Researchers in northwest Peru’s Alto Mayo region have discovered 27 new animal species, including a semi-aquatic mouse, a salamander that climbs trees and a “blob-headed fish.”
The 38-day survey uncovered and recorded more than 2,000 species of plants and wildlife, reported The Guardian.
“Discovering even one new species of mammal on an expedition would be extraordinary, but discovering four new mammal species, as well as eight new fishes and three new amphibians, is mind-blowing,” said Trond Larsen, leader of the Rapid Assessment Program at Conservation International, as Euronews reported.
The expedition was led by a team of researchers from Conservation International who were joined by Indigenous scientists and guides from Global Earth, as well as local experts from the Indigenous Regional Federation of the Alto Mayo Awajun Communities.
“We know very little about the planet’s biodiversity, and these ecosystems hold so many mysteries,” said biologist Wily Palomino with Conservation International, who was part of the expedition, in a press release from Conservation International. “It would take 10 lifetimes to truly understand them. Expeditions like this are just the beginning.”
The Alto Mayo is a diverse and complex landscape of intertwined ecosystems and local communities that stretches from the Andes mountains to the Amazon.
The purpose of the expedition was to find the greatest number of species in a short time. The setting for this unique search was unusual, however, since the area has been scarred by deforestation and is full of human settlements, rather than being the kind of “pristine” forest setting where an abundance of rare wildlife would be found.
The researchers said the findings of the expedition demonstrate that people and nature can live side by side, but we must take immediate action to preserve it.
During the expedition, the team of 20 slogged through swamps, rivers and lagoons. They crossed farm fields and climbed mountains into cloud forests, all the while looking for movements and other signs of animals while setting up camera traps and collecting samples.
Of the 2,000 species they recorded, 27 were new to science and nearly 50 are threatened with extinction. Four of the newly discovered species were mammals.
“Mammals are the best-known animal group in the world — so discovering four new mammals in any expedition is surprising,” Larsen said in the press release. “Finding them in a region with significant human populations is extraordinary.”
The amphibious mouse the team discovered is part of the aguajales ecosystem — a swampy area dominated by aguaje palms. The area is a designated “ecosystem recovery zone,” where deforestation for rice farming is a threat to the mouse’s unique habitat.
Larsen said the species — which likely exclusively inhabits the Alto Mayo — is part of a semi-aquatic group of rodents, of which most known species are exceptionally rare.
Just before coming upon a dark brown harlequin frog — Atelopus seminiferus — an extremely rare species that had never been seen at such low elevations, “Larsen had crossed a muddy logging track, where a donkey pulled a cart of fresh-cut timber through the forest,” the press release said.
Palomino said many researchers hypothesize that fragmented forested areas hold little biodiversity, which is why they have largely ignored places like Alto Mayo. Palomino said the expedition challenges those views.
“The discovery of so many new and threatened species was so surprising, in part, because it was a nearly blank slate — no one has ever really looked,” Palomino said in the press release. “Now, we’re proving the unexpected: Small patches of healthy forests can support a wealth of species.”
Approximately 280,000 people live in Alto Mayo, including Indigenous Awajún people. To make ends meet during the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, community members were forced to allow migrant farmers to rent their lands.
This led to a steep rise in deforestation, according to Diego Dourojeanni, Conservation International’s leader of work with Alto Mayo’s Indigenous Peoples.
“Communities didn’t deforest their land because they wanted to — it was out of necessity,” Dourojeanni said in the press release. “While it helped in the short term, it became clear that this practice came at a steep cost to resources, food security and the ecosystem services like clean water that the forests provide.”
The expedition came out of efforts to address deforestation by working with the Awajún people and other local communities to help build alternative sources of livelihood, like selling vanilla and medicinal teas, in addition to practicing agroforestry with coffee beans and cocoa. They are also striving to improve Awajún community governance to ensure sustainable and equitable management of their territory.
The expedition was the beginning of a plan to connect Alto Mayo’s remaining patches of abundant biodiversity to create a conservation corridor for the long-term protection of the region’s wildlife.
“To effectively protect nature, you first need to know what’s there,” Dourojeanni explained. “By understanding where wildlife lives, we can make better land management decisions and target areas that are best suited for conservation and sustainable activities like ecotourism, selective logging and sustainable agriculture.”
Dourojeanni said getting a better idea of what lives in the forest is not just important for economic reasons.
“We want people to value forests and resources in a more emotional way,” Dourojeanni emphasized. “Because the truth is that if it’s just for income’s sake, it’s really, really hard to compete with agricultural drivers of deforestation. And traditional knowledge on how to use the forest is at risk of being lost in a generation or two.”
Dourojeanni said there have been signs of progress in the last decade. Communities have stopped renting out their land as much and have a better understanding of how important it is to protect their forests.
“It’s not too late yet,” Dourojeanni said. “If we do the right thing, people and nature can co-exist on this landscape.”
The post Amphibious Mouse Among 27 New Animal Species Found by Peruvian Amazon Expedition appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/new-animal-species-discovery-peru-amazon-rainforest.html
Curating a conscious home is a thoughtful process involving much consideration — who made my products, how they were made, and what are they made from — and this guide aims to support you on your journey towards finding ethical and sustainable home decor you truly love.
What is Sustainable Home Decor?
Sustainable home decor includes any home decor that is made in a way that takes into consideration both the makers and the planet. Sustainable home decor will be ethically made using eco-friendly and natural materials. Eco-friendly decor will also be produced using sustainable supply chain practices. This includes using renewable energy and recycled or compostable packaging.
While there are numerous sustainable home decor brands, some of which are featured below, first consider what’s already been made in order to prevent contributing to new waste. Secondhand, used, or DIY home decor options are typically more sustainable than buying new.
What is Ethical and Fair Trade Home Decor?
Ethical and Fair Trade home decor is produced in a way that adheres to Fair Trade standards and is, ideally, Fair Trade Certified. Fair Trade means paying artisans and makers a fair, living wage and providing ethical working conditions. Ethical home decor also includes supporting goods made by artisans using traditional heritage techniques and art forms. Many cultures around the world are at risk of losing their age-old artisanal crafts forever in the age of mass manufacturing.
It’s important to note that sometimes a major brand may use an “eco” fiber while still supporting irresponsible labor practices, and excessive production amounts that inevitably lead to a lot of waste. This is not true sustainability in my mind!
Most artisan-made home decor is ethically produced and directly supports the makers. However, it’s important to check if a brand or marketplace is transparent about their business practices to ensure they are ethical or Fair Trade.
Where Can You Find Sustainable Home Decor?
In terms of environmental sustainability, looking secondhand and vintage is always a great first place to look for sustainable home decor.
But if you’ve scoured those options and haven’t found what you’re looking for and/or if you’re looking to financially support artisans and traditional crafts around the globe, this shopping guide is designed for you. You’ll discover many brands with artfully designed and artisan handmade goods for furnishing any space among this list of decor brands.
All of the brands in this guide use natural and/or recycled fibers and avoid the use of virgin synthetics like polyester; however, some brands do use materials that are not the most environmentally-friendly option on the market, such as conventional cotton.
And of course, I wanted to choose brands that followed slow, thoughtful production practices, prioritizing artisan handmade over factory labor and quality over quantity.
So without further ado, here are my favorite small-batch, artisan-made, and ethical home decor brands.
Note that this guide includes affiliate links — as always, we only curate brands vetted for sustainability that we love (and that we think you’ll love too).
1. Urban Natural
Categories: Accent Pillows, Tabletop, Lighting, Wall Art & Mirrors, Blankets & Throws
Eco-friendly home retailer Urban Natural is on a mission to curate high-quality furniture (and other home goods) built with quality and free of toxic chemicals. Urban Natural carries several sustainable home decor brands, including artisan brands Ethnicraft and Jaipur Living as well as ethically USA-made brands Farmhouse Pottery and East Fork.
2. GOODEE
Categories: Pillows, Lighting, Wall Decor, Planters, Baskets, Blankets, Candles
GOODEE is an ethical marketplace featuring numerous sustainable artisan brands and designers. You’ll find a variety of beautifully crafted home decor goods to suit a wide range of styles. Goodee is a Climate Neutral and B Corp Certified company. They publish an annual impact report so you can easily ensure their business practices align with your values.
Our favorite brands on Goodee are Texidors, Baba Tree, Makaua, and Tensira.
3. Healthier Homes
Categories: Rugs, Lighting, Tabletop, Baskets, Wall Decor & Wallpaper
Founded after years running an award-winning healthy home building firm and publishing a book by the same name (Healthier Homes) this retailer is a go-to online destination for finding non-toxic home goods. The eco-friendly home decor on Healthier Homes is primarily made with natural materials like clay, cotton, seagrass, mango wood, and bamboo,
4. Will & Atlas
Categories: Baskets, Tabletop
Will & Atlas is a women-owned small business making most of their homewares from plant materials like jute, palm leaf, and hogla grass. Their natural fiber baskets are flexile but sturdy built to hold blankets, pillows, laundry, magazines, toys, or just to stand alone as a decor piece. You’ll also find jute coasters and placemats in their tabletop collection.
The brand is committed to ethical practices, partnering with nonprofit fair trade artisan groups in Bangladesh and craftspeople in the U.S. to build long-lasting production relationships.
5. Ten Thousand Villages
Categories: Baskets, Pillows, Throws, Candles, Wall Art, Planters & Vases
Founded 80 years ago, Ten Thousand Villages is the original fair trade store. Throughout the decades, the nonprofit business has continued their commitment to fair wages, safe working conditions, as well as sustainability.
As a founding member of the World Fair Trade Organization, with artisans around the world from under-resourced communities. Most of the products they carry are made from recycled, upcycled, and natural materials.
6. MagicLinen
Categories: Curtains, Kitchen Linens
Linen is an exceptional material for home decor — there’s a reason we say “kitchen linens!” It’s natural, beautiful, and is often high quality.
I purchased a set of linen curtains from Magic Linen one year ago and they remain one of my favorite home decor pieces. The fabric they use meets the OEKO-TEX® STANDARD 100, meaning its been tested for harmful substances.
7. Passion Lilie
Categories: Pillow Covers, Table Linens
Passion Lilie is a fair trade fashion and lifestyle brand with ethically made home decor, too. The Fair Trade Verified brand has handwoven cotton blankets, organic cotton kitchen linens, unique ornaments, and hand-dyed throw pillow covers.
Each piece is made by Passion Lilie’s partners in India who pay living wages and ensure a safe working environment. Beyond this, the brand supports efforts to enable artisans to continually develop their skills and creates opportunities for community development.
8. 54kibo
Categories: Throw Pillows, Wall Hangings & Artwork, Mirrors, Baskets, Rugs, Lighting
A destination for modern African artisanal decor, 54kibo curates a stunning selection of ethically made home decor. The pieces on 54kibo are made with time-honored techniques using locally sourced materials with rich histories. The designs are exceptional, but the stories behind them make the pieces beautiful additions to your home beyond the surface.
9. The Citizenry
Categories: Baskets, Planters & Vases, Tabletop, Wall Decor, Mirrors
The Citizenry partners with artisans around the world, ensuring safe conditions, fair wages, and offering grants to their artisan partners so that they can expand their businesses.
Their online collection features small-batch artisan-made home goods made from locally-sourced and natural materials like palm leaves and indigo dyes.
More Sustainable Home Guides:
Sustainable Furniture Brands to Furnish a Conscious Home
Best Eco-Friendly and Zero Waste Kitchen Products
Easy Swaps for a Low Waste, Sustainable Bathroom
The post 9 Beautiful Places to Source Ethical and Eco-Friendly Home Decor appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.
9 Beautiful Places to Source Ethical and Eco-Friendly Home Decor
Take a look at why hemp is heralded as a hero material and discover 14 hemp clothing brands that have tapped into its sustainable potential.
The exploration of fabrics has always been a starting point for sustainable innovation in fashion. After all, fabrics provide tangible proof that change is possible while having a direct impact on the environment in one way or another. Plus fabrics are responsible for an outsized proportion of a fashion brand’s carbon footprint and overall environmental impact, including biodiversity loss and pollution.
So, What is Hemp Fabric?
Hemp is a bast fiber produced from the cannabis sativa plant, where every part of the plant can be utilized for over 25,000 industrial uses including clothing, biofuel, bricks, paper, and textiles.
Contrary to its popular association, hemp is actually the sober sister to marijuana. Unlike its recreational sibling that’s grown for its psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) properties, hemp contains less than 0.3% THC, a value that was the driving force behind the legalization of hemp production in the 2018 Farm Bill. So while you can’t really get high from hemp, you can definitely enjoy its material benefits — which are plenty!
What is Hemp Clothing?
The simple answer is that hemp clothes are garments made from hemp fabric! But the important caveat here is that most hemp clothes on the market today are not made from 100% hemp fabric. They are usually blended with other fibers, like cotton.
At this point, hemp fabric manufacturing is not at the scale or technological level that the manufacturing of cotton (the most popular natural material) is, making 100% hemp clothing more expensive to produce. Also, pure hemp fabric is also known to be quite stiff until a couple dozen washes later, so blending it with a fiber like cotton can make it softer and easier to wear on the offset.
100% hemp fiber content clothing does exist, it’s just rare at this point. Though we do think this will change with more sustainable material investment happening in the textiles industry.
Is Hemp Clothing Comfortable?
It depends! The softness of hemp clothing will vary based on how the fabric was produced and if it is blended with other fibers like cotton or lyocell. Pure hemp clothing can be rougher than cotton, but hemp is known to get softer with every wash.
Also, since hemp is a natural bast fiber that comes from the softer parts of the plant’s stalk or stem, it is softer than the coarser leaf fibers.
Can Hemp Clothing Protect From The Sun?
A lesser known benefit of hemp clothing is that it can reportedly even help shield you from harmful UV rays. According to skin cancer research, a fabric’s UPF (Ultraviolet Protection Factor) value is a number that coincides with the fraction of UV rays it allows to pass through and hit your skin — the higher the UPF number, the better the protection.
Research claims that hemp has a UPF of >50 (according to European standards) due to natural pigments and lignin within the fibers, which act as UV absorbers.
Is Hemp Clothing Sustainable?
There are a lot of benefits to hemp clothing. But don’t just take our word for it, we’ve listed some of hemp’s most impressive sustainable qualities below:
1. Hemp is not resource-intensive
Hemp can be grown under a variety of agricultural and ecological conditions and has a capacity to grow rapidly.
Hemp clothing vs. cotton: With a high yield of 250% more fiber than cotton, hemp requires less land to grow, has no need for harmful pesticides or chemicals, and needs as little as 1/3rd of the water compared to conventional cotton. (Though individual use cases may vary based on the region that each of the crops are grown.)
2. Hemp is a restorative plant
Growing hemp can also help contribute to the maintenance of soil quality, courtesy of its anchored roots which prevent soil erosion and nutrient loss.
In fact, research shows that hemp can be used to restore contaminated soils through ‘phytoremediation’ — a process that has proven successful in the early 90s when industrial hemp was planted in some of the polluted Ukrainian regions near the Chernobyl disaster where much of the land was rendered useless. The experiments showed that hemp helped remove radioactive elements from the soil.
3. Hemp can absorb carbon more than other plants
Hem can act as a carbon sink. According to a Cambridge University researcher, a hectare of hemp can absorb between 8-15 tonnes of CO2, giving hemp plants a vital role in reversing carbon emissions.
Impressed yet? Ahead, discover 14 brands that have some of the best takes on this sustainably versatile fiber.
Note that this guide includes affiliates. As always, all brands meet very high standards for sustainability and are brands we love that we think you’ll love too.
Where to Find Sustainable Hemp Clothing
1. Patagonia
Have an outdoor adventure coming up? Run for the hills in some of Patagonia’s functional hemp styles that’ll have you covered no matter what path you set foot on. Whether it’s a jacket, sweatshirt, pair of overalls, or technical pants, these styles are hard-wearing and made to last.
Patagonia stands by hemp as one of its hero fabrics and claims to consciously partner with suppliers that use unique processing techniques to minimize waste. The brand has also created unique performance materials by blending hemp with organic cotton, recycled polyester, and TENCEL
lyocell.
Many of Patagonia’s clothes and gear are sewn at Fair Trade Certified factories that ensure all workers earn a living wage.
Size range: US 0–18
Price: $$-$$$
2. tentree
If you’re on the lookout for easy hemp styles