The Earth Summit in 2002 is coming home. When hundreds of heads of state and tens of thousands of delegates descend on Johannesburg in September next year for what is officially called the World Summit on Sustainable Development, they will be coming to a country that cares deeply about environmental issues and where people are tackling them hands on, writes Fiona Macleod.
The annual Green Trust Awards provide a good gauge of this commitment. Since the Mail & Guardian joined forces with Nedbank and The Green Trust to stage the awards three years ago, we have received entries from more than 500 different environmental projects around Southern Africa.
These entries have been sent in by people who spotted the advertisements or got to hear about the awards, and who took time out of busy schedules to put together their presentations. Imagine how many other projects there are out there that we haven’t yet heard about.
Particularly encouraging this year were the range and reach of the school projects entered. These ranged from permaculture projects to major educational programmes that are galvanising whole communities into caring for their environments. These school projects are the face of our future.
The calibre of the 180 entries we received this year was extremely high, especially in the individual and community categories. From the individual who is recycling tyres by turning them into water traps for gardening, to municipalities and developers who are creating green cities, to the company that flies youngsters from around the world to South Africa for a bush experience it’s virtually impossible to describe the hope and positive energy contained in the hundreds of parcels that are sent to the Green Trust Awards.
The only sadness is that they cannot all be winners. The judges agonise as they eliminate most and come up with their winners. We hope the entrants understand and will try again next year.
This special supplement published in the M&G aims to give the nine winners and 14 finalists some well-deserved publicity. One of the M&G’s aims in getting involved in the competition is to provide a network for green projects.
Not all the projects entered can be winners this time round, but the point is that at the end of the day the environment and the people who live in it are the winners. That is exactly what Earth Summit 2002 is all about.