In our bid to generate awareness on saving our environment, we do focus on remedies and solutions that are alternatives to the factors that are disturbing our ecological balance. Be it high tech or simply DIY kinda projects that are still in conceptual stage or already being implemented. We simply desire an eco-friendly green planet to live in! But how many of you out there are actually benefiting from all these efforts is another issue and needs to be estimated too some times. That’s why SmartPlanet decided to go on the roads, and managed to get an idea about what the world thinks about the environment. On this important-to-some calendar day of World Environment Day, Marian Smith hit the streets of London and shot some questions to a few citizens and she was more then enlightened to get an array of interesting answers.
Like when she asked “If I told you it was World Environment Day today, what would you say?” replies like “I didn’t know it” or “No idea” were the commonest. Not surprising I must say!
For the next question in the line, “What kind of pledge would you make today?”, there were an array of promises made……which I’m sure were uttered only to sound a bit fair to earth. May not all meant to say some goody things just for the record. Olivia mentioned that “Today especially, maybe we could take care not to use too much water when we have a shower.” While Jan stated that he would just use the public transport system, and not use his car….only for the day. While Claire was proud to assert that she already cycles, tries to buy ethically sourced food, and organic stuff, and since she is a socialist so politically she is involved in that sort of stuff. On other hand Thomas rightly mentioned that ‘it’s not only today that we should take action. We do things every day, all the time. We take care of how much water we use and we recycle — there are so many things we can do’. I agree to this too Thomas.
Lastly they inquired about the campaigns like Real Nappy Week, Compost Awareness Week, Earth Day and Fairtrade Fortnight, to name a few. Do people think these campaigns do any good? Or are they just fed up? And here are some of the eye-opening answers – “Some campaigns work, some don’t. But an awareness campaign should be more often — not just one day.” and “There are just too many, nobody takes any interest anymore, I don’t think. Unless it happens to come across your consciousness you just kind of ignore them.” Also it was rightly pointed out that it’s pointless to flood the calendar with so many notional days that they become meaningless. Over and above people didn’t really appreciate such campaigns and Joe rightly pointed out that “I don’t think they work, because no-one knows about them. I mean, presumably if you’re going around telling them then that’s quite good, but I don’t think there’s any realization that it’s happening.”
