Vivienne Westwood joins campaign to help save the rainforest
Top designer Vivienne Westwood has teamed up with some of the top names in the fashion world in the continuing quest to save the rainforest and draw attention to the issues affecting it. Joining many iconic faces, Westwood has created an incredible photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar, which incorporates fashion photography with interviews with eco-journalists and other high-profile campaigners looking to further the rainforest cause.
The models in the shots all wear graffiti art t-shirts with slogans such as ‘endangered species’, ‘no fun being extinct’, ‘cool earth’ and ‘act fast and stop climate change’ emblazoned over them. Westwood explains that she directly asked the fashion world to contribute and make her ‘cool earth’ campaign a success and found a fantastic response!
Westwood also believes that fashion has an important role to play in furthering the conservation cause, explaining that it reaches the people that charities often can’t touch or engage with. As many women have a love for fashion, such features in Harper’s Bazaar help to engage with different audiences and raise awareness about the rainforest cause. The designer also helps to raise a cool seven million pounds to help save three of the world’s most important rainforests by the next decade.
It’s great to see one of the fashion world’s most iconic designers bringing a hard-hitting message to an industry commonly criticised for lacking awareness and compassion for the natural world and its creatures. Great work by high profile campaigners such as Westwood really do help to bring the message to a newer, often hard to reach audience that has the disposable income to support rainforest charities and the social networking savvy to share the message onwards with the wider public.
You can find out more about the campaign by searching for No Fun Being Extinct.
Business and charity – working together to save the planet
It’s great to see businesses engaging with the public in innovative and new ways, particularly where it involves educating younger people about the rainforest, global warming and the dangers of climate change.
Rainforest cafe is a great example of this and is London’s biggest family restaurant. It’s hidden in the West End and designed as a tropical hideaway that recreates the atmosphere, sounds and sights of our natural world rainforests. Stunning special effects include tropical rain showers, lightening storms, waterfalls and lifelike inhabitants that include gorillas, jaguars, crocodiles, butterflies and elephants. The best thing about the Rainforest cafe is that it’s wholly committed to teaching its guests about how to save the rainforest through education and support environmental causes.
The owners of the cafe know that serving good food is one of the oldest pleasures of mankind and that education can be fun, engaging and fascinating. They also know that the planet needs the young people to want to save the rainforest, which is still disappearing at the rate of knots and becoming seriously damaged by corporate deforestation, including cattle ranching, monoculture agriculture and soya plantations.
The Rainforest cafe also works with the World Land Trust to protect the world’s remaining rainforest and helps with fundraising and supporting the publicity effort of the charity.
It’s certainly a positive example of commerce and environmentalist action co-existing to better our planet and hopefully the trend will continue to grow, as businesses grow on the premise of being environmentally friendly and based on sound ‘green’ and eco-friendly credentials. Certainly, the younger generation seems keen to patronise those businesses that are committed to preserving and supporting the planet and rainforest – and with the next generation standing ready to inherit the planet that we created for them, it seems hardly surprising that they are demanding more from industry and commerce and its role within the world.
Rainforest wealth and wonder – a source of future cures?
If the Amazon were a country, it would be the world’s ninth greatest, spreading over one billion acres of land and taking in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and the Eastern Andes.
We’ve long known that it’s a crucial element of the planet’s environmental structure, acting as the planet’s lungs to continuously recycle carbon dioxide output, into useful oxygen. In fact, it produces over 20% of Earth’s oxygen.
Additionally, the Amazon is home to over 10 million animal, plant and insect species and its basin holds a fifth of Earth’s fresh water supply.
It provides us with a wealth of natural gifts, such fruits, vegetables and spices and yet scientists are particularly interested in the Amazon for the range of potential cures and scientific discoveries it may yield. Already, biochemists have found that the rainforest plants are rich in alkaloids – which protect plants from insects and disease and indicate medicinal benefit for animals and humans.
Plant-derived sources are already found in 121 of our prescription drugs and up to a quarter of Western pharmaceuticals are based on ingredients derived from the rainforest. The wealth yet to be found is sobering – scientists have only still managed to test around 2% of the Amazon’s plants.
Already, the American Cancer Institute has worked to identify around 3000 plans that provide active protection against cancer cells, of which 60% are found in the Amazon rainforest. A whole quarter of cancer-fighting drugs’ active ingredients are found from plants and sources found only in the rainforest – another sobering reason for protecting it at all costs. Vincristine is today one of the world’s most powerful drugs against cancer and it originates from the rainforest periwinkle plant.
Since that discovery, over one hundred scientific and pharmaceutical companies are engaged in research projects within the Amazon, to find cures and drugs for some of the most serious diseases, infections, cancers and viruses in the world today.
