THE GREEN DREAM

My guest today is Camille Charrière, influencer and sustainability editor for British Elle. A law school graduate who for a time worked for a hedge fund in London, Camille has become one of the leading voices in the eco-fashion movement. In our conversation, Camille shares how – while she has always been conscious about sustainability – a switch flicked in her mind during the Covid-19 pandemic, making her see that she would have to do her work differently if she wanted to make a difference in the world. So, she pivoted to sustainable fashion. We discuss what the fashion industry can do to become more sustainable and what we as consumers can do to contribute to a more eco-friendly world of fashion (hint: buy less!).

Neither of today’s guests is a stranger to Hollywood. On this special episode, we first talk sustainable fashion, dance and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with one of the Housewives, Sutton Stracke. Then, we travel to another movie Mecca, Cannes, to check in with Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek on this year’s film festival. Sutton Stracke is more than just a regular housewife. Sutton is the founder of The Sutton Concept, a boutique in West Hollywood, where she sells her own lines of eco-responsible fashion and homewares, as well as the products of local designers; she is also one of 200 women in the world who is a regular couture client.

This month has been one of the most sparkly in ages. There was the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey, and while, in these difficult economic times, guests were asked not to wear coronets and tiaras, there was still a lot of remarkable jewelry on display, most notably the King and Queen's crowns. And now we have the Cannes Film Festival, a two-week-long glittering Red Carpet parade on the Riviera, and, by far, the glamest cinema event of the year. Anything and everything goes at Cannes.To talk about all this shimmer and shine, and how it's sustainable–because, yes, it is–we have leading jewelry expert Carol Woolton.

The world's population is not going to stop flying. Quite the opposite: there were nearly 40 million flights in 2019, pre-pandemic, and the numbers are quickly reaching that record again, and will bypass it swiftly. Next year, that number is expected to be four percent higher, and by the mid-2030s–a mere ten years from now–experts predict that there will be 200,000 flights a day.The only way to reduce aviation's impact on climate is to create an environmentally cleaner way to fly. And that's what our guest today, Val Miftakhov, is doing with his company Zero Avia. He'll explain how.

Notre-Dame is a gem of gothic architecture, an incomparable beauty in the center of the city, and a site for pilgrimage and tourism. As the cathedral smoldered, the city of Paris pledged to rebuild it as it was. In September 2021, the city launched a pro-environment design competition for the site, and last summer, the jury selected a team led by our guest today, the award-winning Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets, who has specialized in taking hyper-urban, often desolate sites and turning them into eco-friendly oases.

Today, we welcome Mya-Rose Craig, a 20-year-old British-Bangladeshi who is the foremost birdwatcher of her generation. Three years ago, Mya-Rose became the youngest person to have seen half the world's bird species. Mya-Rose, who grew up in a village near Bristol, England, has been a passionate conservationist and climate activist since she was a tween, when she launched her blog, called Birdgirl. We talk about her activism and the beauty of birds and all biodiversity in her new memoir, also called Birdgirl, The Times of London described her book as "a cross between a travel diary, an ornithologist's guide, and a thriller."

About a year ago, we welcomed on the Green Dream two Ukrainian fashion designers, Ksenia Schnaider and Ivan Frolov, to tell us about their harrowing experiences as the Russian army invaded their homeland. When we spoke, Ksenia was a refugee in Germany, with her husband and their young daughter, figuring out what to do next, and Ivan was at home in Kyiv, which was under heavy assault from the Russians. I thought, with the recent anniversary of the invasion, it would be a good time to check in with them and see how they are managing. Turns out they are as well as well can be, given the circumstances. This may be the most hopeful of all our Green Dream episodes.

It's Oscars Week next week, and to celebrate cinema's top awards ceremony, we've decided to have a glamorous movie episode here on The Green Dream. Our first guest is Shaunak Sen, the award-winning director of All That Breathes, a poetic documentary that has already won best documentary awards at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals – a first in cinema. And it has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Also on The Green Dream today is Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek, who will tell us about other touching, and beautiful, environment-themed films in theaters or streaming right now.

My guest today is Amber Valletta, supermodel, actress, and climate activist. Amber works with several NGOs, serves as British Vogue’s Contributing Sustainability Editor, and does eco-consulting for brands such as Karl Lagerfeld. This spring, the third Karl Lagerfeld Amber Valletta collection will drop in stores around the world, and includes stylish, environmentally conscious ready-to-wear, such as biker jackets, little black dresses, and suits, as well as accessories. And she takes her activism seriously, participating in Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Friday protests in Washington and Los Angeles, and even getting arrested for the cause.

My guest on The Green Dream today is the legendary former Vogue editor André Leon Talley, and no, he is not speaking to us from the grave, though if anyone could, and would, it would be André! André and I met for our interview at the Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris, where he was overseeing the installation of "Little Black Dress”. This week, a year after his death at 73 from Covid-19, a large swath of his estate is up for auction at Christie's in New York, to benefit two of his favorite places of worship, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and the Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, where he grew up.

Dale Vince is an eco-pioneer. Back in the mid-1990s, he launched Ecotricity, the world’s first green energy company, based in the United Kingdom. In 2011, Dale created the Electric Highway, Europe’s first EV charging network, which runs from Scotland to Wales. More recently, he founded Devil’s Kitchen, an organization that provides vegan school dinners. Dale is also the chairman and owner of Forest Green Rovers, a professional soccer team based in England, that has been recognized by FIFA and the United Nations as the “world’s greenest football club.”

Today’s guest, Dan Barber, is known as the “philosopher chef.” He's the author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food and leads Blue Hill at Stone Barns, his family-run restaurant at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a multipurpose non-profit organic farm and education center set on a 1920’s Rockefeller estate outside of Tarrytown, New York. Another Barber project is Row 7 Seeds, a vegetable seed company that breeds new varieties for flavor.

My guest today is Merlin Sheldrake, a British biologist and author of an award-winning science-driven memoir called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds and Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures, which The New York Times describes as an “ebullient and ambitious exploration" of fungi, and the Wall Street Journal calls “a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of Robert Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition.”

My guest today on The Green Dream is Natalie Chanin, founder of Alabama Chanin, a slow fashion brand in Florence, Alabama. This year, Alabama Chanin is celebrating its 21st year in business with a new book called Embroidery: Threads and Stories from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making, about sustainability, community, artisans and makers, published by Abrams.