Today’s speaker was Vanita Gangwal. In addition to being a partner at KPMG, she is a trustee of the Nature Conservancy and a member of the Millburn Environmental Commission. Vanita grew up in Jaipur, India and moved to the US at age eighteen. During High School, she was an active member and President of her School’s Rotary Interact Club. Her topic was sustainability and some thoughts about taking a reasonable approach to protecting the environment.
She began her presentation by noting the incredible abundance we have in the US and how this abundance can also lead to unintended degradation of the environment. Examples cited were our ever-increasing use of disposable things like all types of plastics, from bags to cutlery to packaging. While convenient, it is now common to find plastic in the bodies of many ocean organisms. This concept can be expanded to many other types of what she described as “affluent waste.” Another environmentally harmful issue denoted was the homogeneity of suburban landscaping – vast lawns with almost no native vegetation. She cited one specific case, the near extinction of the monarch butterfly which can only lay its eggs in the common milkweed plant. As the name implies, milkweed is a weed, spreading rapidly, and it is poisonous to humans, pets, and cattle. Suburbanites and farmers eschew it. Hence, the monarch is going extinct.
She concluded by making the case for simply increasing awareness of these issues. We can’t, and won’t stop using plastic, but we can certainly use less of it. We want nice looking homes, but there is an option to perhaps not have 100% of our green spaces comprised of manicured grass – some space can be reserved for natural flora. Increasing awareness and increasing willingness to address environmental degradation is the only solution. It will require both bottoms up (the citizenry) and top down (the political leadership) to solve these problems. We thank Vanita for sharing her insights with us and for her efforts towards addressing our many environmental problems.