All for the environment

Deepavali just got over. And we must have noticed the number of creatures and plants that were affected by the smoke and pollution. Just before deepavali day Roots & Shoots organized a program in our school. The Roots & Shoots program is about making positive change happen for our communities, for animals and for the environment. Thousands of children from almost 100 countries are part of this program. Roots & Shoots is guided by Dr. Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist, environmentalist and humanitarian.

The Indian Coordinator for this program Arun Krishnamurthy conducted a program in Sir Sivaswamy Kalalaya, Mylapore.

He showed a short presentation about the rich ecological diversity that India has, and informed the audience that with more efforts we can save our animals from dying. Narrating the story of five animals, a tiger, an elephant, an olive ridley sea turtle, a rhino and a lion he stressed on the protection of these animals.

He quoted examples of how the tiger living in Jim Corbett National Park at Uttarakhand and had been tortured to death just for its skin. However, he did not want to show the children the tapes of such cruelty to animals. The only solution to save other tigers from this fate is to stop buying or using tiger skin products, he told the studnets.

Arun Krishnamurthy later invited the students to participate at a meeting of the Roots & Shoots volunteers to be held on Nov. 6 at the Guindy National Park.

The volunteers come from various schools like, Sankara Senior, Sir Sivaswami Kalalaya, P.S.Senior, Chettinad Vidyashram. The projects include zoo volunteering, paper bag project, cloth bag project, urban eco responsibility, lake conservation, sparrow species reintroduction, native species plantation, etc.

The paper bag project is all about making paper bags from old newspaper and selling it to shopkeepers so that they use less of plastic bags.

Zoo volunteering involves going to the Guindy Park during weekends, choosing one animal enclosure and stopping the visitors from teasing the animal. Each student receives credits and a certificate for each project that he takes up.

If you are interested in joining the TREE Foundation Roots & Shoots group you can register your name by sending an email to arunoogle@gmail.com