Passengers push their bus up a slippery steep slope near Nalae in Luang Prabang Province Laos. The Namtha (River Tha) can be seen far below. Having made it through the greasy mud into the District Center, Nalae, Sack finds these young Khmu boys eager and proud to show a Nature Bag made by their family. That's Sack in Nalae talking with a local woman about bag crafting villages in nearby mountains. She knew where they were and how to contact them to help meet future global demand for Earth’s Greenest Bag™. Bokeo Province villager uses 2 Nature Bags. The heavy load of corn looks like a pain in the neck, but she's...
The traditional Khmu bag, known today as Nature Bag, Earth’s Greenest Bag™ is endangered. The craft of making it rapidly is disappearing from large areas in Laos’ north. A traditional bag can take days to make. In August 2012 Volunteer Sack spent 6 weeks tracking down villages in Bokeo and Luang Namtha provinces where the Khmu still can make the bag. If girls cannot learn the craft from their mother, it is unlikely they ever learn. Soon the craft could die. Saving this ancient craft that dates back perhaps 5,000 years has become a primary goal of the Nature Bag Khmu/Lao Poverty Reduction Project. It is as important as sharing Earth’s Greenest Bag™ with our global community....
While making visits to national parks or forest preserves, you'll often be told to leave nothing but footprints. This is always a good policy in these types of situations. However, we often forget, or simply do not know that wherever we go, we actually leave two sets of footprints. Your physical footprint is, for the most part, a harmless indentation left behind wherever you step. Your other footprint is what is known as your carbon footprint, essentially the level of greenhouse gases your lifestyle and activity emit into the environment. We'd like to help you understand not only what your carbon footprint is, but also how to measure it and identify some simple ways to reduce it and to save...
The early morning Northern Laos sky was a brilliant blue as an European, an American and 10 Lao gathered on a point of land at the base of the massive Kuang Si waterfall for a workshop on using nearby forest products to add color to Earth’s Greenest Bag™. After exchanging greetings and sharing fresh organic coffee grown 500 km south in the landlocked Southeast Asian nation, the group moved into the surrounding jungle to find the bark of a special tree that would be the source of the color for the first natural dye. The temperature was comfortable thanks to a thunderstorm an hour earlier. The smell was sweet from a multitude of Lao jungle flowers. As the roar of...
The Netherlands Senior Expert Ineke Poort-Van Eljk, Bag Crafter Pa Sa, Consultant/Volunteer Vandara, Bag Crafter Som confer before a workshop session. For Nature Bag crafters Pa Sa and Som, the 5 day trip to learn about using natural colors in the stain-resistant JungleVine® fiber of their bags was a major life experience. Although the journey from their rural villages to near UNESCO World Heritage Luang Prabang took only a day, neither had ever been so far away from home or away from home for so long. Pa Sa had traveled 80 km (64 mile) to a Khmu village near her provincial capital of Oudomxai 6 years ago to be a bag crafting trainer for a United Nations Industrial...
