The Monocle Minute

Environmentalists have descended on Seattle this week for the inaugural Bloomberg Green Festival, which runs until Saturday. The Emerald City is a fitting host for the event. After all, Earth Day was conceived here more than 50 years ago and it was an early adopter of voluntary carbon-emission reductions, pledging to meet Kyoto Protocol targets years before other cities announced their own climate goals.

In 2022, Seattle’s Green New Deal won a C40 Cities Award. It was also recently named the US’s only “role-model city” in the UN Environment Programme’s international ecosystem-restoration cohort. Its thoughtfully rebuilt seawall includes a salmon habitat – a clever design that proves that you can support urban biodiversity while protecting residents from rising sea levels. Meanwhile, watersheds in the Cascade Range about 60km east of the city have supplied the greater Seattle area with clean drinking water for more than a century. In 2000, a habitat-protection scheme was implemented to safeguard 82 species that live in the surrounding forests and rivers.

These investments in infrastructure and natural-resource management go far beyond photo-ops of a mayor planting a tree (not that Seattleites aren’t committed to reforestation; a long-established volunteer programme planted 9,914 trees in 2023 alone). When a city makes clear its commitment to climate action, it encourages national governments to take environmental issues more seriously. Only the state can move the needle on carbon emissions at scale but local governments can help to set the pace with their own ambitious efforts. Here in Seattle, you can see juvenile salmon and starfish on a downtown waterfront, stroll through a forested municipal park where citizens have planted native vegetation or tour an environmental learning centre along a glacier-fed river – as many Bloomberg Green Festival delegates will be doing this week. All are powerful reminders that cities can play a significant role in protecting the natural world.

Gregory Scruggs is Monocle’s Seattle correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has partnered with the Korea Tourism Organisation (KTO) to launch a new national food-tourism initiative. The marketing strategy, named Taste Your Korea, highlights 33 of the country’s most hallowed regional dishes, from Busan’s dwaeji gukbap (pork-and-rice soup) and Wan Island’s gim (dried seaweed) to South Gyeongsang’s oysters.

It is part of the wider Imagine Your Korea campaign, which aims to attract visitors by celebrating distinctive aspects of the country’s culture. The plan seems to be working. In the first quarter of 2024, the country welcomed almost five million foreign visitors – an 87 per cent increase on the same period last year. While the government is hoping that the new campaign will boost regional economies, critics are concerned about overtourism, which has strained cities across neighbouring Japan this summer.

City dwellers will be all too familiar with the sight of bins overflowing and the grating of trucks struggling to keep up with the ceaseless flow. But Zug-based company Villiger might have found a simple solution: to take it all underground. Founded in 1991, the 400-strong family business has annual revenues of €40m, exporting its innovative systems worldwide. The company seeks to eliminate the need for unsightly refuse collection with its neat containers, stored below street level, which can hold almost anything from household rubbish to recyclables.

“The initial idea was to limit noise and smells,” says Michèle Villiger, the company’s HR and marketing manager. An added advantage is that residents using the subterranean system can dispose of their waste at any time of the week without worrying about specific bin-collection days or amassing piles of rubbish outside their homes. Towns and property developers tired of having to allocate large spaces to rubbish collection should take note.

To read more about Villiger and other inspiring examples on how cities worldwide are staying clean and tidy, pick up a copy of Monocle’sJuly/August issue, which is out now.

This week’s picture is taken from The British Isles, photographer Jamie Hawkesworth’s first solo exhibition at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery on London’s Maddox Street. The series took 13 years to complete and explores the UK’s rural landscapes, architecture and inhabitants, while celebrating the diversity of its people and places.

‘The British Isles’ runs until 10 August.
huxleyparlour.com

Lisa Jackson, vice-president of environment, policy and social initiatives at Apple, stops by Midori House to talk about her journey from public service to leading the company’s sustainability efforts. She discusses her background in government, including her tenure as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama, and how it has shaped her approach to corporate social responsibility. Plus: how Apple plans to deliver on its ambitious goal of full carbon neutrality across its supply chain by 2030.