
hypothesis. First posited in the late
1960s, the theory proposes that
living organisms and their inorganic
surroundings have evolved together
as a single living system that
greatly affects the chemistry and
conditions of the Earth’s surface,
ranging from global temperature
and atmospheric content to ocean
salinity, in a quasi-automatic,
self-regulating manner as if the
Earth were a living organism itself.
www.gaiatheory.org
DANIEL
PINCHBECK
by Xerxes Cook
AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AND
AUTHOR WHO BELIEVES THE
ECONOMIC SYSTEMS HUMANITY HAS
CREATED HAVE THE POTENTIAL
TO ACT AS REMEDIES TO THE
ENVIRONMENTAL CHAOS OUR PLANET
IS WITNESSING TODAY, here, Daniel Pinchbeck
discusses ideas of corporate alchemy and whether the ecological crisis is an
initiatory process that will lead to the next stage of human evolution.
It’s been seven years since you wrote
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which
you concluded that the end of the Mayan
calendar would mark a period of transition
from “ego-based materialism, alienation
and individuation” towards the next stage
of human evolution which recognises the
interconnected nature of life… Please could
you tell us how these ideas have developed
in the book you are working on now? In my
new book Metamorphosis: A New Operating
System for Human Society, I am thinking about
the process of how we move from our current
civilisation, based on hierarchy and ecological
decimation, to a new social operating system
based on mutual aid, with an integrated world
view. One of the big inspirations is Buckminster Fuller’s work. In Utopia or Oblivion, Fuller
argued that humanity has a choice: either we
construct a situation where we maximise our
efficient use of resources, and redesign our
socio-technical industrial systems to support
and educate everybody to become comprehensively successful as a species. Or we fail
together and annihilate ourselves. And I think
if we look at what’s happening with the ecological crisis, Fuller’s ideas make sense. My
view is that the ecological crisis is potentially
an initiatory process for humanity, that’s going
to force us to awaken to our inherent solidarity
as a species, and shift from our sense of separate identities to being aware of ourselves as
constituting a planetary super organism that
is in a symbiotic relationship with the planetary
ecology as a whole.
My question is,
can you do alchemy on
the Corporations to
turn them from poisons
into medicines?
If cash rules everything around us, how can
we redesign the financial systems we’ve created? Corporate alchemy. It is this idea drawn
from the alchemical principle that poisons can
be medicines if taken at the right dose, and
that the more powerful a poison is, the stronger
a medicine it might be. So if corporations at the
moment are extremely disruptive and often
have a negative impact on the planet, it is
because they are so powerful, because they
are such incredible machines
My view is that the
ecological crisis is
potentially an initiatory
process for humanity,
that’s going to force
us to awake to our inherent
solidarity as a species,
and shift from our sense
of separate identities to
being aware of ourselves
as constituting a planetary
super organism that is
in a symbiotic relationship
with the planetary ecology
as a whole.
Gaia theory — Much of Daniel
Pinchbeck’s philosophy of the
ecological crisis being an initiatory
process for humanity — a rite of
passage we must endure in order to
“awaken our inherent solidarity
as a species” — is based on James
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia
hypothesis. First posited in the late
1960s, the theory proposes that
living organisms and their inorganic
surroundings have evolved together
as a single living system that
greatly affects the chemistry and
conditions of the Earth’s surface,
ranging from global temperature
and atmospheric content to ocean
salinity, in a quasi-automatic,
self-regulating manner as if the
Earth were a living organism itself.
www.gaiatheory.org
for taking ideas, energy and information
and manifesting them. So my question is,
can you do alchemy on the corporations
to turn them from poisons into medicines?
So it’s not the fault of corporations, but that
they have been geared towards operating in
a system which rewards the maximum return
of profits above all else? Exactly. That’s the
problem — as much as we see efforts from
corporations to become more sustainable
and more mindful, if they’re publicly traded,
they’re still locked into the system where they
ultimately have to maximise shareholder value.
We can look at the corporation as an artificial
life form, that we have constructed out of legal
code, ideas, brand logos and so on; and we have
injected that artificial life form into a game, the
stock market. And the problem with the game
of the stock market is that it has only one way to
win, which is to maximise pure monetary profit
for shareholders. Ultimately we require a fundamental restructuring of the financial system to
launch a regenerative planetary culture.
If Walmart became
cooperatively owned by
its workers and
stakeholders, grew
organic food on its rooftop
gardens, developed on-site
manufacturing using
non-destructive materials
powered by renewable
energy, offered continuing
education and childcare
for all of its workers, I
might buy stock.
Can we consider the emergence of the sharing economy as capitalism at its finest — a
group of people exercising their free will to
do what they think is best for them, which
is to collectively share their resources?
I think, with the sharing economy you’re
seeing the beginning of this transformation, where you can utilise the tools of the
system we’ve constructed and build a new
system from within it, that rewards different
behaviour patterns and values. The trend
away from ownership is a big piece of that.
What does conscious consumerism mean
to you — is self-sacrifice inherent to conscious consumerism? I believe that people
must understand that we’re in a planetary
emergency, and there is an alternative — it’s
just a fairly radical one. They’re going to want
to commit themselves to bringing about the
level of transformation that’s necessary. In
the interim, we can think about things like
conscious consumerism. Ultimately, we can
transition to Cradle to Cradle practices, redesigning the industrial manufacturing system
so that everything we make is powered by
renewables, and feeds back productively and
beneficially to the ecosystem. If we reach that
point, everybody could consume all they want.
Can we consider businesses to be natural
creations of Gaia — the idea that all living
and non-living components on Earth work
together to promote life? If we take this idea
that humanity constitutes a planetary superorganism in a symbiotic relationship with the
whole Earth as a system, then we can consider
this organism to have a body, and ask, what
are the organs of that body? If you think about
it, the organs of that body are corporations.
For instance, energy companies are like the
blood, sanitation companies are the liver and
kidneys, the media companies are like the perceptual mechanisms and cognitive functions
and so on.
Now if you look at the process of evolution, it
goes through stages; immature ecosystems
are characterised by aggression and competition. But as ecosystems mature, they are
much more marked by symbiosis, cooperation
and mutual aid. An example of this is our own
bodies, which are made of trillions and trillions of cells and micro-organisms, that were
once competing for resources, that somehow
through a series of crises figured out how to
work together and create organs, blood, bones
and so on, and weave themselves into a body
to maximise their own potential for success.
But obviously, to get from competition to
cooperation will require a fundamental redesign of our economic system. And I think
that’s going to be necessary at some point.
In the near term, if we look at a process that’s
been going on for quite a while now, there’s a
counterculture which constructs narratives,
images, means of revolution, transformation,
sexual liberation, magic and so on. The energy
of the counterculture often gets co-opted,
corrupted, and used by the corporate system
to sell stuff. In the future I believe we will see
a creative synthesis, where the counterculture that seeks human liberation melds with
the corporate infrastructure to bring about
a transformation of our world from within.
So is it a situation where to be simply against
something is not useful — that you need to be
able to state your desired alternative? Rather
than boycotting companies you disagree
with, to work in collaboration with them to
show the ways forward? We have to think in
terms of transitional strategies and ultimate
goals. I think that corporations are going to be
hamstrung, if they are publicly traded, by the
In the future I believe we
will see a creative
synthesis, where the
counterculture that seeks
human liberation melds
with the corporate
infrastructure to bring
about a transformation of
our world from within.
need to maximise shareholder value. Still, in
the interim, if a Coke or a Walmart transitions
to a certain level of sustainability, it has a big
impact on the planet. Down the line, if Walmart
became cooperatively owned by its workers
and stakeholders, grew organic food on its
rooftop gardens, developed on-site manufacturing using non-destructive materials powered by renewable energy, offered continuing
education and childcare for all of its workers, I
might buy stock.
To contribute to Daniel’s crowdfunding
campaign to publish Metamorphosis: A New
Operating System for Human Society, visit
www.danielpinchbeck.net
What Lies Beneath
CLAIRE
NOUVIAN
by Xerxes Cook
WATER MAKES UP 72 PERCENT
OF THE EARTH’S VOLUME,
YET WE’VE ONLY HAD A CHANCE
TO EXPLORE ONE PERCENT OF
ITS WILDLIFE. With the populations of the
tasty fish we like to eat diminishing by the day, the European fishing
industry has had to look for fish further ashore, and deeper, for new
species using a technique called deep sea bottom trawling that
threatens the marine organisms we know of, and those we don’t.
It was on a reconnaissance trip for a film at
the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the United
States in 2001, that Claire Nouvian first
discovered incredible images of unidentified creatures in spectacular shapes and
astonishing colours, filmed at depths of up
to 4000 metres. Captivated and dazzled,
she sought to learn more about them, capturing this otherworldly abyss in her book
and exhibition, The Deep, in 2006.
Her feelings soon turned to outrage on discovering that as the numbers of cod, haddock, hake and flounder have fallen as much
as 95 percent over the past decade, boats
have been indiscriminately trawling the
bottoms of the deep seas in a hunt for just
three species — blue ling, black scabbard
fish and grenadier —
­ and simply throwing
everything else away, whether that be 4000
year old corals, sharks, or the examples of
biodiversity we know very little about. So
Claire set up BLOOM Association, an organisation dedicated to campaigning against a
marine industry dominated by France that is
3000 times more destructive than any other
— and that includes gas and oil extraction.
Do you eat fish? Yeah I do. I have had a lot
recently because the fish labelling study
we’re doing, which I didn’t particularly really
like. Outside of the study, I’ll eat animals low
on the food chain like herring, mackerel and
sardines, I really enjoy sardines. I think we
should forget about tuna in general, unless
you can get a specifically identified fish that
you know is sustainable, why not, go ahead
and indulge yourself — but it’s going to remain
a predator no matter what. It’s like eating the
lions in the savannah and not the antelopes.
all these links between living things, which
will eventually produce a surplus which you
can collect — the idea of fisheries is that you
should only harvest the surplus. And we tend
to forget that fishing is the last activity that
feeds the world from wild things — these are
not things we farm or breed. Except for when
you pick a few berries or mushrooms when
you’re going for a walk in the forest, fish are
literally the only food items you’re going to get
from the wild. So we shouldn’t be playing with
fire… We’ve depleted the stocks so much
that we’ve lost we think about 90 percent of
predators in the ocean, the big large fish, in
the past 50 years. And what are you going to
have next? In the Mediterranean, it’s jellyfish.
Or, in Croatia for example, I have unpublished
data from scientists that has shown last
year was the first time that they’ve caught
more plastic bags in weight than fish. And so
because of that, fisherman have had to look
for fish further offshore, and deeper, for new
species which have very little value.
So it is out of desperation we’ve turned to
these fish? Yep.
Eating tuna is
like eating
the lions in the
savannah and not
the antelopes.
Deep sea bottom trawlers are looking for
three fish, and throw away everything else
— but these three fish don’t seem to be parWhat is the situation with deep sea bottom
ticularly tasty… How can there be a demand
trawling? Well we can start with the oceans
for them? It’s weird. When they started deep
in general. They are massively exploited, and
sea fishing in France in 1989, they offered
there are very few fisheries that are sustain- these fish for free to French people, to get
able, properly managed so we get the same
them acquainted with the taste. And they got
amount of fish year after year, especially in
used to it, and after a while, they started to
Europe. If you bottom trawl an area, you take
think it was acceptable. The beautiful great
everything that’s there and really jeopardise
fish we used to have in the North Atlantic, like
cod, huge beautiful cod, have completely disappeared, collapsed once and for all, apparently in 1992. So because they’re not coming
back, since then, people have developed a
taste for deep sea fish.
We tend to forget that
fishing is the last activity
that feeds the world
from wild things — these
are not things we farm
or breed. So we shouldn’t
be playing with fire.
People now are quite familiar with the idea
of buying sustainably caught fish, such as
pole-and-line caught tuna. But what are the
few steps consumers can do for a phenomenon like deep sea trawling? Every time you
buy something you are making a vote for the
world you want when you buy. You are what
you eat. And then in our evanescent world,
signing petitions or sharing information —
which is what social networks are great for.
Also, I would just say, we have a great filter
which allows us to have a positive outlook on
life, but people should just trust NGOs, even
if the truth is so bad it’s hard to believe.
When it comes to fish, does the responsibility lie with customers or businesses?
Both, as one doesn’t work without the
other. Brands are so hypocritical. Because
Intermarché [the French supermarket who
own six of the 11 of Europe’s deep sea bottom trawlers] has a vested interest in deep
sea fishing, for years they’ve been carrying
out this toxic lobbying, and we’ve had this
massive construction of this huge state lie
about deep sea fishing. And just because
we’ve managed to generate public pressure,
they’re now negotiating with us. Brands are
sensitive to public mobilisation; as without
us, the customers, they don’t exist. And then,
brands, when they become champions — there’s a beautiful piece of research called
Shame vs. Honor by Jennifer Jacquet, a social
game that’s shown that brands who seem
to be moving towards or cooperating with
environmental or social standards are very
sensitive to shame or honours. But those
who already have pretty shameful business
practices are insensitive to anything. And
that’s why BLOOM has issued a supermarket ranking in France regarding their fish
procurement policies. So yeah, get mobilised.
The BLOOM Association is also active in
the Far East in working to conserve shark
populations through making shark fin soup
a socially unacceptable dish, and has had
some success with Hong Kong’s Peninsula
Hotels taking it off their menus, and Cathay
Pacific refusing to transport sharks from
unsustainable sources. But why should
we be bothered about sharks in the West?
Well, actually, you are going to eat a shark.
An NGO revealed that for a long time, fishing ships in the U.K. were selling a large
proportion of deepwater sharks instead of
cod for your fish and chips. Also, you will
probably find some squalene in your beauty
products, which is a product very often
derived from the liver of deep sea sharks.
It is a very moisturising compound which is
non greasy, which is why everybody loves it.
For the cosmetic industry, there’s a whole
trade out there of endangered species,
especially in Asia. In the West they’ve said
they’ve cleaned up — and actually I’m testing a load of cosmetics tonight from England,
France, Asia to see if their squalene comes
from sharks or other sources such as olive
fermentation. Squalene is also used in some
vaccines. The world has lost 99.9 percent of
its sharks — it’s crazy.
And how did you become so interested in
the oceans? I could have done something
else. It’s just out of all the spending on NGOs
for environmental work, it’s only something
like three or four percent, even though oceans
cover 72 percent of our planet. The NGOs are
completely understaffed, when you compare
it to what is at stake — half of the oxygen in
the world comes from the oceans, we’re dealing with the stabilisation of the climate, recycling of carbon, the food supply, the economy,
jobs — there’s a billion people who depend
on the oceans, but there’s only three percent
of funding that goes into oceans. So I think it
was the urgency of the situation that pulled
me in that direction. My real passion is for
birds, but they don’t need me, they’re doing
fine. Whereas the oceans, especially the deep
oceans which are the largest reservoir of life
on Earth, nobody was doing anything about
the really rapid destruction which is probably
totally irreversible.
What gives you hope? I am optimistic about
individuals. And brands — some brands can
really change the world, and they should take
their CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility]
commitments very seriously.
Do you think humans are intrinsically altruistic or selfish? Selfish. Is there even a debate
about this?
Dianna Cohen said what gives her hope is
that people’s first reaction to bad news is
to ask, ‘what can I do about this?’ I’m pretty
pessimistic about human nature — otherwise,
why would we be where we are?
Daniel Pinchbeck views the ecological
crisis as an initiatory stage for human
development. That’s what Descartes used
to think 400 years ago, but look what happened. These people were fiercely in favour
of progress, as they thought technological,
medical progress and science in general
was going to bring us liberation from slavery
tasks and diseases.
We have a great filter
which allows us to have a
positive outlook on life,
but people should just trust
NGOs, even if the truth is
so bad it’s hard to believe.
Yet we’ve become slaves to our machines.
And the only progress we can now achieve in
the West is altruism, education, empathy and
consciousness — these are real projects that
can really drive you for your entire lifetime. But
are we taking this route? I don’t think so.
However, we do see a rise in mindfulness
within business practices, which is basically
Buddhist meditation recalibrated for a corporate culture, and the popularity of Eastern
practices such as yoga hints at a recognition that Western material progress hasn’t
fulfilled the needs of our body nor soul. Yet
after spending so much time in China and
Hong Kong, do you find this phenomenon to
be in reverse? Yes, which is why my faith is in
individuals, and not in a collective trajectory.
Lots of individuals are doing amazing things,
and if not faith, it gives you hope, love and
meaning on a day to day basis, so you don’t
end up in the gulch. If you go downtown to
Shanghai it’s like a mass that’s been put to
sleep, they’re going to a mecca of shopping.
Consciousness, I don’t see it.
What would be your advice? To throw away
your television.
www.bloomassociation.org
Deep sea wildlife — In deep
water, a new creature is discovered
every two weeks, and yet we have
only explored one percent of the deep
ocean. Below the photic layer where
the sun doesn’t shine, 200 metres
down, there are dazzling arrays
of creatures that have developed a
number of ways of surviving without
photosynthesis. Some of these fish
even produce their own light, like
the giant siphonophore which, at 100
metres long, is the largest animal in
the world — and is one of the two life
forms on Earth capable of emitting a
red biolumescence (the other being
Chirostomias pliopterus, a species of
barbeled dragonfish found in the
Atlantic Ocean). The very bottom of
the ocean bed is home to over 3,000
species of coral, some of which
have been discovered to be 4,200
years old. All these magical creatures
and the world they inhabit is destroyed
daily by deep sea bottom trawling,
a fishing technique that strips
the ocean floor at a rate that would
demolish Paris in a day and a half.
For more information, have a look at
Penelope Jolicoeur’s witty illustration
of Claire’s TED talk on deep sea
bottom trawling, and don’t forget to
sign the petition!
www.penelope-jolicoeur.com
by Burak Cakmak
to work WITH BOTH INDIGENOUS
TRIBESPEOPLE AND BUSINESSES
AS THE RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK’S
CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR IS TO BE
A BRIDGE BETWEEN CULTURES AND
ECONOMIES. Having spent time in Nepal, Fiji and Papua
New Guinea — where he set up Greenpeace’s local headquarters — Lafcadio Cortesi’s
25 years of negotiating resource management, community development and
biodiversity conservation for both the private sector and NGOs, have taught him
the significance of understanding other cultures and their connections with the natural
ecological processes of the planet. It’s a way of life Lafcadio has applied back
home in Berkeley, where he is surrounded by a close community of friends who share
each other’s cars, food and lawnmowers.
How do you define your role at the Rainforest
Action Network? My career and my passion
have always been about being a bridge to different cultures. I act as a translator of global
economies into local communities — crosscultural communications. It can be defined as a
bridging role. I work with people to understand
and navigate new forces coming into their lives
and find ways to teach them how to live with
them. I ’ve lived in many countries, learnt about
their cultures and brought that learning back
to North America to people, companies and
NGOs. We can say I am also in the business
of conflict resolution between cultures and
between humans and nature; when you work
with other cultures, you learn about yourself. In
my long career, I still haven’t burnt out because
I’m always working with different people,
which I feel personally benefits me.
have been working for over 20 years now. For
the last ten years, I have spent three to four
months at a time in Papua New Guinea — I
started the Greenpeace office there. I’ve also
lived in the Solomon Islands and in Fiji. Experiencing many different cultures influenced my
decision to study anthropology at University.
Everyone has
something to teach
you; that is the ‘Universal Truth’. When you look closely at your life now, are
there aspects you would like to change or
improve? There are so many challenges in the
world and I always try to take on so many of
them at once. I need to focus more, choose a
few and do them better. Even in my personal
life, I still haven’t yet been able to apply these
principles. I feel all the opportunities lying
ahead and I want to do it all. I enjoy exploring
the terrain, identifying opportunities and bringing back solutions. In my work, I tend to play
the role of lead guard but I need a team to follow up to bring projects to conclusion. I am curious how you got into what you do
today… When I was 15, I volunteered in Nepal
with the NGO Earthwatch Institute. We were
doing research on the rhesus macaques that
live in the temples of Kathmandu. This experience turned my world upside down and made
me question everything about who I was, what
I believed was true and made me realise my
values were not necessarily real. I questioned
all my existing assumptions about life after
experiencing new ways of living, cultures and
poverty. On my return, I decided to study critical theory, philosophy, religion and anthropology to understand what I really value and don’t
value — what is important for humans overall. You mentioned the influence of different
cultures in your life as a result of living
in other countries. Where have you lived
before? When I was young, I was a volunteer
in Indonesia for three years — where I also
What values did you identify as the most
important for you? First, it was the environment. I have come to realise that ecological
integrity, interestingly, is valuable to all human
beings. Also, to be open with your heart, to
ultural Exchang
LAFCADIO
CORTESI
listen and appreciate others. Everyone has
something to teach you; that is the ‘Universal Truth’. There is a sacredness, consciousness and magic in exploring what is out there. Ecological processes and the natural world
— these are things we need to be preserving.
They have been around much longer than we
have, and we need to leave space for them. I
try to find ways to allow different cultures to
have space, time and respect. I want to help
and influence people, teaching them about
what needs to be preserved, what is good
to observe only from the outside, and what
needs to be kept intact.
The big question
is, how do
you come out
of a crisis? You
can preserve
biodiversity,
cultural diversity
and even love,
so we can better
bring balance
to our lives
within the limits
of nature.
Rainforest Action Network
— Founded in 1985, the Rainforest
Action Network is an environmental
organisation whose mission is
to protect both rainforest ecosystems
and the indigenous people who call
these forests home. Through
education, non-violent action and
campaigning, the Rainforest Action
Network hope to transform the
consciousness of global consumers
and businesses. Not afraid to
challenge corporate power, some
of the world’s largest companies
— including the Bank of America, Citi
and Home Depot — have committed
to the Rainforest Action Network’s
efforts to save the forests from harm.
The Rainforest Action Network brings
together environmental and human
rights groups in over 60 countries
with whom they organise grassroots
initiatives and education to respond
directly to the issues that threaten
the rainforests, such as the
deforestation of Indonesia from palm
oil plantations and logging for paper.
bourhood opened up, one by one friends
started moving in. We share our cars and our
meals; we even have one lawnmower rather
than five, so we can reduce our impact. Even
in Berkeley, the setup is unique. We built our
community in ten to 15 years. And now when
I travel to different cultures, I bring more back
to the community to share. How have all these cultural experiences
and places you’ve lived in influenced and
changed you? They have made me less sure
about what I think is true. There are many different ways of living. If we are going to make
a better world, there has to be an allowance
for differences, and respect for alternative
ways of being. I also fully realised that ecological processes are somewhat like scientific laws in a sense. They should be seen as
underpinning human life. Our culture in the
West is unfortunately degrading these natural ecological values, whereas in places like
Papua New Guinea, people are very respectful of them. Cultural diversity is also an experiment in how people can live in balance with
their environment.
Do you think our children will live in a very
different world? The world is on a pathway now where the science behind climate
change is clear. There will be some very painful times for humans and other species, with
the sea level rising to catastrophic events. It
will bring about a crisis that will push us to
change the way we live today. The big question is, how do you come out of a crisis? You
can preserve biodiversity, cultural diversity
and even love, so we can better bring balance
to our lives within the limits of nature. There is a sacredness,
consciousness and magic to
be explored in what is out
there in nature.
Are you taking any daily action at a personal
level to influence the future? I live in a closeknit community in Berkley, California — with
ten to 15 best friends living next door to each
other. We use less resources sharing and caring for each other. We feel a responsibility that
goes beyond the individual.
Do you mean you all consciously settled at
the same location to create this community
lifestyle? Yes, as new houses in the neigh-
Did you also try to bring your values into the
community? We all had these values and all of
us try to live a more conscious way of life. One
of our community members is Annie Leonard
who created the animated film, The Story of
Stuff, that addresses these very issues.
Ecological processes
are somewhat like scientific
laws in a sense — they
should be seen as
underpinning human life.
Do you have a guilty pleasure? I feel guilty
about flying much too much. I love it, but it
is a huge burden on the environment. I feel
less guilty about enjoying good food, as I
buy local products. We are privileged people,
and we are able to make choices that aren’t
only based on the price of a product. I look
for quality first and impact second. I always
buy from my local butcher where all the meat
is sourced within a 100-mile radius. I am very
conscious of the footprint — both social
and environmental. I try to get companies to
have the same way of thinking, to minimise
their overall footprint. We all have to carefully
evaluate our footprint to have the minimum
impact with maximum benefits. We have to
be respectful of biodiversity, human rights
and the dignity of people.
www.ran.org
The Revolutio
Will Be
Televised
Conscious Programming —
While Fabiola is seeking to buy
airtime from the television networks
that broadcast her show, giving her
the independence to create content
without their interference and so
she is not “at the mercy of a network
who can shut it down if we don’t have
enough viewers,” the revolution
in media is an intrinsic catalyst for
a revolution of consciousness.
A great example is the independent
Gaiam TV, a video subscription
channel streaming the world’s largest
collection of films, documentaries
and original programming dedicated
to personal growth and spirituality.
Its Mind Shift chat show, hosted
by Daniel Pinchbeck, was the platform
Russell Brand chose to debut his
revolutionary agenda late last year.
www.gaiamtv.com
Fabiola
Beracasa
Can a new
reality TV show unearth
the next generation
of eco-entrepreneurs? Its producer
Fabiola Beracasa, a Venezuelan-American philanthropist and
gallerist, has a strategy and team on board to spread the search
and support as far as possible.
“People have an archaic belief that you have
to first make a lot of money any way you can,
and then be charitable and do good,” Fabiola tells Ever Manifesto. “My theory is that
you can integrate those two worlds: make a
lot of money and do good at the same time.”
She cites the company TOMS, who gift a
pair of shoes or glasses to children in need
with every purchase as a great example of
a social business — a term first defined by
the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad
Yunus to describe companies that seek to
address social and environmental issues
while turning a profit.
You can’t hit people on the
head with negativity all
day long. There should be
more ‘What can we do?’ and
not ‘How terrible is this?’
At the time of writing, Fabiola is working
with the studio Relativity Media in producing and raising money for her television
show, and Echoing Green, a global nonprofit organisation which has been providing seed funding for social businesses for
over 30 years. She’s also brought together
a team of advisors, with the former General
Assembly President of the United Nations on
board to provide expertise on “what the biggest problems facing the world are, whether
it’s sanitation, education, farming…” This,
together with “incorporating a format that
people are familiar with and that works” —
the Dragons’ Den model of entrepreneurs
pitching to investors — are important, as the
show “can then be mainstream, to bring to
the forefront and collective consciousness
of the world awareness that these issues do
exist and that there are places where they
can be solved. Hopefully we can do it with
a positive undertone because you can’t hit
people on the head with negativity all day
long. There should be more ‘What can we
do?’ and not ‘How terrible is this?’”
While Fabiola’s show will have the suspense
and nail-biting drama of the reality TV format, where it differs is in incorporating a
crowdfunding element for those business
ideas that get rejected by the judges, with
audiences donating money via a dedicated
social network for the show. “It’s a two-fold
program,” she explains. “Maybe somebody
has a great idea in Nigeria; maybe we’ll find
them, and they can solve a problem that is
currently huge in the world. Culturally, the
show is going to help empower pockets of
people in the world that otherwise would
have not known they could make a difference. Hopefully it will spark a new generation of activists.”
PATHY IS OVER
MATTHEW
STONE
by Xerxes Cook
“EveryTHING IS POSSIBLE and
LOVE CHANGES EVERYTHING”
is one OF THE Maxims
MATTHEW STONE, THE BRITISH
ARTIST WHOSE PHOTOGRAPHS
ARE FOUND ON NEARLY
EVERY PAGE OF THis MAGAZINE,
LIVES AND WORKS BY.
Matthew believes that in a world defined largely by
“cruelty and destruction”, optimism is the only radical act we
have left. So he recently created a “spiritual oasis” in the
form of a hybrid electronic opera titled Love Focused Like A Laser
in Miami in December 2013, which he plans to take on tour to
a struggling Detroit. Here Matthew elaborates on the
philosophies which guide his life, and tells us how he
approached photographing the faces of Ever Conscious.
How can optimism be a form of cultural
rebellion? When I first wrote that in 2004,
optimism wasn’t something that was culturally normal at the time. It had a grand history,
but that history was something that needed
to be bared in mind — that essentially blind
optimism, to assume that everything’s going
to be okay was as dangerous as sheer pessimism, both of which are extreme states that
are essentially irrational. Because the future
doesn’t just unfold, it is created by the actions
that people undertake. And I was trying to
propose the idea that we should be conscious of our actions, and how they create the
future. It wasn’t focused on specific ways of
being, more the idea that every human being
has the potential to create positive ways of
being within their lives, and that maybe artists,
as people who are hyperconscious, could be
a starting point for that.
I feel that it’s time
for the values of
the countercultural
movement that
started in the 1960s
to be manifested today
in a diffferent
visual language.
So it’s a case of rebelling against the negativity, the ‘whatever’ attitude and apathy of
a lot of pop culture? Yes. I think it is a sense
of desperation in the face of powerlessness.
But I also think post-modern culture, with its
death of God and death of singular truths
created a kind of psychic fallout, a sadness
that’s permeated the culture of the late 20th
century and today. And I feel that artists
were mourning the death of God, mourning
the death of singular truth, and rather than
embracing what is essentially the exciting potential of post-modernism — which
is about enlarging possibilities, as I see it.
They assumed that if there were no singular
truths, then there must be no truth at all. And
now, I think that apathy is over. We are still
in a difficult place, and that’s got a lot to do
with how we are all implicated in a system
that corrupts us. So in today’s late-capitalist
era, if we want to live sustainable lives, and
not engage with things that are morally questionable, it’s very difficult to live a normal life,
because every part of normal life is part of a
capitalist structure that oppresses people.
And so people are quite rightly conscious
that their actual acts of altruism, and the acts
of love that they want to apply to their lives,
other people and the environment — that
their actions will never meet the intensity of
their intentions. And I think a lot of that apathy comes from people being afraid of being
labelled a hypocrite, which doesn’t create the
right environment for people to try to be sincere. I think we have to be realistic about the
fact that none of us are perfect, and it’s about
finding that right balance between accepting
that and not giving up.
Every human being
has the potential
to create positive
ways of being
within their lives.
remit of the human imagination to design a
system that facilitates that. I feel that the next
stage of capitalism will see a basic living wage
for everybody on Earth, and then a competitive element for luxury items.
The future doesn’t
just unfold,
it is created by
the actions people
undertake.
What daily act could people do to make the
Earth a better place? The one thing I could
do, that I don’t do well enough, is listening,
to listen to other people. And not to lie, to be
transparent — as if you think about conflict,
much of it arises from people thinking the
other is irrational as they don’t understand,
and that limits people’s capacity for empathy.
And empathy is essential for us to be able to
help the planet.
How did you approach taking the photographs within this magazine? What did you
try to capture of each personality in their
portraits? A lot of the time I spoke to them
about how we want to communicate the
ideas of this project, so I had some interesting discussions with our subjects about
whether they want to be smiling, or looking
sombre — as the work that they do is often
very serious. And it didn’t need to always be
super serious, but then if they’re smiling, it
may also be undermining the gravity of the
situation we’re facing in the environment and
within their work.
And what kind of aesthetic decisions did you
make? Was it a conscious choice to adopt
the language of fashion photography? It was
interesting to have so many people from the
fashion industry involved in this, as it’s something you usually associate with glamour and
style, something that can be divisive, or politically problematic — or that it’s superficial to
want to look nice. But I feel that it’s time for
the values of the countercultural movement
How do you interpret conscious consumer- that started in the 1960s to be manifested
ism? Conscious consuming for me, is con- today in a different visual language. There’s
suming less. It’s important to try to support
a space for these ideas to be aspirational —
local businesses; individuals rather than
but not unachievable, like a lot of advertising
corporations, but essentially consumerism is — rather than associated with some hippy
tied up within what I consider to be the late
thing. It’s to aspire to a life that is wholesome.
stages of a failing monetary system. I think it’s
just important to make conscious decisions
www.matthewstone.co.uk
where you can if you have to consume things,
but essentially the way that we relate to consumerism needs to change.
So when did you decide not to eat meat? I’ve
been vegetarian since I was one [years old].
I’ve never eaten fish or meat. For me, it’s kind
of normal [Laughs]. I went through a stage
of being ‘meat is murder’ when I was 13, but
now it’s just normal... I have a lot of respect for
people who are prepared to kill the animals
that they eat.
Do you mean along the lines of the Buddhism’s belief of desire being the root cause
of suffering? Not necessarily. I feel like there
are enough resources on Earth for everybody
to have what they need, and it is within the
LILY
COLE
by Rana Toofanian
WHILE SOME WEBSITES LET US
SHARE OUR POSSESSIONS FOR A FEE,
IMPOSSIBLE.com ENCOURAGES
PEOPLE TO DO THINGS FOR OTHERS
FOR FREE. Well known for her long-time support and contribution
to humanitarian and environmental causes, Lily Cole has spun her interests
in ecology and economics into a series of businesses that challenge
not only current models of fashion production, but now Western notions
of commerce as a whole.
A model and actress who, at 16, spent a
summer interning at The Body Shop to
learn more about the beauty industry’s
international supply chains, Lily Cole later
put her discoveries to use when she set up
The North Circular knitwear label in 2009.
Inspired by Cradle to Cradle design and production practices, the label sources British
wool from within a 120 mile radius of its base
in London, and employs the hand-knitting
skills of expert grandmothers. Her most
recent enterprise, Impossible, is an online
platform which encourages a community
of users to do things for others for free.
Taken as a whole, this form of exchange has
been described as the “gift economy”, and
embodies Lily’s belief that solutions to our
environmental problems extends beyond
issues of consumption and conservation,
and can also be found in acts of kindness
and empathy.
The gift economy — The gift economy
may sound like some kind of new fad,
but it is in reality, older than the exchange
economy that our world currently runs on.
In gift economies, the wealthiest person
is defined not by how much they have,
but how much they give, and gift giving
is based on the context of relationships
rather than making transactions for
profit or gain. The exchange economy
in contrast is a barter economy — it relies
on exchange of either goods or labour
for money. The gift economy was ideal
when humans lived in small, interrelated
communities where there was no need
for exchange. The exchange economy
was more practical as humans expanded
and travelled and encountered other
societies. Yet, in recognition that all of
life is connected, we have recently seen
forms of the gift economy re-emerge in
skill-sharing, open-source coding, time
banks and WikiLeaks. Lily’s website
impossible.com provides a forum for
people to post their wishes and connect
those who can help them. Equally
rewarding are the posts that thank
others who have helped ­— cooperation
and gratitude are just two currencies
in the gift economy.
How did you become interested in production processes and their environmental consequences? There’s not one specific date or
turning point. It’s been a cumulative process.
I grew up in London. And I really had no clue
about these ideas, or I didn’t really care much
about them. I was quite thoughtful as a child,
but it was more towards animals — I became
vegetarian at a young age — or humans in disaster situations. But sustainability was not on
my radar whatsoever. I went to Japan when I
was 16 for a few months travelling; that’s the
first time I fell in love with nature and when I
really started to appreciate it specifically. And
cumulatively I learnt more and more about
the environment. I don’t know at what point,
but it became more and more obvious to me
that it’s just absolutely imperative — the idea
that anything else other than sustainability
would seem rational or reasonable is inherently problematic. And it’s built into the word
itself — what can you do other than just sustain something? You destroy it. Who votes for
that idea? I’m not saying that I can fix it, there
are all these problems with our lifestyles, but
it feels philosophically imperative.
If you put a monetary
figure on the things that
people do for one another
for free in the UK, it’s
already bigger than GDP.
So what were your motivations behind setting up Impossible? The impact that economics has globally led me to really want to
work in that medium. I’m also more and more
inspired by the idea that consumers have a
lot of power in this game, even though we feel
potentially like small players amongst politics
and business — though actually the way the
markets move dictates the decisions made by
more powerful people. That’s why transparency, consumer action and conscious consumerism are so important. And I think the
digital age makes that more possible than
ever. Impossible.com was an idea that spun
out of that — to question the ways in which
economics have a huge effect on our relationship with the planet and with one another, and
whether these existing economic systems are
the only way of managing our relationships.
The ‘gift economy’ wasn’t something I had
heard of prior to having the idea to start the
project with a friend. So I started researching it and the different ways societies have
interacted for thousands of years. There are
many different communities that have existed
that way, and the sociology and psychology
associated around it all seemed so positive and natural — it felt like something that
I wanted to have more of. We took a gamble
on the Internet’s potential to facilitate these
ways of behaviour which we’ve been tending
for thousands of years, but in recent times
haven’t been structurally easy.
You mention the significance of consumer
action and the principle that as consumers,
we vote with our money and our choices.
With Impossible, you seem to go one step
further — currency is not monetary, but measured in time and empathy. Do you believe
the gift, as a form of currency, is something that will catch on in the West in our
lifetimes? Obviously. Why do you think that I
would be investing my time and money into it?
And I played on that utopian idea of the possible in the name impossible — I am possible. I
don’t think we’re that far from it. I already exist
in this way with all of my friends and family,
and if I’m given the opportunity and someone
needs my help on the street, I’ll give it to them.
When I travel to more impoverished communities in the developing world, it’s a very natural way that people engage with one another.
You have to predicate a lot in the gift economy
because there’s less resource. But if you put a
monetary figure on the things that people do
for one another for free in the U.K., it’s already
bigger than GDP; so it’s a silent, but really big
part of our culture. That said, I do think it’s
under-tapped, especially in big cities where
we’re largely alienated from one another. And
hence why I think there could be technology
that could make it feel more normal. The power
of the Internet makes new things possible,
and the way that social media has changed
our interactions with one another globally in
the last ten years is beyond radical. I went to
a session the government were doing this
morning at Downing Street for people working
in the sharing economy — car sharing, house
sharing — some of them monetised, some of
them exchange-based. There’s a lot growing
in that space and the government recognises
that, and wants to make sure there are laws
working efficiently for that sector.
We’re really more
powerful than
anybody realises,
therefore we
must be more
responsible than
we often realise.
What’s going through your mind when
you’re contemplating buying something —
does your desire often trump necessity or
sustainability? Yes and no. If I really didn’t
trust where it was from, I wouldn’t get it.
However, we’re missing so much transparency, which sometimes I have to assume is
problematic. I do actually order my vegetables to be delivered —
­ that’s how I get most
of them — but I do sometimes break my rules
and buy from Marks & Spencer, despite all
that packaging, because that’s the only
option near me. That pisses me off too. I was
on a plane the other day, and I had a plastic cup of water and I asked for some more,
assuming she would put it in the same cup,
but then she took out another plastic cup to
pour into. ‘No!’ I thought. ‘I haven’t touched it,
can you take that back please?’ I asked. And
she said she couldn’t take it back now I’ve
touched it. I was so angry at myself for using
two plastic cups!
But how can a little action like not using an
extra plastic cup have any difference to the
grand scheme of things? I think that we’re all
so phenomenally powerful, and that change
begins with ourselves. Every single person is
hugely powerful because reality is made by
all of us. I became vegetarian when I was ten.
I remember at the time people would say, ‘Oh,
it doesn’t make a difference. If you don’t eat
that burger, then I’m going to eat it or someone is going to eat it.’ And that’s a really literal
example that you’re not actually changing
anything. And I would say, ‘Yeah, but imagine
if every single vegetarian in the world said
that. Imagine the effect that would have and
vice versa.’ I do think the inverse logic. We’re
really more powerful than anybody realises,
therefore we must be more responsible than
we often realise. And I fuck up all the time,
and I can’t say what other people should do
or what society should do, but really if I don’t
be that myself then I shouldn’t bother. There’s
the butterfly effect of how your actions inspire
and affect other people. Also like everything
in life, it begins with intention and knowing
the power we have. If we all have the intention then it’ll put pressure on manufacturers
to have more transparency, and we’ll create
a market for independent auditors to manage the transparency. The intention will foreground the movement.
What are the obstacles in your life stopping
you from making the sustainable choices
you want to make? Temptation I guess. I just
had a bite from that cookie — and I’m trying to
be vegan. I broke it last night because somebody came to my house and brought cheese
from Spain which was really sweet, so I didn’t
want to tell him I was trying to be vegan — I had
already told him I don’t eat meat, and so I ate
the cheese. I thought at the moment: ‘Fuck it.’
It was more important to do it and be grateful.
And because I changed that switch then I’m
immediately like ‘fucking hell.’ So those things
happen. Sometimes I’m too tired to care. And
also the problems are so complex, it’s never
clear what’s right or wrong. Everything is relative. I fly a lot, but I also do work that if I didn’t
fly a lot, I wouldn’t be able to do. But hopefully it
helps in other ways. Although, I also acknowledge that I could have a different lifestyle and
say, ‘I’m not going to travel anymore.’ One day
I will do that. Flying is the lesser of many evils. I
think cumulatively, that our carbon footprint is
greater when eating avocados out of season
in the wrong country than it is about flights.
We took a gamble on
the internet’s potential to
facilitate these ways
of behaviour which we’ve
been tending for
thousands of years, but
in recent times haven’t
been structurally easy.
What daily act can you do to make things
better? I’d say an act of kindness. That’s very
much in the spirit of what I’m trying to do right
now, but I just think that’s so powerful. It transcends you in that moment. I’m a big believer
of how much more fulfilling life would be, and
how much more reduced our need to consume would be, if we had richer interpersonal
relationships.
www.impossible.com
LILY
COLE
by Rana Toofanian
WHILE SOME WEBSITES LET US
SHARE OUR POSSESSIONS FOR A FEE,
IMPOSSIBLE.com ENCOURAGES
PEOPLE TO DO THINGS FOR OTHERS
FOR FREE. Well known for her long-time support and contribution
to humanitarian and environmental causes, Lily Cole has spun her interests
in ecology and economics into a series of businesses that challenge
not only current models of fashion production, but now Western notions
of commerce as a whole.
A model and actress who, at 16, spent a
summer interning at The Body Shop to
learn more about the beauty industry’s
international supply chains, Lily Cole later
put her discoveries to use when she set up
The North Circular knitwear label in 2009.
Inspired by Cradle to Cradle design and production practices, the label sources British
wool from within a 120 mile radius of its base
in London, and employs the hand-knitting
skills of expert grandmothers. Her most
recent enterprise, Impossible, is an online
platform which encourages a community
of users to do things for others for free.
Taken as a whole, this form of exchange has
been described as the “gift economy”, and
embodies Lily’s belief that solutions to our
environmental problems extends beyond
issues of consumption and conservation,
and can also be found in acts of kindness
and empathy.
The gift economy — The gift economy
may sound like some kind of new fad,
but it is in reality, older than the exchange
economy that our world currently runs on.
In gift economies, the wealthiest person
is defined not by how much they have,
but how much they give, and gift giving
is based on the context of relationships
rather than making transactions for
profit or gain. The exchange economy
in contrast is a barter economy — it relies
on exchange of either goods or labour
for money. The gift economy was ideal
when humans lived in small, interrelated
communities where there was no need
for exchange. The exchange economy
was more practical as humans expanded
and travelled and encountered other
societies. Yet, in recognition that all of
life is connected, we have recently seen
forms of the gift economy re-emerge in
skill-sharing, open-source coding, time
banks and WikiLeaks. Lily’s website
impossible.com provides a forum for
people to post their wishes and connect
those who can help them. Equally
rewarding are the posts that thank
others who have helped ­— cooperation
and gratitude are just two currencies
in the gift economy.
How did you become interested in production processes and their environmental consequences? There’s not one specific date or
turning point. It’s been a cumulative process.
I grew up in London. And I really had no clue
about these ideas, or I didn’t really care much
about them. I was quite thoughtful as a child,
but it was more towards animals — I became
vegetarian at a young age — or humans in disaster situations. But sustainability was not on
my radar whatsoever. I went to Japan when I
was 16 for a few months travelling; that’s the
first time I fell in love with nature and when I
really started to appreciate it specifically. And
cumulatively I learnt more and more about
the environment. I don’t know at what point,
but it became more and more obvious to me
that it’s just absolutely imperative — the idea
that anything else other than sustainability
would seem rational or reasonable is inherently problematic. And it’s built into the word
itself — what can you do other than just sustain something? You destroy it. Who votes for
that idea? I’m not saying that I can fix it, there
are all these problems with our lifestyles, but
it feels philosophically imperative.
If you put a monetary
figure on the things that
people do for one another
for free in the UK, it’s
already bigger than GDP.
So what were your motivations behind setting up Impossible? The impact that economics has globally led me to really want to
work in that medium. I’m also more and more
inspired by the idea that consumers have a
lot of power in this game, even though we feel
potentially like small players amongst politics
and business — though actually the way the
markets move dictates the decisions made by
more powerful people. That’s why transparency, consumer action and conscious consumerism are so important. And I think the
digital age makes that more possible than
ever. Impossible.com was an idea that spun
out of that — to question the ways in which
economics have a huge effect on our relationship with the planet and with one another, and
whether these existing economic systems are
the only way of managing our relationships.
The ‘gift economy’ wasn’t something I had
heard of prior to having the idea to start the
project with a friend. So I started researching it and the different ways societies have
interacted for thousands of years. There are
many different communities that have existed
that way, and the sociology and psychology
associated around it all seemed so positive and natural — it felt like something that
I wanted to have more of. We took a gamble
on the Internet’s potential to facilitate these
ways of behaviour which we’ve been tending
for thousands of years, but in recent times
haven’t been structurally easy.
You mention the significance of consumer
action and the principle that as consumers,
we vote with our money and our choices.
With Impossible, you seem to go one step
further — currency is not monetary, but measured in time and empathy. Do you believe
the gift, as a form of currency, is something that will catch on in the West in our
lifetimes? Obviously. Why do you think that I
would be investing my time and money into it?
And I played on that utopian idea of the possible in the name impossible — I am possible. I
don’t think we’re that far from it. I already exist
in this way with all of my friends and family,
and if I’m given the opportunity and someone
needs my help on the street, I’ll give it to them.
When I travel to more impoverished communities in the developing world, it’s a very natural way that people engage with one another.
You have to predicate a lot in the gift economy
because there’s less resource. But if you put a
monetary figure on the things that people do
for one another for free in the U.K., it’s already
bigger than GDP; so it’s a silent, but really big
part of our culture. That said, I do think it’s
under-tapped, especially in big cities where
we’re largely alienated from one another. And
hence why I think there could be technology
that could make it feel more normal. The power
of the Internet makes new things possible,
and the way that social media has changed
our interactions with one another globally in
the last ten years is beyond radical. I went to
a session the government were doing this
morning at Downing Street for people working
in the sharing economy — car sharing, house
sharing — some of them monetised, some of
them exchange-based. There’s a lot growing
in that space and the government recognises
that, and wants to make sure there are laws
working efficiently for that sector.
We’re really more
powerful than
anybody realises,
therefore we
must be more
responsible than
we often realise.
What’s going through your mind when
you’re contemplating buying something —
does your desire often trump necessity or
sustainability? Yes and no. If I really didn’t
trust where it was from, I wouldn’t get it.
However, we’re missing so much transparency, which sometimes I have to assume is
problematic. I do actually order my vegetables to be delivered —
­ that’s how I get most
of them — but I do sometimes break my rules
and buy from Marks & Spencer, despite all
that packaging, because that’s the only
option near me. That pisses me off too. I was
on a plane the other day, and I had a plastic cup of water and I asked for some more,
assuming she would put it in the same cup,
but then she took out another plastic cup to
pour into. ‘No!’ I thought. ‘I haven’t touched it,
can you take that back please?’ I asked. And
she said she couldn’t take it back now I’ve
touched it. I was so angry at myself for using
two plastic cups!
But how can a little action like not using an
extra plastic cup have any difference to the
grand scheme of things? I think that we’re all
so phenomenally powerful, and that change
begins with ourselves. Every single person is
hugely powerful because reality is made by
all of us. I became vegetarian when I was ten.
I remember at the time people would say, ‘Oh,
it doesn’t make a difference. If you don’t eat
that burger, then I’m going to eat it or someone is going to eat it.’ And that’s a really literal
example that you’re not actually changing
anything. And I would say, ‘Yeah, but imagine
if every single vegetarian in the world said
that. Imagine the effect that would have and
vice versa.’ I do think the inverse logic. We’re
really more powerful than anybody realises,
therefore we must be more responsible than
we often realise. And I fuck up all the time,
and I can’t say what other people should do
or what society should do, but really if I don’t
be that myself then I shouldn’t bother. There’s
the butterfly effect of how your actions inspire
and affect other people. Also like everything
in life, it begins with intention and knowing
the power we have. If we all have the intention then it’ll put pressure on manufacturers
to have more transparency, and we’ll create
a market for independent auditors to manage the transparency. The intention will foreground the movement.
What are the obstacles in your life stopping
you from making the sustainable choices
you want to make? Temptation I guess. I just
had a bite from that cookie — and I’m trying to
be vegan. I broke it last night because somebody came to my house and brought cheese
from Spain which was really sweet, so I didn’t
want to tell him I was trying to be vegan — I had
already told him I don’t eat meat, and so I ate
the cheese. I thought at the moment: ‘Fuck it.’
It was more important to do it and be grateful.
And because I changed that switch then I’m
immediately like ‘fucking hell.’ So those things
happen. Sometimes I’m too tired to care. And
also the problems are so complex, it’s never
clear what’s right or wrong. Everything is relative. I fly a lot, but I also do work that if I didn’t
fly a lot, I wouldn’t be able to do. But hopefully it
helps in other ways. Although, I also acknowledge that I could have a different lifestyle and
say, ‘I’m not going to travel anymore.’ One day
I will do that. Flying is the lesser of many evils. I
think cumulatively, that our carbon footprint is
greater when eating avocados out of season
in the wrong country than it is about flights.
We took a gamble on
the internet’s potential to
facilitate these ways
of behaviour which we’ve
been tending for
thousands of years, but
in recent times haven’t
been structurally easy.
What daily act can you do to make things
better? I’d say an act of kindness. That’s very
much in the spirit of what I’m trying to do right
now, but I just think that’s so powerful. It transcends you in that moment. I’m a big believer
of how much more fulfilling life would be, and
how much more reduced our need to consume would be, if we had richer interpersonal
relationships.
www.impossible.com
obody’s Perfect
by Xerxes Cook
FOR EVER MANIFESTO’S FOUNDERS,
IT’S THE FASCINATION WE HAVE WITH
THE LIVES OF OTHERS ONLINE THAT
INSPIRED EVER CONSCIOUS’ CALL FOR
SELF-REFLECTION. “We live in a society
that’s constantly spinning, looking for the new and the next,” state Alexia Niedzielski
and Elizabeth von Guttman. “This constant flow of information can be quite
dizzying for everyone involved. With that in mind, we took our collaboration
with H&M on the Conscious Exclusive Collection as an opportunity
to explore the choices we make in our daily lives, and the impact they have
on the environment.”
And it’s been quite the journey. “I’ve learnt
perfect, and now I know I can do so much
individuals have the potential to bring about
so much for the cast of characters we’ve
more. But what’s important is not to give
a critical mass on these issues, and affect
put together,” says Elizabeth. “From Lewis
up, or to point fingers at others. Instead, we
changes on an international scale.
Perkins of Cradle to Cradle, I felt a real opti- have so many tools at our disposal to make
mism for a future where we don’t have to
ourselves much more educated consumers “We all love Instagram. It’s a creative tool
produce less, just differently. Sustainability — if you are not sure about a product, you
that offers us an intimate glimpse into the
is a science, and with these innovations in
can investigate it online.”
lives of others. And with it, whether it’s our
techniques and materials, you can really
appearance, our lifestyle or our actions,
excite designers, brands and customers. “This is the great thing about the Internet. It
everyone tries to present the best version
Dianna Cohen has also inspired me to try to
can help inform our decisions and to com- of themselves online,” says Alexia. “This verfind alternatives to plastic. With Graham Hill, municate them to others,” Alexia adds, and
sion of ourselves should also demonstrate a
I was so inspired by LifeEdited, and his mes- Elizabeth elaborates. “We can create a col- commitment to the environment.” It could be
sage to minimise everything. We live with so
lective consciousness around these issues, something as simple as “capturing yourself
much excess — and initially you think it’s a
and the more people vote with their pur- in the act of recycling something, mending
big luxury — but really, it’s a burden.”
chases, the more they will be able to dic- your favourite top, or picking up litter from
tate the market, and those brands who are
a beach when you’re on vacation,” Eliza“It’s important to understand that it’s not
conducting their business in a transparent
beth says. As ultimately, the future is in your
only the responsibility of brands, businesses
and ethical way will grow.” And, as we’ve
hands. Our message is to be the change you
and the higher decision makers,” Alexia con- seen with Claire Nouvian’s online peti- want to see in the world — present yourself
tinues. “But that we are also key decision
tions against the deep sea bottom trawling
to others in the best light possible.
makers that can bring about change.” For
trade and Dianna Cohen’s viral anti-plastic
Elizabeth, Ever Conscious was an opportu- campaigns, the Internet allows us to be #everconscioushm
nity to take stock of some of the decisions
both proactive and reactive — assembled
she makes in her daily life. “I’m definitely not
together on social networks, the actions of
A SELECTION OF BOOKS
DISCUSSED IN THE MAKING OF
EVER CONSCIOUS
A New Earth: Create A Better Life
Question Your Thinking, Change The World
A Return to Love: Reflections on
the Principles of a Course in Miracles
Cradle to Cradle:
Remaking the Way We Make Things
Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit
and How You Can Too
Plastic Ocean:
How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery
Launched a Determined Quest
to Save the Oceans
In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Eat the City:
A Tale Of The Fishers, Foragers,
Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders,
Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters,
Beekeepers, Winemakers, And Brewers
Who Built New York
Breaking Open The Head:
A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of
Contemporary Shamanism
Food of the Gods:
The Search for the Original Tree
of Knowledge
Your Money or Your Life:
Transforming Your Relationship
with Money and
Achieving Financial Independence
Stuffocation
by Eckhart Tolle, 2009, Penguin Recommended by Bruno Pieters
by Byron Katie, 2007, Hay House Recommended by Bruno Pieters
by Marianne Williamson, 2006, Thorsons Recommended by Bruno Pieters
by Michael Baungart & William McDonough, 2009, Vintage Recommended by Elettra Wiedermann
by Beth Terry, 2012, Skyhorse Publishing Recommended by Dianna Cohen
by Captain Charles Moore, 2012, Avery Recommended by Dianna Cohen
by Michael Pollan, 2009, Penguin Recommended by Cecilia Dean
by Robin Shulman, 2013, Broadway Books Recommended by David Selig
by Daniel Pinchbeck, 2010, Flamingo Recommended by Mimi Xu
by Terence McKenna, 1999, Rider Recommended by Mimi Xu
by Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin, 2008, Penguin USA Recommended by Graham Hill
by James Wallman, 2013, Crux Publishing Recommended by Graham Hill
Natural Capitalism:
The Next Industrial Revolution
by Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins & L. Hunter Lovins, 2005, Routledge
Recommended by Graham Hill
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics
as if People Mattered
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a
Perfect Meal in a Fast-food world
Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda
of Genetic Manipulation
The One Straw Revolution
Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
Utopia or Oblivion:
The Prospects For Humanity
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society
In The Age Of Transition
The Future Of Money: Creating New Wealth,
Work And A Wiser World
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years
Of Evolution From Microbial Ancestors
by E.F. Schumacher, 1993, Vintage Recommended by Daniel de la Falaise
by Michael Pollan, 2011, Bloomsbury Recommended by Daniel de la Falaise
by F. William Engdahl, 2007, Global Research Recommended by Daniel de la Falaise
by Masanobu Fukuoka, 2009, NYRB Recommended by Daniel de la Falaise
by Neil Young, 2013, Penguin Recommended by Pamela Love
by Buckminster Fuller, 1969, Lars Muller Publishers Recommended by Daniel Pinchbeck
by Charles Eisenstein, 2011, Evolver Editions Recommended by Daniel Pinchbeck
by Bernard Lietaar, 2002, Century Recommended by Daniel Pinchbeck
by Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, 1999, The Hebrew University Magnes Press
Recommended by Daniel Pinchbeck
The Holocaust by Bullets:
A Priest’s Journey to Uncover
the Truth Behind the
Murder of 1.5 Million Jews
Food Matters: A Guide To Conscious Eating
The Zero-Waste Lifestyle:
Live Well By Throwing Away Less
Voluntary Simplicity:
Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly
Simple, Inwardly Rich
by Father Patrick Desbois, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan Recommended by Claire Nouvian
by Mark Bittman, 2009, Simon & Schuster Recommended by Fabiola Beracasa
by Amy Korst, 2013, Ten Speed Press Recommended by Fabiola Beracasa
by Duane Elgin, 1998, Quill Recommended by Lily Cole
EVER CONSCIOUS
Editors-in-Chief
Alexia Niedzielski
Elizabeth von Guttman
EDITOR
Xerxes Cook
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Patrick Li / Li, Inc.
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Rana Toofanian
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Burak Cakmak
ART DIRECTOR
Miquel Polidano / Li, Inc.
DESIGNER
Shiman Shan / Li, Inc.
DESIGN COORDINATOR
Joan R Cheng
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Manoela Madera
MANAGING EDITORS
Blake Abbie
Ignacio Carvajal
PHOTOGRAPHER
Matthew Stone
Set DesignER
David White
RETOUCHER
Jean-Michel Massey / The Forge
SPONSORED BY H&M
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Margareta van den Bosch, David Davis, Cale Harrison,
Stefanie Hessler, Fia Ingman, Peter Lyle, Kamin Mohammadi,
Gabriella Moussaieff, Jeana Hong Oh, Anna Tillberg Pantzar,
John Scarisbrick, Donald Schneider, Vivan Thi Tang,
Emma Turpin, Anya Yiapanis
FOUNDERS
Alexia Niedzielski
Elizabeth von Guttman
Charlotte Casiraghi
EVER MANIFESTO
29-31 Brewery Road
London, England, N7 9QH
www.evermanifesto.com
[email protected]
EVER MANIFESTO
Issue Number 3
Copyright © 2014 Ever Manifesto
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
in whole or part without written permission from the publisher.
The views expressed in Ever Conscious are those of the respective
contributors and are not necessarily shared by Ever Manifesto
and its staff.
Ever Conscious is printed on
ScandiROCK (biodegradable, c2c certified) 100g
made without wooden pulp, from 85% calcium carbonate
Munken Lynx Rough 120 & 170g
Cromatico TransWhite 90g & 80g
with Eco-label Ink supplied by
Toyo Ink, Belgium
Printed and bound in Sweden
Ever Manifesto calculated the carbon footprint of the production
of Ever Conscious, doubled it, and offset the impact with a pledge to
plant 200 trees — two trees for every tonne of CO2 emitted in the
making of this magazine.
LONDON
Bruno Pieters, Amber Valletta,
Mimi Xu, Daniel de la Falaise,
Ben Goldsmith, Eva Kruse,
Claire Nouvian, Lily Cole, Alexia
Niedzielski, Elizabeth von Guttman
Photography
Matthew Stone
Studio
Spring Studios
Set Design
David White
Hair
Roxane Attard, Maki Tanaka
Make-up
Mel Arter, Emma Williams
Digital Tech
Elliott Wilcox
Photo Assistance
Rogelio Ramirez Fava, Paola Vivas
Set Design Assistance
Max Cornwall, Kila Carr-Ince,
Yasmina Kurunis, George Beleznay
Hair Assistance
Natalie Shaafi
Make-up Assistance
Fran Lee Done
NEW YORK
Elettra Wiedemann, Lewis Perkins,
Liya Kebede, Yves Béhar,
Cecilia Dean, David Selig,
Julie Gilhart, Pamela Love, Daniel
Pinchbeck, Fabiola Beracasa,
Matthew Stone
Photography
Matthew Stone
Studio
Jack Studios
Set Design
David White
Hair
Edward Lampley
Make-up
Georgi Sandev
Assistant Set Design
Whitney Hellesen
Digital Tech
Jackie Roman
Lighting Assistance
Anthony Garito
Make-up Assistance
Aya Ogasawara, Rie Tsukui
MIAMI
Pharrell Williams
Photography
Matthew Stone
Production
Vivan Thi Tang
Photo Assistance
Rafael Mayoral-Parracia
STUTTGART
Carsten and Sina
by Carsten Höller, 2014
Photography
John Scarisbrick
Retouching
Dan Sjölund
p. 16 — Getty Images, courtesy Tristan Savatier
p. 17 — Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2013,
courtesy Chris Jordan
p. 28–29 — Graham Hill’s LifeEdited Apartment #1,
courtesy Matthew Williams
p. 48–49 — Indonesian Rainforests, for the
Rainforest Action Network (RAN) courtesy
David Gilbert
COVER
Sina by Carsten Höller, 2014
Courtesy of the Artist
Unique artwork for Ever Conscious