17th September 2009, this bright sunny day marked the celebration of the Environment Awareness day at the Government School of Adugodi, Bangalore. Organized by the Lion’s Club, Bangalore, the event saw active participation by the young school students as well as the youth representing the adjacent Government Intermediate College within the same premises. Which meant a crowd of over 800 enthusiastic people gathered to understand what the phenomenon of climate change is and to learn simple steps they could undertake at their individual levels to help fight it.
The day kicked off with an invocation followed by the Principal’s Address. Mrs. Chamundeshwari Ramalinga Reddy, from the Lion’s Club delivered an inspiring talk to the gathered youngsters enlightening them on the facts of pollution and global warming. She ended her talk on a note encouraging students to preserve nature and respect the natural surroundings.
The stage was thus set for the very inspiring and motivating talk provided by Ms. Varshitha Jha, International Climate Champion 2009 and member of the Indian Youth Climate Network, Karnataka Chapter. Her talk introduced the listeners to the various principles underlying the Global Climate Change phenomenon and presented in an interactive manner the various activities undertaken by IYCN, Bangalore. She motivated the students to join up with current activities or to be climate leaders in their own rights. She then introduced the concept of Green Commandos, the social networking based climate revolution mentored by IYCN that has currently got an anti plastic campaign going. She introduced the concept of a green family report card that Green Commandoes has developed which gives points to a student based on how ‘green’ his family is in their daily lifestyles. Varshitha listed out the various alternatives to the use of a plastic bag and urged the students to take up the cause of cloth bags within their individual households. Ms. Hita Unnikrishnan the meet as well on behalf of IYCN, Karnataka.
This session was followed by an interactive session by Mr. Nagaraj, District Governor, Lion’s Club. The hallmark of this session was a display of the cloth bags to the eager students some of whom were also lucky enough to be gifted with one!! The talk concluded by subjecting the participants to a pledge committing them to reduce the use of plastics in their homes.
The talk was succeeded by a short and sweet session delivered by Dr. Chandrashekar Balakrishnan from Center for Social Market, Bangalore and a presentation on the benefits of cycling by Mayank Rungta from Ride a Cycle Foundation. His presentation attracted the crowd because of the display of a unique foldable bicycle that can be carried about anywhere.
The events of the day concluded with a tree planting session. Close to 25 saplings of various timber and flowering plants were planted in the campus making the day a very action oriented one in terms of generating environmental awareness. In all the participants carried home a very strong message of individual environmental responsibility and a hope to carry the message further and be ideals for the world to model them upon.