Displaying items by tag: ijams

The Fleurish fashion show will feature sustainable and stylish clothes to reduce your big old footprint on Earth.  Courtesy Fleurish/Ijams Nature Center

Help rock the catwalk at Ijams’ display of sustainable clothing

Cindy Hassil is a writer for Ijams Nature Center.

KNOXVILLE — Clothes can be a burden to both bear and wear. Ijams Nature Center offers fashionable alternatives with sustainability cred this month.

Ijams and Natural Alternatives Salon and Spa will present Fleurish: A Sustainable Fashion Event, from 6 to 9 p.m. Sunday, April 24.

“Fleurish is a runway show focused on how sustainability, conservation and beauty intertwine and affect our lives … and our future,” Fleurish Creative Director Ben Prager said. “This event engages the audience in ways that will help the average consumer make changes in their day-to-day lives to better impact the planet while never losing sight of the beauty of nature and the human experience.”

Twelve local designers, along with hair stylists and makeup artists, are coming together to create looks using both recycled and natural materials.

Not all of the Knoxville Urban Wilderness is true wilderness, of course. This monoculture field of sunflowers planted at the Forks of the River Wildlife Management Area does, however, attract lots of wildlife.  Courtesy Visit Knoxville

Spring study to quantify visitation, economic impact

“It’s something special for Knoxville and defines us as a recreational community,” said city Deputy Chief of Economic and Community Development Rebekah Jane Justice. She was named the city’s first Urban Wilderness Coordinator in July 2017, and is still the city’s go-to expert on this ambitious, ongoing land-preservation and recreational project. “It’s about so many things, including building our local economy in a unique way.” 

Now that the Urban Wilderness is more established, actual numbers about usage are more easily captured than when Sims authored his paper. Matthew Kellogg of the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club said that his club received an equipment grant from the International Mountain Bicycling Association for trail-counter devices to quantify how many people use the trails — and where and when. Currently Kellogg’s group is calibrating 11 newly placed trail counters in the Urban Wilderness. By spring, the group hopes to be collecting reliable data. 

Among the things this data will be used for is a multi-year study by University of Tennessee kinesiology and recreation professor Eugene Fitzhugh, a frequent lecturer about urban trails their impact on a community’s physical activity.