The Indian government recently finished a massive database that puts thousands of years’ worth of traditional Indian remedies, medicines, and practices in the public domain—and, hopefully, out of reach of Western biotech companies attempting to patent this knowledge. The Ecologist reports that this huge repository of information, dubbed the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, was completed by 200 researchers who spent 8 years transcribing and translating ancient texts on Ayurveda, Unani, and siddha. They’re also working to include yoga poses, which have come under patent-attack by many Western yoga instructors as the practice has grown more popular.

“India has effectively made its store of wisdom public property,” the Ecologist notes, “which can now be accessed and used by anyone, but patented by no one.”

Sources: The Ecologist, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library 

Image by zoyachubby, licensed under Creative Commons.

No, I don’t mean on an energy-efficient treadmill. Get a wild workout the good old-fashioned way—doing chores. According to Nicolette Loizou of the Ecologist (article not available online), Green Gyms, which are gaining popularity in the UK, revolve around the idea of conservation and gardening volunteerism as a workout. The UK now has 95 Green Gyms, where you can expend your calories while nurturing the great outdoors.

BTCV, a charitable environmental organization in Doncaster, UK, began its Green Gym 10 years ago. More than 10,000 people have since volunteered to improve local green spaces, as well as their own fitness. Typical tasks can be anything from digging soil and planting trees to sawing logs for building a sheep enclosure. And just like a workout routine with a personal trainer, BTCV leads groups in pre-workout warm-up exercises.

Aside from the obvious benefits of improving physical health and our natural surroundings, participants felt that the skills they learned helped to improve their mental health, self-esteem and confidence, reports Loizou.

A single Green Gym session usually lasts around three hours—for free. So instead of hiking it across spinning rubber, grab a shovel and dig—a tree is waiting to be planted. Exercise never felt so worthwhile.

(Thanks, Ecologist.)

Image by  alexindigo , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

For some clotheshorses, the ethical quandry of leather fashions is implicit: It’s a dead animal’s skin. But that’s only part of the story. While leather goods don’t carry quite the stigma that furs do, perhaps they should, especially when one learns the cost of leather production in terms of human health and environmental damage.

A recent article in the Ecologist (not available online) profiles the leather industry in Hazaribagh, a city in the Dhaka region of Bangladesh. Thanks to lax environmental regulations, the city is able to provide leather at lower costs than its Western counterparts, making its tanneries an economic boon to the city. But the cost of production is lower precisely because environmental regulations are lower.

Describing the leather manufacturing process at length, the Ecologist implicates the city’s tanneries with vivid descriptions of their environmental impact:

Electric-blue rivers of effluent gushing out of every tannery wall; a frothy, noxious cocktail of lead, chrome syntans, mercury, cadmium, and corrosive acids that creeps along the open drains under the stilted homes of neighbouring slums, and then straight into the Dhaka’s primary river, the Buriganga. 

Communities that once depended on the river for fishing have been decimated, while toxic tanning chemicals are slowly killing the city’s inhabitants:

Large numbers of the 8,000 to 12,000 workers at the tanneries suffer from gastrointestinal and dermatological diseases... SEDH (Bangladesh’s Society for Environment and Human Development) claims that 90 percent of tannery workers will be dead by the age of 50.

As with other consumer goods, there is an alternative for the conscientious: Organic Leather, in California, for example, promises leather derived from humanely slaughtered animals and tanned without toxic chemicals. Of course, these methods raise the product’s price significantly and cannot be conducted on Hazaribagh’s massive scale. It’s unlikely that real change can happen in Bangladesh’s tanneries until leather buyers worldwide, and especially in Europe, stop feeding the market for cheaper leather manufactured under such conditions.

(Thanks to Kari Volkmann-Carlsen for additional research.)

Image by Frances Voon, licensed by Creative Commons.