MEET NIKA & CO
Hello and Welcome! I am Nika (short from Veronika) and I am a mother of three little boys. I live with my kids, husband, our dog Fleur and many squirrels, birds, badgers, voles and hedgehogs in a French village near Geneva. Before having children, I worked as a humanitarian practitioner in various conflict zones. Few years ago I finished a PhD in Migration Studies and work now to support those affected by forced displacement. In addition to enjoying being with my family and blogging on sustainable living, I love gardening, painting, writing and travelling.
THE STORY BEHIND
In 2018, I was watering my garden in mid-October, under heat that would usually characterise a beautiful summer day. While many in the news reported being happy to have summer weather in the autumn and were enjoying the beach, I was witnessing the damage this weather did to my garden. It was heartbreaking. For a moment, I thought that all that I wanted was to escape. To go back to living in the city in order to avoid the pain of seeing all this beauty slowly dying.
Another moment that I recall and that marked me profoundly was sitting in the plane with my husband. We were flying to our romantic getaway weekend to Capri. It was the first time we had traveled without the kids since our son Rick was born, and I felt so guilty. It was not because I had left my kids with my parents, but I was aware that due to all the air travel involved, this special time with my husband came with a high price for our planet. And I knew that this guilt was justified.
Climate change had become personal for me. I could no longer think of it as something rather abstract happening somewhere else. Since then, I have known that I needed to make a change in my life and that I cannot continue in my old ways. I had already made some eco-friendly adjustments to my family’s life. For example, we recycle paper, glass and PET bottles, we have vegetarian days, and we have switched to using energy-efficient light bulbs. I also try whenever possible to re-use gift wrap, to wash only a full load of laundry, and to take showers instead of bathing. Yet I knew that these efforts were not enough and that I could do much more. I felt that in addition to assisting people affected by war and displacement, it was time for me to dedicate more of my energy to our natural environment. Yet because I found it hard to sacrifice my own comfort, it still took me more than a year to truly commit to changing my daily life.
WHY A BLOG?
In this blog, I will share with you my journey of trying greener living. I believe that more powerful change is possible when we work together with others—we can keep each other motivated, committed and inspired!
While reading other blogs, I have found numerous helpful tips and success stories, but I wanted to hear more about what it’s like to implement those tips—including the struggles that ‘going green’ can bring to our lives and the emotions it creates. How do we manage the trade-off between ‘going green’ and time, or ‘going green’ and money? What about the tips one failed to implement, and why? How do we resolve situations when family members or friends react badly to our green efforts? These are just some of the questions I wanted to explore.
I believe that comfort is rather addictive, and established habits are hard to change. Yet change is badly needed. For instance, when I googled in the beginning of my green journey “struggling to lose weight,” 23 pages and about 226 results emerged. Yet “struggling to go green” gave me 3 pages and about 23 references—despite that losing weight concerns only some of us, while the climate change affects everyone on the earth. I hope greener living will be a much more universal concern than it currently is.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and artwork presented in the blog are made by myself or my family members.