Eco Holidays

posted by Catherine on Feb 22

Why not take an extended eco holiday to a part of your past?

These days you can buy yourself a genome-realted DNA test that may well help you to see where your ancient ancestors came from or travelled through on their journey to becoming you!

It is currently believed that around 60,000 years ago the first humans started to move away from their original homeland. Theories still abound as to why they moved and how they managed it – but basically from those first steps – they sowed the seeds for all the thousands or cultures, languages and peoples that we know today.

Some of these groups are still very isolated such as island communites, whereas others are now highly mixed up including many capital cities like London and New York.

Over thousands of years of migration, settlement, working and trade; cultures have met, mixed and moved on. But where does your history come from – where has your distant family been living all this time?

Genome Testing.
It is now possible to buy a testing kit for yourself or a friend that will tell you about the journey of your ancestors as far as we know it.

There have been many studies over the past few decades that have found certain ‘markers’ in human DNA which can be plotted on a map of the world based on where these markers are found within indigenous populations still living in those locations.

For example, certain markers found in indigenous people living on Island A will be identified as different to all other marker combinations, so if your DNA is found to have most or all of those same markers, then you can almost guarantee that your ‘family’ were there too at some point.

And as humans moved from Africa across Asia, Europe and the Americas, they left a trail of these similar markers – and it is these markers that the DNA test can highlight for you.

These markers can be found for both your maternal linage – through your mother and then her mother and then all the mothers for ever; or paternally through your father, then his father, then all your family’s fathers (however only males can follow their paternal lineage due to the ‘Y’ chromosome – as ladies don’t have one!).

This tracing backwards doesn’t give you a list of all their names and addresses of course, it just tells you whether your markers are found in certain populations over time and in which areas and countries.

Wow!
This is of course something that could change your life. Especially if you have no idea what your ancestry is and find out that most of your past relatives were from a totally different continent to what you thought.

I know skin colour and your direct relations might give you a clue to more recent family ties over the past 100 years (like the last 3 generations of my family were all from Europe) – but they can be hiding a whole host of other relatives over the past 59,900 years that are hidden within our genes!

And finding out that your history is focussed in a whole new landscape could be the very input you needed to find a new path in life. What if you could travel back to that place for an extended period of time; learn about who still lives there and past events.

And if it is still a developing region – there may be volunteer or teaching opportunites close by so that you could actually be helping people still living in that very place who share a similar past to you.

If you are interested in learning more about yourself, then maybe take a look at one such Genome Project and take it from there?

photo credit: Lordcolus

posted by Catherine on Jan 23

Nothing beats actually doing something – so book yourself on a course.

If you are one of those people who says ‘oh, I’ve always wanted to do that…’ then you need to start doing them!

Sometimes they are such simple things, like going to a local castle, walking along a certain coast, climbing a certain mountain – all of which are usually free, but we never seem to fit them in, even though they are so simple to do.

Other things people might not get round to are new skills – or improving existing skills – where courses can be free, or the cost going to a great cause.

You will never learn how to identify fungi unless you get out there and actually search for them; learning bird calls is impossible without listening to the birds themselves and you certainly can’t learn how to manage a woodland, divert a stream or grow your own food from just reading a book!

Local Courses:
So, by booking yourself on to a course with a local agency, charity or organisation, you will finally get around to achieving something outdoorsy and eco friendly – and have a great time learning!

Build You Own Bug House

Here I have listed some courses and talks that I have found available in local advertisings – things that you could easily do:

Sustainable Building Talk – Local Permaculture Group:
Spend the morning listening to a talk by a leading local expert with a Q&A session – and then have a tour of an existing sustainably built and run eco house and get to see what is working where inside and outside.

Make Your Landscape Photography Come Alive – Local Wildlife Trust:
An intensive 1-day course for landscape photography for beginners and improvers. A few hours in the class room first thing to cover the basic settings, composition and equipment – then out in the field to experiment with emotion, light and adding your own style.

Basic Bushkraft – Local Independant Adult Ed Centre
Covering an array of outdoor skills – you will spend the day with adults all experimenting with basic survival skills. These skills include; green wood-working, shelter building, fire lighting, knots and cooking.

A Weekend With A View – Local Youth Hostels
Stay for 2 days at a local Youth Hostel in a picturesque location – with activites and walks planned throughout. Explore the local area and landscapes with your guide before settling down for group dinner and stories in the evening. Wake up to fresh air and a great breakfast and then head off on more adventures till hometime!

There Is Something For Everyone:
Even if none of those sound like your kettle of fish, then hunt around for other adventures to get you outside and exploring – and hopefully learning a new skill along the way.

Whether its an evening with badgers or bats, woodland or heathland ecology, an introduction to beekeeping or butterflies, or maybe rock pools, painting, basketry and bryophytes! You can always find something you like.

So, no more excuses – do what you have always wanted to do!

posted by Catherine on Dec 20

You can get so much more out of your travels if you are learning along the way!

Say you are volunteering at an animal sanctuary in Brazil, and wetland habitat in India or underwater in Fiji – what could be a better use of your evening than learning more about it all online?

I’m sure that you will get plenty of on-the-job training once you arrive – but you could make that 10 times more effective by studying a related course at the same time – in your own language – and possibly with a qualification at the end of it.

So not only would you come home with 3 or 6 months hands-on active experience under your belt, but also a certificate, a diploma or even a foundation degree under there too!

Why Study?
Many people have their ‘career’ qualifications and experience on the one side to pay the bills - but they often don’t get qualifications or certified experience in their passion.  That’s where short course and diplomas, etc, come in – they boost up your ‘hobby’ into an active skill.

I mean, if you love wildlife – and spend many hours reading about it and wandering through woodlands, mountains and open countryside with your binoculars - this doesn’t translate into any quantifiable experience or application of that passion.

So, if you were to apply for a job in this field - you couldn’t really use “20 years of walking outside looking at wildlife” as a qualification could you?

This is where these short courses online could come in really handy for you.  You could get an actual certificate to prove that you have the knowledge and experience in the field – which could hopefully open up a whole new window of opportunity for you.

Add this new qualification to a few months active volunteering in the field with a well-known college, institute or tour company and you could well have found yourself a new vocational path.

Extra Curricular Activity:
Many courses can also require a certain amount of practical experience and may even have many units based purely on hands-on activities like animal care, people skills or habitat management.  And no doubt you will have plenty of things to use a mini projects if you are actively working in the field.

Rather than the usual things like reporting on a local cat rescue centre, or new supermarket near you, your project could be ‘how building a school in a remote village empowers women and children’ or ‘discovering new species of reptile in the pristine forests of Papua’.

Rather than thinking of ways to add extra information to bulk your projects up to 5000 words of whatever – with all the action around you – you may have a hard job deciding what to cut out instead!

posted by Catherine on Jun 28

When the little guy took on 1 of the largest petrochemical firms in the States!

I just love a David and Goliath case – it makes you proud to be the little guy!  That is why I wanted to tell you about this amazing film I just watched about just that: A newly qualified young Ecuadorian Lawyer is fighting a case against Texaco (now owned by Chevron – one of the 6 ‘major’ petroleum companies in the world).

Basically, over the past 2 decades petrochemical companies have moved in on the Ecuadorian rainforest to drill for oil and haven’t really paid much attention to the effects on the local people and the local environment.  And although it was only really a short while ago – the people involved didn’t really think it was ‘that much’ of a problem – and so did nothing about it.

But now a local has changed all that.  Sickened by all this pollution, disregard for human life and wanton destruction of such a beautiful and irreplaceable environment – Pablo Fajardo struggled against the odds to get a law degree and is now fighting for the 30,000 indigenous people who have been affected.

The Facts:
In The Ecuadorian Amazon there were many indigenous tribes living a peaceful existence off the land.  The habitat was lush, the wildlife plentiful and the people were healthy.  Then they found the Lago Agrio Oil Field.

Texaco moved in to the area and started setting up drilling and refining factories and littering the rainforest with miles and miles of oil-carrying pipelines.

They took over large areas of the rainforest either for mining or for waste dumps – and in their time they really made an impact – a bad one!

Yes, the Ecuadorian government gave them permission to drill for oil – but I don’t think they were aware that the results would be so damaging to their own country and people.

As a result of their presence here and their bad management and control practices they are quoted as having dumped ’18 billion gallons of toxic filth into the Amazon’; ‘flooded 17,000 square miles of both rainforest and agricultural land with toxic waste and cancer’ and have spilled so much oil here that they have surpassed the Exxon Valdez disaster by nearly 30 times!

One of Texaco’s responses was that people shouldn’t be living here anyway as it is a working oil field and that ‘it isn’t contamination – it is industrial exploitation permitted by law’!

The Effects:
Amazingly, there is still totally obvious areas of pollution today – literally pits of thick oil waste all over the place! 

They do not need to rely on witnesses from the past – they can simply take people to some of Texaco’s waste pits and see the destruction for themselves – and the new Ecuadorian President did just that in 2007; nearly 20 years after the lawsuit was first filed!  It’s all still there……..

As the local people have no real water system for their homes – they all bath and drink from the rivers and stream where they live – and unfortunately this is where most of the toxic waste has been and still is running into.  There has been an increase in cancer and leukemia across the area as well as many other illnesses that we associate with pollution and petrochemicals.

However, the Texaco Chief Scientist claims that they have tested water across the area ‘all the time’ and that ’99% of streams sampled meet US EPA and WHO drinking water standards’!  I doubt if a test on US streams would ever be that high!  Anyway – she then goes on to say that all the rashes and skin complaints that babies and children are getting are because they have ‘poor sanitation’ and that ‘their water contains fecal bacteria and sewage’ – so how does THAT pass for ‘drinking water’?

I love it when their own arguments contradict each other!

The Results:
Well, you can still help with this battle and others like it by supporting charities that work in these areas. 

I mean you don’t have to become a human rights attorney to make a difference – although if you did – that would be great! You just need to keep yourself aware of all the injustice in the world, and try to support those charities and groups that are making a difference in the areas you are passionate about.

Charities involved in this area include the Rainforest Foundation Fund, Oxfam America, Amazon Watch, Amazon Defence Front, Rainforest Action Network, Unicef, WWF, Flora & Fauna as well as Pablo himself!  And I’m sure there are many more.

So whether it is just people in general, sick children, the environment, the wildlife, the Amazon itself or the rights of indigenous people – your volunteering or regular donations can all add up to get things put right!

I’m not going to tell you what happened in the film – you will have to go out and watch it yourself and add your support to the cause!

posted by Catherine on May 7

Would You Believe That The Orangutan Could Be Virtually Extinct In 15 Years?

Some experts would have us believe this if the current trends in rain forest destruction and mono-cultures continued to be profitable in Borneo.

Are people more important than animals?

What’s The Deal?
There are only some many places on earth that Orangutans live, and they are being destroyed at a very fast rate.

Over 50% of the wild population has been lost in the past decade, and it is likely that this figure will continue to decline unless we stop it.

By volunteering, you could help to make sure that the destruction was slowed or at least channelled into the least damaging areas of the forests – rather than key retreats or wildlife ‘corridors’.  Of course any destruction of their habitat is a bad thing – but once the key areas are lost, or the links between those areas, then the species cannot survive.

It’s not just home to the Orangutan either.  There are pygmy elephants and the Sumatran tiger competing for a living in the same jungles, not to mention a whole host of birds, insects and smaller mammals.  All rely on this land and these habitats.

Who Can I Go With?
There are several companies offering volunteer trips to these areas, and all have slightly different aims.

Frontier: from £350, departs all year.
Offer a 9 day or 2 week conservation and adventure package in Indonesia, focusing on the Orangutans habitat and the wealth of other wildlife that needs your help.  It also contributes to local communities and is very open about where your money is spent for each project.

The Great OrangUtan Project: $1575 for 2 weeks with baby Orangutans.
This trip is leaving right now as 2 babies are due to be born in the next few weeks!  However, they do offer a ‘no touch’ policy for the young and their parents…..

They offer plenty of other trips to Borneo so you have a choice with regards to what your experience can offer the project.

Responsible Travel: from £730 for 6 weeks in June & August.
On this trip you also get an insight into the Indonesian culture and learn the language with this longer than average trip to help out.  You will get involved with all aspects of the Orangutan rescue and habitat maintenance programs.

Discovery Initiatives: at £2195 for 9 days with Orangutan experts.
This company offer you the chance to go behind the scenes at the Orangutan centre as well as spending time in the forest with the experts in the field.

Funding goes to offer you a years membership to the foundation as well as a contribution to Rain-Forest Concern.

How Else Can You Help?
Well, here is your chance to make your voice heard on the subject – by volunteering with an effective charity in the region and helping them to make a difference with your time and your money.

And why not make your trip into a longer vacation, by offering to teach in the area, or one close by.  Rather than fly all the way there for just that one eco adventure, why not see what else is out the on offer!

However, your money can also help by not spending it at all!

If we know that un-certified Palm Oil and Soy are one of the main reasons that the jungles of Borneo are worth more cut down than standing, lets make a stand. 

If you are buying toiletries, margarine, biscuits and detergents with palm oil in them, regardless of their point of origin – then it doesn’t matter how much time we volunteer; it won’t break the destructive cycle or our consumer behaviour.

Imagine the irony of travelling to Borneo to save Orangutans, but blatantly using the very ingredients that are destroying their habitat to wash and style your hair each morning!

posted by Catherine on Mar 27

This longer-term volunteer project could be the opportunity of a lifetime!!

There are many short-term opportunities out there for volunteering and fit with most peoples work schedule - but some of the longer-term options will very likely change your life!

Take the following volunteer placement as an example: 12 weeks working in a Safari Lodge in Africa for about the same amount of money (rent, bills and food) that you would be spending back home!

As with all volunteer packages it doesn’t include international flights or other travel arrangements, but everything else while you are there is included.

What Do I Do There?
Well, you will be helping to run the lodge, so it will include general maintenance, working with the guests, helping the local community and enjoying the wildlife of course!  There will be many an opportunity to get close to the wildlife here.

The company involved will plan to speak with you at length before you go so that you are matched up with the best location for your abilities, skills and to a certain extent your preferences.

Naturally, they will not want to waste their time and money and your time and skills by putting you in a location that is beyond your ability or in a country you didn’t want to visit!

And you certainly won’t perform at your best if you really aren’t happy sleeping in a tent and using an outdoor shower! All options are considered carefully to make the best of your time and to get the most out of your trip.

What Else?
The package comes with training in the UK before you leave and 24 hour support the whole time you are away. You even get a small salary to spend whilst you are abroad.  All food and lodgings are included as is on-site training.

All the camps featured are eco-friendly and strive to be responsible locations – for example using local resources and natural energy. These eco-credentials are a integral part of the camp and your experiences and training will allow you to pass on your knowledge and enthusiasm to all the guests that visit during your stay!

Education is a very important part of this trip.

You may also be required to work alongside nature and wildlife teams in removing snares and rehabilitating injured and orphaned animals – which would of course be amazing! 

Many sites also have strong links with local communities, so if this is an area you are interested in or have the skills to teach in your skill set, then this could become the main focus of your trip here.

Getting There & Away:
Depending on the time and season of your eco adventure, they can also offer international travel options, or allow you to make your stop at your safari lodge as part of a larger or worldwide trip.

Why not travel the length of Africa by overland tour bus to get to your lodge and then head down to The Cape afterwards? Or stop-over in Africa as part of your round-the-world journey from India or Australia on your way back home?

The Details:
Holiday Details: Responsible Travel act as the agent
Countries: Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi.
Costs: from £2400 (12 weeks) – depending on location and park fees

I am seriously considering this one myself!  What an experience, and what a story to tell……

.