Eden’s Mission

Driven by the vision of a #pristineplanet, Eden’s initial mission is to have 1,000 UK market towns be #pristineparishes by Christmas 2030.

We are building on the work of David Attenborough and others who are raising awareness and leading people to think, “I get it, but what can I do?” It’s a question that Eden, supported by CPRE Gloucestershire, the countryside charity, Cotswold District Council and the Gloucestershire Constabulary, is equipped to answer.

Our approach, in contrast to the many abortive attempts to change the litter dropping culture, is to change the culture of litter picking. Whereas litterers operate secretly, volunteers raise their hands - and have proven ready to adopt a new way of thinking about litter. To underpin the new thinking, we have a new lexicon: we talk not of litter picking (where the default is littered) to parish keeping (where the default is pristine) and we therefore refer to our volunteers as ‘pikkers’ who go ‘pikking’, a term inspired by ‘Pikker’, the protector of the holy river in Estonian mythology.

Our strategy is to mobilise the willing by inviting them to soirées and offering them free information, training, kit and a tried-and-tested method, in the form of Eden’s no-nonsense no-effort #pristineparish program.

The #pristineparish program involves pikking your entire parish road network twice a week. Happily, in a parish there are enough people who have a visceral connection to their parish, whether or not they know exactly where the boundaries are, to want to own it and care for it.

Eden is an Impact Venture

The problem we are addressing is so huge we need to act fast to spread the #pristineparish program worldwide. The entities that excel at growth are ones that attract private equity and they do so because they promise a good return on investment.

Therefore our business model is to be a for-profit impact venture.

And our primary challenge is to demonstrate that parish-keeping can be a highly profitable endeavour.

If we succeed, parish-keeping will then be a self-sustaining activity, embedded within and supported by the economy.

Why a #pristineparish program?

Annual mass litter picking events were dreamt up in bygone less littery days. A growing more mobile population coupled with more packaging, much of it now plastic, has meant that traditional litter picking is no longer fit for purpose - litter builds up daily, causing harm to animals, be they domestic, wild or human.

So our second challenge is to persuade people that the litter picking rulebook is obsolete and to have them move from occasionally clearing up their parish to relentlessly keeping their parish litter-free or pristine. This is done by conveying five key points:

1. They, and all other animals, will enjoy a pristine parish all year round

2. Any litter they pick up will not find its way into the food chain, nor onto children’s dinner plates

3. A #pristineparish program takes more time but a lot less effort than an annual litter pick

4. It can be done at a brisk pace, and so doubles as exercise

5. It really cheers people up, both participants and passers-by!

A shift in mindset is required

The style of the recruitment soirées heralds a radical new approach and evokes a different mindset, one where the problem of litter is relegated to history and the norm is pristine countryside. As a harbinger of living in a nice environment, aperitifs and exquisite canapés are provided and served in a nice setting.

Why call the get-together a “soirée”? It’s because the main target democratic, whether pikker or patron, is an ABC1 Baby Boomer - the sort of person who would enjoy professionally made aperitifs and canapés served in a nice environment. It also serves to confound people’s expectations - who would associate litter with a soirée? Could this emphasis on a nice environment truly be a game changer?

We are up against the clock

We ask our soirée guests to imagine themselves in the world they ideally want, where all legacy litter has been cleared and any rubbish on the ground has only been there for a day or two.

It’s a world in which the pristine parish will not be the exception; rather it will be the wrapper on the pavement that is the exception - and a passer-by will feel an urge to bin it.

We are focused not on ending littering (in the main, we can’t identify litterers) but on ending litter (which we can identify). The first is impossible to do in the timeframe Mother Nature has given us. The second is doable.

Parishkeeping is akin to housekeeping

Once a #pristineparish program is established, there will be little litter. If litter is picked up within moments of it being dropped, it becomes a non-issue, like a vegetable peeling dropped and picked up from the kitchen floor. So litter per se will no longer be newsworthy. As #pristineparish regulars, we don’t show off the litter we pick up, like we don’t photograph the vegetable peeling after we’ve picked it up. We certainly don’t stand proudly beside piles of bin bags - because there won’t be any - let alone measure success by the height of the pile.

We downgrade parish cleaning from a special event to a weekly errand for a few people.

We make parishkeeping part of the daily fabric, no different to house keeping - just the other side of the front gate. In fact, we can build it into our outdoor exercise regime - plogging (picking while jogging or hiking) is catching on worldwide.

Of course, in parishes without a #pristineparish program, where there is no or minimal litter picking, then huge quantities of litter will be found and shocking imagery is useful for kickstarting a twice-weekly regime. The mass communal litter pick, with its attendant razzmatazz, will definitely be encouraged and supported, but only as the opening salvo of a newly introduced twice-weekly pikking regime.

Why twice a week?

A twice-weekly regime sits in the Goldilocks region between an organisational burden on the one hand and litteriness on the other.

Fewer than two piks of the entire parish per week means litter stays on the ground long enough for it to appear as if it's the status quo. Just one piece of litter left for up to a week is enough to suggest dysfunction and engender disquiet. By contrast, litter cleared within 3.5 days suggests that litter is being handled and that civic pride is the reason.

More than two piks a week could mean volunteers inadvertently doubling up on the same day on the same route. The reason is that a pik can take place on any one of three days - flexibility is built into the program to allow for inclement weather and last-minute exigencies. A pik scheduled for, say, Tuesday, can actually be done on the Monday or the Wednesday and still count as having been done on the Tuesday.

Were there three piks per week with 3-day flexibility, then we'd need nine days in the week to avoid overlap! Of course, volunteers could correspond to avoid overlap, but that takes time and defeats the purpose of a no-fuss schedule that manages itself with zero need for cross-checking.

A parish’s status is published online

We are working with Steve Green of Clean Ocean Sailing

One thing that catches the public’s imagination, is that we are supporting Steve Green, of Clean Ocean Sailing, in his mission to keep the beaches of Cornwall free of litter - see video below. It’s also a neat way to connect the state of a beach with the state of the parishes upriver, and a reminder that we live in a small interdependent world. Rubbish on the beaches, where children play, is more jarring and has a more visceral effect on the human psyche than rubbish by the roadside, which goes mostly unremarked. A pristine beach has the power to inspire more than a pristine verge and that inspiration is then the motivation to clean up the verges that are a source of rubbish on our beaches.

The support for Steve makes the task of pikking our roads personal, purposeful and urgent. And perhaps the most impactful contribution we could make to Steve is to get every Cornish parish to adopt the #pristineparish program. That’s a worthy early objective, a compelling milestone on our path to a #pristineplanet, and something a patron would gain massive kudos by funding.

Eden HQ welcomes Prime Movers

We invite locals to soirées

Soirées are set up, provisioned and funded by Eden.

Keeping a parish pristine is a challenging and fun way to meet like-minded folk. The soirée is where everyone gets to meet each other.

Soirée Purpose

The reason for the soirée is to enrol both pikkers and patrons and set up #pristineparish programs, with pikkers (in the main) looking after their own parishes, and patrons selecting (even bidding for) parishes where they want brand exposure.

Soirée organisation

Wherever a Prime Mover is located, we organise a soirée for parishes within an area dictated by the coverage of whatever local media is available. The soirée will either be in the PM’s house or at another venue in the area with a room large enough to accommodate 20 to 30 people. Either way, it will be hosted by Eden and sponsored by a company active in the local market, whose branding would be placed on all our local media advertising.

Soirée Presentation

Guests get to see Rosie & Steve clearing the shoreline of plastic. They discover how a #pristineparish stops adding to the plastic in the sea. And they are invited to take part, as a patron or pikker, in a #pristineparish program in their parish.

Want to know more?