I will investigate Caring for Nature through the action of Environmental Observation.
I was so excited for this action because I was looking for an excuse for going to nature again. This time I knew exactly where I would go. I went to the National Botanical Garden of Iran. This garden is almost a jungle filled with different plant spices from different parts of Iran and some other countries such as USA, China, Japan, Europe, Azerbaijan and so on. I had visited this place two times before, but I haven’t seen the whole place and I never visited it in the autumn.
If you look at the map, you easily see that the place is a Charbagh Garden. [Charbagh or Chahar Bagh (Persian: چھار باغ chahār bāgh, Hindi: चारबाग़ chārbāgh, Urdu: چار باغ chār bāgh, meaning “four gardens”) is a Persian and Indo-Persian quadrilateral garden layout based on the four gardens of Paradise mentioned in the Qur’an. The quadrilateral garden is divided by walkways or flowing water into four smaller parts. They are found in countries throughout Western Asia and South Asia, including Iran and India.]
The place is magical and full of surprises. Even the animals are unique.
The interesting thing about my reason for visiting the place was to search for a way to care for nature, but all I could see in this place was caring. The place had lots of rules in order to protect the environment. For example, people were not allowed to have picnic stuff, no tea flask are allowed, no playing instruments are allowed, setting fire is forbidden and so on. The place had different fences, surveillance, signs, path and guards for watching the natural setting.
I found a couple of things in my visit to the Garden and I decided to bring them with me. I found acorn, Chinese mulberry, shepherdia and some other plants that I don’t know their names. So, I placed all of them in a piece of paper and put them in the terrace to take a picture from them. I came inside to pick something and when I went back to the terrace I scared to death by a cat standing on the piece of paper.
The cat’s footprint triggered some thoughts in my mind. It made me think about my carbon footprint. I did some thinking and looked around my home to see how can I reduce my carbon footprint. I tried to think of my everyday activities and see what I can change in order to reduce my carbon footprint. I suddenly saw this.
I work in field of fashion and I cut the fabric myself for my personal brand. This is the amount of fabrics that are wasted in a year during the process of cutting fabrics. I always try my best to reduce the amount of waste during the process of cutting, but I would end up with some waste anyway. The waste adds up in long term and become an obvious damage to the environment. Till a year ago, I gave all the waste to a charity which would upcycle them. They are not accepting the waste anymore and I cannot through them away because I feel guilty.
So I decided to try upcycling them in a way. I used whatever I had in home to create a textile by weaving with the small pieces. I used stitching as well to connect some small pieces together and then use them as some sort of thread for weaving.
After weaving the pieces, I was left with really small pieces. I thought about a way to used them as well. So, I used a rice bag, which was useless in our home, and created a pillow.
The whole process was really emotional for me, because working with the fabrics reminded me of the time that I cut them and the memories of that time of my life. I really liked this action because I saw I could do positive things with the thing I couldn’t see before. I would love to continue this process and explore other ways of upcycling the fabric waste.
