Sustainability is a hot-button topic in today’s world, especially when it comes to brands and businesses. Issues like climate change continue to affect our lives and our planet, and sometimes even the smallest changes, like supporting a sustainable business, can make an impact.
While there are many brands like us that champion sustainable change through reducing their carbon footprint, minimizing plastic packaging and ensuring their post-consumer products are recycle or reusable, there are even more activists at the fore front of this environmental fight.
Today (March 8) is International Women’s Day. To celebrate, we are spotlighting 3 environmental female activists who have and still are making a change in the name of sustainability.
Greta Thunberg
Who is she? Swedish Youth Activist
Status? Active 2018 - present
At only 15 years old, Greta Thunberg sparked an international movement to fight climate…all by skipping school. In August 2018, she famously camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament, holding a hand-painted signed that read Skolstrejk för klimatet: “School Strike for Climate.” She has since addressed heads of state at the U.N. and met with varying world leaders including the Pope and the President of the United States. Thunberg is also the youngest person to ever be honored as Time’s Person of the Year. Now at a mere 19 years of age, Greta Thunberg is a pioneer for environmentalism. With her coined term climate strike, she continues to inspire the next generation of female activists enthusiasts all over the world.
Isatou Ceesay
Who is she? Gambian Environmental Champion
Status? Active 1997 - present
Dubbed the “Queen of Recycling,” Isatou Ceesay is a Gambian activist who started the recycling movement called One Plastic Bag, a project that creates plastic yarn and forms bags out of the upcycled waste. Her inspiration came from her home village of N’jau, Gambia, an impoverished community that had left long-favored woven baskets in the past in favor of single use plastic bags. With no weekly trash collection to haul the rubbish away, plastic bags soon littered her village, killing cattle who mistook them for food and attracting disease ridden mosquitoes as the bags pooled with rainwater. Along with fighting a growing plastic pollution problem, Ceesay also broke gender stereotypes of women not being allowed to work in Gambia. She started One Plastic Bag in secret, eventually founding the N’jau Recycling and Income Generation Group, a collective of over 100 N’jau women working together to weave sustainable products and fashion out of the plastic waste that once plagued their village.
Rachel Carson
Who is she? Writer, Scientist and Ecologist
Status? Active 1936 - 1964
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and nature writer from Springdale, Pennsylvania. She made a name for herself as a naturalist and science writer to the public, authoring several books about the biography of the ocean. Most famously, Carson authored Silent Spring, an exposé on the misinformation spread by the chemical industry on the dangers of pesticides, which spurred an environmental revolution. Her writing led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides, her works eventually inspired the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Along with her environmental legacy, Carson paved the way for future female activists like Greta Thunberg by challenging the status quo around females in science. She received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University, held the title of Editor in Chief of all publications from the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and was often deemed hysterical and a Communist for her ground-breaking research on the dangers of pesticides. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and her life and works are still celebrated to this day.
Sustainability and environmental protection are at the core of everything we do at Enviroscent. From our eco-friendly packaging to our reusable and recyclable products to our strict regulatory process for creating nature-loving scents, we are constantly working toward a more sustainable, safer future and we would love for you to join us! Shop our sustainable, safer ingredient products here.