The Eco-Preneuers

A new wave of women entrepreneurs have built businesses that prioritize the planet alongside profits, while also serving their communities.

• Lindsey Galloway •

While Earth Day has been celebrated every April 22 since 1970, this year has put the planet and the challenges it faces into sharp relief. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a report that the world is nowhere close to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit warming to 1.5 Celius by 2030, warning countries around the world that they must do more to stem the tide.

But some women aren’t waiting. Instead, they’re fighting the climate crisis on their own terms by building businesses built on earth-friendly practices. We spoke to some of these sustainability stars across different fields to find out what motivates them, how they give back, and what the future of sustainability looks like across the globe.

The Ethical Traveler Harika Parmar, Founder, VOGO Tours

As a vegetarian, Harika Parmar remembers spending countless hours trying to find tours that didn’t involve meat, animal exploitation and chain hotels. When she did, she found herself disappointed in the options presented to her.

“I had my fair share of bad food experiences on travels involving sacrifice, struggle and compromise in the form of plain salads, simple side dishes, accidental meat broths, or fish dishes misunderstood as vegetarian choices,” she says. “I’m sure the majority of vegans and vegetarians can relate.”

She also found herself horrified by the animal exploitation of many tour operators, which included everything from camel and elephant rides to tanked sea life visits to fish markets and street side meat vendors. “The list of ethical ignorance has no end when it comes to the majority of tour operators,” she says.

That’s when she knew she wanted to start VOGO tours, a UK-based company dedicated to ethical tours and focused on vegan and vegetarian travellers. While she knows vegetarians used to spend hours searching for which restaurant to eat, she works instead on curating unique food experiences, like plant-based bush BBQs in West India and custom vegetarian cooking experiences on a farm.

She also ensures that each hotel they stay at meets at least one of 10 of their proprietary ethical requirements, including criteria like being a local employer, having a recycling or composting program, or having energy efficient installations. The tours also incorporate local artisans, philanthropic initiatives, and ecological education. “We are attuned to local culture and are advocates of authentic immersive encounters,” says Parmar.

One of her favorite trips she remembers was in Marari Beach in South India, where she stayed in a small family-owned eco-lodge, all constructed with local materials and outfitted with rainwater harvesting. She loved that it was miles away from the mainstream budget chain resorts where tourists flock. “Especially in a postCovid world, tourism dollars are needed more than ever to sustain indigenous communities,” says Parmar.

A Solar-Powered Pursuit

company called SolarArise with a vision to bring solar energy prices on par or lower than conventional power.

While others at the time considered solar to be a “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) rather than a money-maker, she was convinced she could do both. “I wanted to prove solar could make good returns for investors on their investment,” she says. “So I aimed to build a team from the ground up, gain capability and experience, to be able to continually build larger scale plants, – not just in India but all over the world.”

And she succeeded. SolarArise has since built seven solar plants which power more than 250,000 homes, reducing 600,000 tons of CO 2 emissions per year. “These plants have now been sold to an infrastructure trust listed on the London Stock Exchange and have made multiples for our investors,” she says.

Tanya

Singhal, Founder, SolarArise & A Climate Tech Venture

In 2009, Tanya Singhal had a stable, consistent consulting job with the Boston Consulting Group. But her world turned upside down when she found herself investigating the solar potential of India.

“I attended a presentation that showed that just filling a small box covering 7.5% of the desert on the map of India with solar panels was sufficient to power all of India,” she recalls. “The solar sector was waiting and all it needed was professionals to jump in and realize its potential.”

Awestruck at the opportunity solar had to transform the climate crisis, she followed her passion and in 2010 took the plunge to join a solarengineering firm to better under-stand how solar could work in India. In 2014, she took the leap toward entrepreneurship, starting a

Not only that, but her actions helped pave the way for continuing India’s energy transformation. “Today solar is cheaper than fossil fuels, and it’s the talk-ofthe-town!” says Singhal. “We were able to reach sub coal prices in 2015, four years ahead of target. Solar today accounts for 15 percent of the Indian power capacity and is now a key sector for India’s energy independence path.”

Today she’s focused on continuing her passion toward carbon neutrality, focusing on technology solutions and AI to help empower individuals to be more climate conscious. “There is a lot we must all do, each of us, to move to a low-carbon world,” she says.

Beauty Made Simple & Sustainable Archana Johnsen, Founder/ Formulator Forshelli

Archana Johnsen always struggled to find skincare products that suited her complicated skin type, which had oily, textured skin on the top half and sides of her face, and dry, sensitive skin on the lower half of her face. She also found that products contained too many or low quality ingredients. So she used her experience as a natural skincare formulator to create a skincare that would aid her sensitive skin, with a philosophy of simplicity and sustainability, rooted in the concept of Ayurveda.

“Ayurvedic skin treatments are minimal by design,” says Johnsen. “Most true Ayurvedic formulations only contain a few ingredients, yet work wonderfully to soothe and calm the skin. There is great emphasis on the value of cold-pressed, organic, and natural seed oils for nourishing the skin.”

Instead of treating symptoms, the goal of Ayurveda is to restore health to the skin so it can repair any issues that might be present. She applied all these principles to the creation of her beauty brand Forshelli, named after the phonetic pronunciation of the Norwegian word Forskjellig which literally translates to “different.”

“Å gjøre en Forskjell is my guideline. It means ‘to make a difference,’” says Johnsen. “My goal is to raise more awareness regarding skin health as I truly believe that healthy and resilient skin fixes most of its problems on its own.”

She carefully chooses her ingredients based on their production methods and impact on the environment, and also uses cold-process methods, which ensure energy efficiency and sustainability. She also uses a “just-in-time” production system, which avoids wasting unused product. “It ensures only the freshest and more recent batches are shipped out,” she says. The packaging also uses recycled materials and biodegradable tape—and she’s moving to make all her packaging completely biodegradable.

“Sustainability to me means balancing my needs with those of my environment,” she says. “It means applying thought to the choices I make on a daily basis that involve using or consuming products.”

3 Steps to Living More Sustainably

Though the climate crisis can feel overwhelming at times, all of us have the power to make small changes that can collectively lead to a big impact. Here are a few ways to get started.

Measure Your Carbon Footprint. “Knowing the problem is half the solution,” says Tanya Singhal, founder of SolarArise and A Climate Tech Venture. “See what your big contributors are and then work to reduce them.” Our homes can be some of the biggest contributors, so switching to energy efficient products, reducing and reusing products wherever possible, and buying local can all go a long way to cutting down your output.

Make Sustainability a Lifestyle. While much focus is put around the planet on Earth Day, we can’t make the mistake of something we think about as a one off. “Sustainability is a lifestyle that needs to be adopted with patience as a part of our daily lives,” says Singhal.

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Consider Office Sharing. While it may seem counterintuitive, working from home actually leads to higher emissions than working from an office, says Singhal. If you can work from an office in a shared space, the energy use is split across colleagues. “So take an energy efficient transport mode, like an electric car, or walk or bike to work,” she suggests.

It’s one thing to avoid animal products in your diet, but eating foods that are also nutritious and delicious can be a challenge. Vasudha Viswanath, founder of We Ate Well helps us rethink our vegetarian ways.

So many vegetarians face a quandary. In an effort to steer clear of animal products, eating a balanced diet that tastes good to the palette can feel like an uphill battle. Vasudha Viswanath, the founder of We Ate Well, has got you covered. From her own experience as a vegetarian and the need to adjust her diet after an annual medical checkup reflected high blood sugar, she combined her passion for food and healthy eating to write a healthy cookbook called The Vegetarian Reset , which features cuisines from all over the world with a healthy Indian vegetarian twist.

Viswanath, who was rising professionally as a hedge fund executive, was shocked to see the results of her annual medical checkup, which showed an elevated blood sugar level. Following a vegetarian diet all her life, she always felt that she was eating healthy but the overload of carbs in her diet had resulted in the distressing finding. “I thought I was eating healthy,” Viswanath says. “I thought I was cooking at home and eating home food but that led to a note from the doctor saying that my blood sugar levels were elevated. This was a year after I had my baby, so I couldn’t really blame it on that.”

Concern for her overall health and that of her husband led her to experiment with low-carb and healthy vegetarian recipes that eventually resulted in The Vegetarian Reset. “The doctor’s note really got me thinking and researching into what healthy food really means. I changed the way I cook,” she recalls. “And I developed a lot of recipes just for myself and my husband at home.”

Foodie Culture

Born into a family of foodies in Bangalore, Viswanath as a threeyear-old would be asking her parents about the contents of her lunchbox for the next day. The enthusiasm continued and developed into a passion for cooking and experimenting. “I would bake a lot and our oven was a little clunky, and it wouldn’t get hot enough for a cake. So I figured out that I could fill up a pressure cooker with sand and bake cakes in that. I was always fond of experimenting in the kitchen,’ she recalls.

The tinkering with recipes and the experiments continued when she moved to the U.S. for her undergrad in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University. She was fortunate to find a big Indian community and an Indian grocery store for the basic supplies. “I got to experience several cuisines, but it was always the Indianized take on that cuisine, with a generous dash of masala added and that’s a big influence in the way I cook,” she says.

Viswanath pursued a career in finance and spent a decade on Wall Street but didn’t have the same passion that she had for the culinary art. She left her job to create We Ate Well—a community for foodies with a mission to help people enjoy eating mindfully and sustainably on a vegetarian diet.

Reassessing her life and what she really wanted to do during the pandemic, Viswanath took an exit package and took the next step in her life. She decided to write a book.

Being vegetarian does not always mean you are eating healthy. It does not put you in the clear from ailments. The note from the doctor after her regular medical exam came as a shocker to Viswanath, who thought her vegetarian diet cooked at home had the perfect nutrition balance. “My doctor’s note said to minimize rice, pasta, and sweets. Most people know they should avoid eating sweets—that’s a no brainer. But rice and pasta? What am I supposed to eat instead? This is what I ate every day. So I started to research and ended up reading a lot of books and I finally understood the science that what we eat impacts our blood sugar,”Viswanath says. “So if you keep eating a lot of foods that are high in carbs, what happens is your insulin keeps spiking. Over time, your body becomes resistant to that insulin, which is when it gets to a critical pace.”

Viswanath shifted her focus to what and how she should be eating. A shift from quantity to quality, but at the same time not missing out on Indian dishes like her favorite—dal. Most vegetarians, like Viswanath, do not really eat enough vegetables. Their plates are predominantly filled with rice, maize and wheat. She talks about the changes she made in her diet. “When I shifted my focus to include fiber and protein, the healthy fat really filled me up and kept me satisfied. Which meant that I automatically needed fewer grains or carbs,” she explains. She suggests not cutting out all carbs in an extreme way. Instead, she recommends focusing on what you add rather than what you subtract from the plate.

Uplift Your Diet

The prospect of an uninspiring diet filled with quinoa, avocado, and greens was understandably very uninspiring. Viswanath set about putting her passion for cooking and experimentation to work and to satisfy her craving for flavor. “I said I’m gonna create my own recipes. In vegetarian food, you obviously have veggies mixed in, but the center of the plate is always the carbs. So I would just replace them. If I made fried rice with white rice, I would replace that with cauliflower rice,” she talks about her recipes.

The lifelong vegetarian and a forever foodie, Viswanath is all set to release her book, The Vegetarian Reset, this month. The book includes 75 recipes that she has carefully put together from around the world and re-imagined them to make vegetarian food healthy and fun. If you are a vegetarian and hard pressed for options, the book might help introduce a wider spread in your kitchen.

Viswanath gives a sneak peek into her debut book. “This book was written for foodies that want to eat healthy. When I was trying to find recipes to eat healthy, the vegetarian books were either telling you how to make excellent focaccia, or noodles, or they’re telling you how to make boring salads and smoothies. It was hard to find a book that was really healthy and had a focus on nutrition and flavor. That’s the balance that I tried to straddle in this book. What I have tried to do is make eating healthy, really compelling.”

At the next annual medical checkup, Viswanath, having followed a healthy vegetarian diet based on her own recipes, was able to bring her sugar levels back to normal. She was able to eat her favorite foods that are part of her cultural heritage. She said, “I could taste flavors from different cuisines and it really transformed the way I looked at what was possible and really unleashed my creativity in the kitchen.”

“It has ingredients in both metric as well as U.S. measurements. Nutritional information is provided for each recipe. It’s a gorgeous coffee table book. It’s a book that you want to pick up and start cooking because the pictures look so amazing. The recipes are inspired by traditional cuisines from all around the world. So if you love spice, if you love flavor and you like learning how different cuisines are made and finding the commonalities as well as what makes each cuisine different and special. You can take a little trip around the world and still eat healthy and that is really the core essence behind this book.”