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Sean Amos
Joined: Sep 12, 2006
Posts: 165 (view all)
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Country: Kenya
Province/State: Nairobi Area
City: Nairobi
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Simplify warnings on environment
June 5, 2007 - 08:10 AM
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Simplify warnings on environment
Mention global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, desertification, and environmental degradation to a person who has been worrying all day over how to feed his or her children, and he or she is bound to think that you ought to see a doctor.
Talk to them about the need to reduce reliance on fossil fuel and substitute it with renewable fuel, and they will, with good cause, warily look around and back off, convinced that you have completely lost it.
And yet, these are issues that affect ordinary Kenyans more than they commonly realise, and shorn of their gaudy clothing, are common sense.
For the fact is, people have been busy poisoning the environment for a long time, the soil they cultivate the air they breathe, and the crops they feed on. But nobody has told them how or why they should stop.
Nobody told them that felling trees without replacing them contributed in no small measure to the destruction of the environment. Nobody told them that cultivating right down to the riverbed, thus mowing down the natural foliage was the reason why they are not likely to see a river with clean water ever again.
And nobody told them that doing all those things was bound to make them and their children poorer and more sickly in the long run.
Today is World Environment Day, when it will be drummed on us that the polar ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, that the snows of Mt Kenya are also melting rapidly, and that if we continue destroying our environment with such abandon, the world will eventually be too hot for anything else but the mosquito and other deadly vermin.
All this information will mean very little to us. But mention one small fact; that the climate has been changing, and today you cannot predict when the rains will fall, or how much of it, whether there will be floods, or whether there will be drought, and you might actually start communicating with people.
It will eventually become necessary for the authorities to seek simple ways of drumming into the ordinary citizen the need to conserve the environment by avoiding those activities that destroy it.
Let us shun the abstract, esoteric terms that mean nothing to hungry people and explain to them complex concepts in simple language. That way, the lesson may sink in, and planet Earth may get a reprieve.
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April
Joined: Jun 17, 2004
Posts: 98 (view all)
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Gender & Age: Female, 22
Country: United States
Province/State: Florida
City: Orange Park
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Re: Simplify warnings on environment
June 7, 2007 - 02:36 PM
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Do you really think that will work? The computer you used to write that message is part of the problem, but you still used it.
The world will not have her problems solved by one country. The mountain will continue to melt juft because of the other countries out there. It's not even just the poor that need it explained to. Its the rich. Al Gore, one of the biggest (right now) spokes persons for global warming and saving the planet has the highest electricity bill in the entire state. No solar pannels untill VERY recently. Is he still a saint?
It's not just one group that needs the work to save us, it's the world.
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Anu maheshwari
Joined: Jun 14, 2005
Posts: 1148 (view all)
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Gender & Age: Female, 27
Country: India
Province/State: Maharashtra
City: Pune
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Re: Simplify warnings on environment
June 8, 2007 - 02:08 AM
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Very Interesting Thought 
[link="http://allafrica.com/stories/200706050139.html"]
Many NGO here are already implementing programmes where they educate people from different strata of the society about the environmental issues in ways that they could actually relate to.
They concentrate on the specific issues affecting each section of the society and then give advise on how to counter those problems.
For example, drainage issues for people living in crowed streets, and near the banks of rivers ..., effective ways to reduce energy consumption at home for housewives etc...( btw Household Sector is the largest consumer of energy . check this out ;
The household sector is one of the largest users of energy in the EEA, consuming 29% of final energy consumption (excluding energy used for transport). Between 1985 and 1998, the actual amount of energy consumed per household remained nearly constant, but the growing number of households increased energy use by 4%.
[link="http://themes.eea.europa.eu/Sectors_and_activities/households/indicators/energy"]
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