Interview with Greenpop Director Misha Teasdale – Part 1
Misha Teasdale is one of the Founders of the Greenpop Foundation, who are hosting the Eden Festival of Action on the 23 – 30 June and 01- 08 July 2018.
In 2010, Misha gathered like-minded individuals to plant 1000 trees in a month and hasn’t looked back since.
Here is more information on his organisation and the projects he has completed so far.
Could you tell me a little more about your organisation?
We are a tree planting environmental organisation and a large part of our mission is to reconnect people with the planet and themselves.
We want to get people active and interested in the state of the world today and we feel tree planting has a really beautiful role to play in this.
What projects have you worked on so far?
Over the past 7 years we’ve set up various projects around Southern Africa. One of my favourite projects is in Livingstone, Zambia – a very spectacular place. There’s the mighty Victoria Falls, which is really beautiful, but then there are a lot of environmental and social issues too.
It’s quite an intense charcoal production in terms of the energy mix – the traditional farming practice which maybe 50 years ago, was a viable approach because of how much the population was at. Chechemani isn’t as viable anymore – there’s just too much pressure on that very urban space. However it still remains a beautiful place and hopefully with innovation and behaviour change there is opportunity for a considerable shift to happen.
We have a small project in Tanzania where we have planted a good number of trees. I went there for my honeymoon with my beautiful wife and we fell in love with this one particular forest just outside of Mukuni – It’s an incredible semi tropical place.
We have a team that has just arrived back from Malawi, where we are working with small grower tea estates. With climate change pending, the shift in agriculture in places like Malawi and specifically with tea is quite a challenge for them to continue growing tea. Ultimately the band within which the altitude that tea needs to grow well in, is diminishing and tea unfortunately is the number one commodity in Malawi.
Tea is their number one export so majority of the population is relying on it. Greenpop has been involved in various kinds of work with a couple of the NGO’s there. We host workshops on behaviour changes and are looking into communication skills training, around developing the way in which they are able to communicate effectively, so that they can get the various behaviour change projects off the ground.
There is also landscape management and a lot of other stuff we’re trying to get off the ground, but ultimately how do you tell the story first in the most effective way. So we literally have a team on the ground there at the moment and it’s quite exciting for us.
Closer to home we have a few projects in the Eastern and Western Cape. Just last month we planted 8500 trees in the Platbos Forest, which is just outside of Gaansbaai. I think we have just gone over 50 000 trees since we first started planting there, which is also very exciting.
Platbos is the most Southern forest on the continent, there are trees there that are over a thousand years old, so really beautiful, magnificent trees. The forest eco-system is super unique, you have afromontane forest and coastal thicket that has merged together, creating a very special and unique eco-system.
We’ve been working with a local land owner, a forest stewardship site, which is located on a registered nature reserve. We’ve been clearing alien vegetation and ultimately expanding the size of the forest. It will never get back to its original form, but we’re 7 years in and it’s amazing to be able to walk through an area that 7 years ago was alien vegetation and now is filled with indigenous trees and they are slow growing trees so it’s really amazing to be a witness to this.