About Sera!

Meet Sera Blair,

owner of Mainstream Green

After many years as an environmental consultant I decided last year to stop preaching to people about environmentally friendly behaviours and decided to try and take some of the guesswork out of shopping for a green lifestyle to help bring about positive behaviour change.  Now I enjoy spending my time investigating products, looking into their manufacturing, packaging, transport and quality to find products that support people trying to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Over the past decade I have had many fantastic opportunities to learn about a range of important environmental issues like threatened species habitat conservation, environmental restoration, native vegetation protection, sustainable gardening, environmental weed management, sustainable purchasing etc.  I have also had the opportunity to move to rural Victoria and start a family with my husband Dave and our two young sons.   So I understand the challenges associated with running a household, raising children and trying to maintain an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Many years ago, while doing research for my Masters Degree, I lived in the rainforests of Borneo studying wild orangutans and I saw the destruction of the forest for timber, palm oil and rubber tree plantations.

Since coming to Australia in 1999, from Canada, I have learnt a great deal about the endangered species of Australia, I even started up a Friends Group for Leadbeater’s Possum (www.leadbeaters.org.au), the endangered faunal emblem of Victoria in order to try and save it in the wild.

Despite the obvious differences between great apes in Indonesia and possums in Victoria, there are some stark similarities between the decline of both species – they are both losing their habitat to logging (which largely goes to pulp for paper production overseas) and forest conversion to plantations.  Ultimately, the power to stop this destruction for both species is in the hands of the consumers of the developed world who use forest products like timber and paper and can make decisions about the least harmful products to purchase.

With the development of the Mainstream Green shop I am aiming to provide more environmentally preferable options to people trying to lead greener, more sustainable lives.  Sustainable purchasing is a growing industry with many new products available all of the time.  But we are also seeing a lot of ‘greenwashing’ in the market with products claiming unsupported or unclear green credentials. This is making it difficult to know what products to trust.  I hope I can help you by doing some of the investigative work for you.   If you know of a good product you think we should carry I would love to hear from you.  I appreciate all feedback on our products and others on the market to help us keep track of this growing

sector.

Hopefully together we can help make the MAINSTREAM

of our society more GREEN!

Sera