connecting you with stories of nature ✨🌱♾️
introducing eco-stories
✨ Dear fellow storytellers,
Through the many stories we have shared these past few years, we have learned more about the world, more about ourselves, and more about this shared experience we call life. It was through a few recent experiences - one of our team members had a baby while another lived in the Amazon Rainforest for a month - we felt a deeper appreciation for the depth and breadth of stories that we live and live with, inspiring us to reflect on the stories we share through eco-nnect.
Slowly, we have been taking steps in a new direction along what feels to be an exciting path. Our team is shifting away from a purely news-focused approach, appreciating that so much of our personal learning has emerged from connecting with longer and deeper stories that have inspired new ways of thinking and being.
So alongside our usual short articles, our writers will start offering longer pieces with an investigative yet personal approach that will showcase the intricate weaving of humanity and nature through the ancient art of storytelling. Today we share the first of these stories from a writer new to the eco-nnect family, Anton Rivette.
We hope you enjoy it.
*Also, if you know or hear a story you feel we should platform, please contact us.
🗞️ In Climate News
🇪🇺 EU unveils new rules to cut packaging waste and certify carbon removal projects.
⚖️ Court blocks giant coal mine in Australia over human rights concerns.
🌍 Africa is being devastated by a climate crisis it didn’t cause.
🌊 A flood cycle in South Sudan creates some of the first permanent climate refugees.
.📈 Cool Trends
♾️ eco-stories
COP27: a cautionary tale
by Anton Rivette
eco-nnect received an invite to COP27 in early October from an organization we collaborate with asking us to join their delegation. Due to other commitments my colleague Isabella Cavalletti declined the invitation, but then a week later, while talking over dinner, we touched on the upcoming Conference, and I asked her why she didn’t feel to attend: “shouldn’t you be present for these kinds of conversations?” She had her mouth full of salad, so she didn’t reply at first, but I could see that she was thinking. When she finished chewing she responded, “I’m not sure, I’ve never really considered us to be a part of these conversations.” She told me about the process of starting eco-nnect with Almudena Bentin, how they wanted to help make living sustainably a tangible reality rather than a far away utopia through raising awareness and increasing knowledge of the environmental sector, both the issues related to climate change and the solutions that were being developed to mitigate it. I asked her “isn’t that what the focus of COP is?” To be honest, my understanding of COP - which stands for the Conference of Parties, what the United Nations Climate Change Conferences have come to be known - was limited.
I remember studying its formation during High School, how in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - otherwise known as the Rio Summit - established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) with the ambition of stabilizing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere. The COP was created as the convention’s supreme body, an association of all member states with the intention to convene regular meetings of government, NGOs and environmental experts.
💩 WTF? news
🌏 The Culture Club
📺 What we’re watching: Film: “Time Travel in Britain’s Lost Rainforests” by Hugh Hartford
📸 Profile of the week: @aniwa.co
📚 What we’re reading: Becoming Landscape, essay by Alexa Firmenich
🤯 Fun fact we learnt this week: 🍯 A pound/500g of honey takes bees 2 million flower visits.