About

Our team

> Ngoc Dinh has a background in linguistics. Her writing interests range from culture, art, languages to cuisine. 

> Anh Nguyen has a background in innovation management studies. She writes about innovative designs for the environmental shift (@Harvard Business Review France, @Stim and @illuminem).

This blog is not about

• an ecological apocalypse or collapsology. As much as we enjoy the Walking Dead series and the likes, we believe that humans are responsible – and capable – of finding out interesting, less energy-demanding alternatives & designs for a livable future for all, if we so choose.
  
• using biodegradable straw rather than plastic ones, changing all your lightbulbs to LED ones, riding your bike to work, etc. As much as we try to do this in our personal lives, we are convinced that these actions are simply not enough to alleviate the possible outcome of climate change & biodiversity loss. More systemic alternatives & systems must be deployed in order to tackle climate change & environmental degradation.
  
• advocating recycling and putting the right trash in the right trash bins. However important, recycling is an energy-demanding process (e.g water, heat, electricity, transportation, sorting out, etc.), lots of materials cannot be recycled infinitely (e.g papers, plastics). We advocate the reduction of waste in the first place, through reducing and reusing.
  
• pointing fingers at people who eat meat 7/7 twice a day, ride an SUV alone to the grocery, work for an investment bank, take domestic flights, watch Netflix 10 hours a day, etc. As much as we try to avoid these actions in our personal lives, we are in no position to judge individual choices, but to propose better alternatives.
  
• creating a perfect Utopia in which we live in wooden cottages in a forest, produce our own food to feed our stomachs and that of the neighbors, and dance around the fire every night. As much as we think this sobriety is one of the key elements to a livable future, we also believe that this is not the endgame for humanity. In this article, we wrote about why this type of Utopia won’t work.

This blog, on the other hand, is about:

• finding less energy-demanding, less wasteful alternatives & designs to lead our lives on an individual level. It is not because we, as consumers, are presented with a certain model of packaging, delivering, consuming, spending, etc. that we can stop re-questioning the absurdity of these designs.
  
• ditto, but on a community/government/industry level. It is the responsibility of these entities to create better designs of packaging, delivering, consuming, spending things; because collective, systemic, large-scale actions accounts for 60% of decarbonization efforts in order to reach the threshold of 2 tons of CO2 per person according to the Accord of Paris.