Page 117 - Vogue - India (January 2020)

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KRITHI KARANTH, 40
CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST
AND EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR OF CENTRE FOR
WILDLIFE STUDIES (CWS),
BENGALURU, INDIA

By next month, Wild Shaale (the
conservation education programme
launched by the CWS in Bengaluru
in August 2019) will reach almost
40,000 students and 400 schools on
the fringes of conservation parks in
Maharashtra and Karnataka. Krithi SAHAR MANSOOR, 28
Karanth informs, “It’s a four-part ZERO-WASTE ADVOCATE,
programme where we spend a month FOUNDER OF BARE NECESSITIES,
in every school, with three main BENGALURU, INDIA
goals: to create interest in wildlife, to
build empathy in children for nature Sahar Mansoor is the kind of zero-waster
and wild places, and to give them whose annual non-recyclable waste can
safety and coping mechanisms in be stuffed into a single mason jar. But
case there is a conflict situation.” that’s not all. She distilled her millennial
Over the past two decades in the eco-anxiety with Indian traditions and
field, this Vogue Women Of The created Bare Necessities in 2016—a zero-
Year 2017 winner witnessed a shift waste personal care brand while building
from theory to practice. “I started awareness on waste-free living. Having
my career as a scientist, so the initial lost her father early and been raised by her
emphasis was about doing good mum, she overcame learning disabilities
research, collecting lots of data and and naysayers, studying environmental
publishing papers on topics around law, policy and environmental economics
man and animal conflict,” she says. at Cambridge. Inspired by zero-wasters
“It was during the next decade that Bea Johnson and Amy Korst, she scoured
I became interested in the impact their blogs before blending local traditions
of the research and how we could to cleave together her own philosophy.
use that to change ground reality. Her focus is to now take Bare Necessities
Whether human-wildlife conflict or beyond India’s boundaries while reaching
wildlife tourism, we try to see how new audiences back home. She believes
we can involve people and solve that we need “a circular economy where
issues, rather than document the resources are valued, rather than having
problems and stop at that. Now, products end up in our landfills, rivers and
research projects either have a policy oceans. We need to do this for all life, and
outcome, or intervene directly.” – SS we must do it together.” – NM >

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