What if our clothes can heal the Planet?

Listen to the story behind SukkhaCitta, a farm-to-closet social enterprise changing lives in rural Indonesia. And how it serves as a blueprint for a circular village economy.

This episode was recorded on the same day Patagonia announced its founder is giving the company away to fund climate action initiatives. An omen to continue the push the narrative of how businesses can be a force for good.

What does it really take to build a farm-to-closet supply chain? Rediscovering Indigenous regenerative farming & challenging the status quo.

From the real hardwork behind changing how clothes are grown. To the humbling process of re-learning a way of life that is grounded in giving more than we take. To how our grandmas were right.

How can the textiles industry harness the power of the circular economy to make global change?

Environment Editor for The Times, Adam Vaughan is joined by social entrepreneur and Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate Denica Riadini-Flesch, live at the Royal Geographical Society, to hear how she is rekindling our connection to the land and creating societal and environmental change, one stitch at a time.

This podcast was brought to you by The Times in partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative.

A guest essay on Fashion Revolution on the relationship between what we wear and the climate crisis.

I wrote about the indigenous agricultural wisdom of Tumpang Sari and how we can create a win-win solution that help rural communities adapt to a warming climate.

Should our goal be net zero - to do less harm - or can we find ways to create positive impact? Some conversations leave a mark, and this is one of them.

I sit down with my fellow nerds with big dreams for Indonesia: Gita Wirjawan, our former trade minister turned educator and the host of the Endgame Postcast, Tanah Sullivan, the Chief of Sustainability of GoTo Group, and Gita Syahrani, the pollinator driving systemic change in rural areas Lingkar Temu Kabupaten Lestari.

We cannot shop our way out of the climate crisis. In a world that churns out 100bn garments every year, I write about the systematic issues of overproduction and overconsumption that underlie our modern economy.

And how choosing fewer, better is perhaps the most revolutionary thing there is.

While new technologies and business models are very much needed, one of the key problems of fast fashion is rarely addressed: the invisibility of the hands that make our clothes, the untold story of their suffering. The disconnect is real, with or without us realizing.

But it doesn't have to be this way. And together with Yo-Yo Ma, we wanted to show that an alternative path is possible. One that requires us to look back, to indigenous cultures and how they have lived in harmony with Nature for generations.

Handmade is not just about beautiful things. In it, are humanity’s stories and our perrennial search for meaning. Read this Op-ed, first published by Darling Magazine as an invitation to inspire a more mindful fashion habit.

We’re excited to feature founder, Denica Flesch, and her organization SukkhaCitta, and how she is holding onto hope in the midst of human disaster.

While any social enterprise has its own inherent challenges, the coronavirus pandemic has heightened economic risk on the informal handworker economy worldwide. Denica has witnessed those implications firsthand in Indonesia, and shares SukkhaCitta’s experience of COVID-19 with us here.