Hello Folks,
A few weeks ago, a bunch of us had met at Cubbon park, to (also) discuss what people would like to do on World Environment Day. While things have been slow to progress (as tree planting is entirely a volunteer driven effort) there has been some progress off late. More on that later.
GREEN had been invited by the kind folks at RMZ Corp to have a stall at their campus. It has been 2 days of hectic fun interacting with IT people - a significant chunk of them green thumbs who were very interested in the #BambooPyramid and in the upcoming Self Discovery & Systems Thinking course at Coop Forest on June 17th and 18th!
From relevant producers in the network, we had acquired many products for the specific purpose of promoting those entrepreneurs and their products. We sold seeds, jaggery, cold-pressed oils and the red rice porridge (khichdi) mix, all with the phone number and photo of the entrepreneurs themselves from whom it was acquired for the special purpose of promoting those entrepreneurs at our network events. And, all organic, of course!
Amongst this the central attraction was the #BambooPyramid (by virtue of its rather large physical presence). It lead visitors to ask us "how do we grow food in this?" and further... "Does the pyramid shape transfer some form of energy to the plants?" and so on.
Simply put, the pyramid is just a frame to hold the soil inside in a shape that maximizes several variables (such as inter-root distance) and minimizes some others (such as plants per sq.ft, amount of water used, weeding work, etc.,). It trades off some 1-day worth work to make maintenance, water conservation for the next 1 year.
For those who wanted to understand it a bit more... here is a little GIF animation, built as a promo-educational material, to explain this open-source technique:
The most interesting use case that we heard was from the founder of JungleScapes who suggested that urban / rural people could grow certain forest herbs and that could be the most green thing people could be doing to the environment. That brings us to Tree Planting again...
There were many people on the WhatsApp "GREEN Enviro-Activism" group who had expressed a desire to do something about tree planting and so on towards "World Environment Day". Later, it was discovered by us that a certain noble soul from the Agasthya Foundation spends his working hours (weekedays) training people on how to create a forest using the Miyawaki method. This was when we bumped into an eye opening conversation with the founder of JungleScapes, Ramesh Venkataraman, who explained to us that there is a need (opportunity) to preserve over 130 native Pioneer Species herbs and 7 native grass varieties of the Bandipur forest reserve and that some of them even have monetary values in producing feedstock for indigenous / ayurvedic medicines and so on.
The first wonderful thing that happened as I opened this up to the WhatsApp group titled "GREEN Enviro-Activism" was that Smitha offered her land, of about 3000 sq.ft. at Devanahalli, to be turned into a Miyawaki forest. What is needed now is for a critical mass of a team to form who will commit to plant the trees there on that day. The saplings, etc., can all be arranged - just a matter of enough people signing up. So now we have a WhatsApp Group to plan and discuss the tree plantation drive. Wanna join? Please want. Bangalore's many non-human inhabitants would want you to join.
The second wonderful thing that happened as we met many people at the stalls of our reach-out events was that it became clear and confirmed that there are always a few in a thousand people who will want to step up and do more than just be an organic consumer. Many are already urban gardeners. Many were interested in setting up the #BambooPyramid at their terrace and backyard gardens.
The BambooPyramid is manufactured as ready-to-assemble frames out of Bamboo strips. The frame design itself is simple and we welcome hobbyists and enthusiasts to try it out on their own, suggest improvements and make it better... however, for those who mean business, we also offer two other levels of help:
What is to be seen here is that the opportunities that walk into us today at the World Environment Day event (at Embassy Golf Links) was reflecting the fact that there are many objects available to us in the network of GREEN, such as innovations such as the BambooPyramid as well as the rich knowledge of folks such as Piyush Manush, which we must put to good use without trying to make mistakes again and again.
There can be mistakes on the level of words, but they should al be rectified before they become mistakes on the level of actions... and environmental degradations. For this, we must learn to create Learning Organizations.
Are YOU ready to create a Learning Organization for YOUR cause?
A few weeks ago, a bunch of us had met at Cubbon park, to (also) discuss what people would like to do on World Environment Day. While things have been slow to progress (as tree planting is entirely a volunteer driven effort) there has been some progress off late. More on that later.
GREEN had been invited by the kind folks at RMZ Corp to have a stall at their campus. It has been 2 days of hectic fun interacting with IT people - a significant chunk of them green thumbs who were very interested in the #BambooPyramid and in the upcoming Self Discovery & Systems Thinking course at Coop Forest on June 17th and 18th!
From relevant producers in the network, we had acquired many products for the specific purpose of promoting those entrepreneurs and their products. We sold seeds, jaggery, cold-pressed oils and the red rice porridge (khichdi) mix, all with the phone number and photo of the entrepreneurs themselves from whom it was acquired for the special purpose of promoting those entrepreneurs at our network events. And, all organic, of course!
Amongst this the central attraction was the #BambooPyramid (by virtue of its rather large physical presence). It lead visitors to ask us "how do we grow food in this?" and further... "Does the pyramid shape transfer some form of energy to the plants?" and so on.
Simply put, the pyramid is just a frame to hold the soil inside in a shape that maximizes several variables (such as inter-root distance) and minimizes some others (such as plants per sq.ft, amount of water used, weeding work, etc.,). It trades off some 1-day worth work to make maintenance, water conservation for the next 1 year.
For those who wanted to understand it a bit more... here is a little GIF animation, built as a promo-educational material, to explain this open-source technique:
There were many people on the WhatsApp "GREEN Enviro-Activism" group who had expressed a desire to do something about tree planting and so on towards "World Environment Day". Later, it was discovered by us that a certain noble soul from the Agasthya Foundation spends his working hours (weekedays) training people on how to create a forest using the Miyawaki method. This was when we bumped into an eye opening conversation with the founder of JungleScapes, Ramesh Venkataraman, who explained to us that there is a need (opportunity) to preserve over 130 native Pioneer Species herbs and 7 native grass varieties of the Bandipur forest reserve and that some of them even have monetary values in producing feedstock for indigenous / ayurvedic medicines and so on.
The first wonderful thing that happened as I opened this up to the WhatsApp group titled "GREEN Enviro-Activism" was that Smitha offered her land, of about 3000 sq.ft. at Devanahalli, to be turned into a Miyawaki forest. What is needed now is for a critical mass of a team to form who will commit to plant the trees there on that day. The saplings, etc., can all be arranged - just a matter of enough people signing up. So now we have a WhatsApp Group to plan and discuss the tree plantation drive. Wanna join? Please want. Bangalore's many non-human inhabitants would want you to join.
The second wonderful thing that happened as we met many people at the stalls of our reach-out events was that it became clear and confirmed that there are always a few in a thousand people who will want to step up and do more than just be an organic consumer. Many are already urban gardeners. Many were interested in setting up the #BambooPyramid at their terrace and backyard gardens.
The BambooPyramid is manufactured as ready-to-assemble frames out of Bamboo strips. The frame design itself is simple and we welcome hobbyists and enthusiasts to try it out on their own, suggest improvements and make it better... however, for those who mean business, we also offer two other levels of help:
- DIY by buying pre-fabricated parts (6 frames) from us and assemble it as per instructions.
- End-to-end consulting and man power solutions to setup the #BambooPyramid for large scale commercial projects.
What is to be seen here is that the opportunities that walk into us today at the World Environment Day event (at Embassy Golf Links) was reflecting the fact that there are many objects available to us in the network of GREEN, such as innovations such as the BambooPyramid as well as the rich knowledge of folks such as Piyush Manush, which we must put to good use without trying to make mistakes again and again.
There can be mistakes on the level of words, but they should al be rectified before they become mistakes on the level of actions... and environmental degradations. For this, we must learn to create Learning Organizations.
Are YOU ready to create a Learning Organization for YOUR cause?
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