
Project Orange Elephant: Buy a tree, save an elephant.
Help Juniper Yoga + Fitness save wild elephants in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka has 4000 wild elephants roaming freely through the middle of the island. These elephants were thriving until 30 years ago when the government relocated farmers to the lands where the elephants graze. This encroachment of the elephant’s natural habitat has created human – elephant conflict, the cause of elephant extinction in Sri Lanka.
Each year elephants damage millions of dollars of crops through raiding farmer’s fields. In retaliation, these farmers shoot or fatally injure these elephants in hopes of keeping their families fed. An average rural family earns about $2,000.00 a year and relies on their crops to feed their families and earn their income. They cannot afford to loose even one plant.
Project Orange Elephant (POE) is an agricultural solution to this conflict, helping humans and elephants live peacefully together on shared land.
Elephants do not like the smell, taste or feel of citrus trees. At POE we buy orange and lime trees for farmers to plant around their crops of fruit trees and rice. When an elephant comes upon a farm surrounded by citrus they walk away. Our goal is to surround all the farms with trees to put and end to elephant crop raiding. As an extra bonus the farmers get to keep the income from the sale of the citrus. Cargills, the largest grocery chain in Sri Lanka has committed to buy all the citrus produced by these trees.
All the proceeds from the elephant products sold in our studio go towards buying orange trees. You can also make a donation and become part of the team saving the wild elephant population of Sri Lanka.
Thank you,
Project Orange Elephant