alina Buskarovacadres of the futureAlina Buskarova is a 17 year old student based in Yakutsk, Russia, and is an advocate for global issues such as the interrelationships between environment and human health, as well as national culture appropriation and other social issues.
Since she was a child, her relatives, mostly aunts, have advised her to be respectful towards nature. They taught her to collect trash when we were visiting nature, which built up her interest in ecology. Human health became an area of interest during the pandemic, making her care about her health and those of others around her. Apart from nature, culture is also her childhood interest, specifically on the topic of culture appropriation. During the pandemic, the city where she resides also experienced another major issue - forest fires. She was sitting at home and felt a bitter smell, like something was burnt. Outside her windows, she could see nothing but smoke in a radius of 200 meters. Everything around was gray, and she could feel the smell and feel a bitter taste in her throat. To help her raise her knowledge in this matter, she started taking ecology elective lessons for the purpose of gaining an understanding of forest fires in terms of their effect on the current biodiversity landscape, as well as the overall sustainability of the ecosystem. She also drew inspiration from her experiences from a project camp called "Cadres of the Future", which helped youth design sustainability solutions over 72 hours. The initiative of “eco-stickers”, which happened to win first prize at the camp, aimed to draw attention and awareness to the huge waste problem in the city. Despite some inherent issues with the initial design, this project gave her a taste of creating her own nature-focused solution, and also educated her to consider the commercial feasibility of a project during the design thinking process. In the future, she wants to study business and entrepreneurship in university, since she feels it highlights her strengths in economics, sociology and more practical subjects. As a personal goal, she wants to found her own enterprise towards developing and implementing further social projects. |