Sustaining Mother Nature and our Motherland
“Be part of the solution, not part of the pollution.”
Although my project is not focused on sustainability, there is a link between my work supporting whole person health and others’ work promoting environmental sustainability and safety.
One of the more direct links between sustainability and wellness is in the food we eat. I visited Nude Foods in Cape town. Nude Foods’ founder Paul Rubin created a plastic-free shopping experience for South Africans to fill their pantry with high-quality, local, sustainable, foods and eco-friendly home & body products without filling the trash with wasteful packaging. Their bulk wholefoods, health foods and Earth-friendly products are all non-GMO, plastic-free and sold by weight. The goal is to make plastic-free shopping easy and accessible to the everyday consumer, while supporting local suppliers and other waste-reducing initiatives.
This relates to my project as I think about how nutrition impacts whole person health - our diets can either bolster or prohibit good health. Nude Foods offers nutritious food to fuel us, including single-origin brews, organic teas, artisanal plant-based meals, adaptogenic hot drinks and superpowered smoothies. And these items are offered at affordable prices with seasonal offerings from local farmers while promoting zero-waste lifestyle norms. To learn more about Nude Foods, visit https://nudefoods.co.
I also discovered a link between my project and plants. I visited Nguni Nursery with another Eisenhower Fellow Siyabulela Sokomani. The nursery, based in Cape Town, specializes in contract growing indigenous plants and trees for sustainable landscapes, greening projects, horticultural industry, and eco-restoration. Siya and his team take a community-based approach to plant production in their nurseries and see this as a vital part of scaling African ecological restoration goals. By prioritizing endemic plants and empowering local employees, Nguni Nursery is leading the ecological revolution to revitalize the life of South Africa’s landscapes, economies, and people.
Creating green spaces is essential to addressing climate change, but it also benefits the communities in which the spaces exist. Planting in communities helps to stir the economy by creating a positive value chain, teach trade skills to individuals who want to collaborate and promote being outdoors and engaging in physical activity - all life skills that my project also aims to promote. To learn more about Nguni Nursery, visit https://www.nguninursery.co.za/services.
To bring together all of these great ideas, I visited the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. Known as the “green heart” of Cape Town, the Botanical Garden is renowned for its beauty and diversity of flora and fauna.
