Asad Avenue Cleanup- GWEC ( written by Abrar B. Tohid )

It’s very recent and booming news that a team of foreigners, students from Japan have come over to our country to ‘clean up Dhaka’. They’ve even started their own page, titled ‘Clean Up Dhaka’ and have got a massive response from the population of Dhaka city. It all happened really fast, overnight the amount of support they got, overnight, overwhelmed even  the starter of this project, Jawad Mubashwir. 

They didn’t think that things would happen so fast, makes you think doesn’t it? Change is indeed inevitable, someone just has to get up there and start it, and Jawad was exactly that person that Bangladesh needed. He went abroad to study, if he wanted he could’ve never looked back and just carried on with his life but it was the love for his country and the love for the environment that brought him back and along with him some very willing friends from Japan, who wanted to be part of this change, this noble cause. Something to ponder on, why would they come here, leaving their country behind and coming here to clean up what we made dirty, It doesn’t really concern them does it? Maybe their love for the environment transcends notions of borders.

Our club, the GWEC decided to join hands in this noble work and we decided to clean up Asad Avenue.  

On the 24^th of August at 9 am we began our mission from the gate of our school, guided by our moderator Julian Malcolm Mendez sir, we along with the help of our A level students and teachers set our hands to work cleaning up our streets. It was tough but not impossible, and we proved just that. Shovels, gloves, plastic bags and down on the streets with just a handful of people, there were a lot of people just standing there, questioning what we were doing, why we were doing it. Some gave us encouragement whilst others had the audacity of saying that it is useless to do something like this. But that didn’t stop us, we were firm on our goals and firm on our love for the environment we live in. The leaders of tomorrow, but we start today or else this ‘tomorrow’ is never going to come. In a way we proved what the determination of the youth can do. It’s not about bragging, but setting an example that inspires someone out there, even if it is just one person because it was the thought of just one person that brought this whole thing together. The club persevered and we are proud that we were actually able to make a difference, we were able to attract people to this thing, the first hour went by and we thought maybe it would just be us and the people with camera taking videos and snaps but then swarming from here and there came students from different universities to help us out.  

One of the contributors to this very blog and our ex student Abie Rawad Akhand is someone who deserves a special thanks for helping us out in every way possible, he is a very active member of our blog and he writes in his free time to contribute to other news sources, he is someone who shares the very same agenda as us. We were short on hands but we hurdled through it. Raising awareness to people, picking every little cigarette butt, every little peanut peel, we did it all. On that day no one went ‘eww’ no one felt ashamed of bending over to pick up someone else’s trash, no one had an unnecessary feeling of ‘high class’ in them, one thought brought us all together and made us forget all of our pretences, a thought for a better tomorrow.

A lot of people have been commenting about this thing, they’ve been saying that it is so shameful that foreigners have to come and clean our country, maybe we should simply get this out of our head, these man made concepts of borders, maybe we should realise that this isn’t my world, this isn’t your world, this is our world, it’s about time we came together and realised that, it’s about time we understood that together we can make a difference. These people they say this whilst they sit behind their computer screens and sip coffee, maybe just posting a Facebook status isn’t enough anymore, heck, when was it ever enough? Your opinions have been heard, the awareness has been raised, it is time you got down to do something practical. When you see a fire you don’t sit on Facebook and update a status saying that someone should douse that fire, you simply go and put it out yourself. The Earth, the world you live in, is burning. The question is, will we be the ones to put out the fire? Or will we continue to let the earth burn up like a tinder box while we casually sip coffee in our air conditioned rooms.

002 by Abie Rawad Akand

005 by Abie Rawad Akand

003 by Abie Rawad Akand

004 by Abie Rawad Akand

http://goo.gl/forms/wY7oMJrAl1


Hey guys, this is the registration form for Aobhan's next event #Triple R.
It's an ECA that you can participate, based on the environment. It's a project I've been planning for a while now and I just thought it'd be worth sharing for those of you who are interested. The Registration Form is given in the link above.

An issue we all to be aware of. As members of GWEC the spread of education regarding environmental degradation is our duty. It's a link to my article


http://dhakainsider.com/bangladesh-news/importance-of-environmental-education-in-bangladesh-to-make-a-cleaner-path-to-induce-information-about-climate-change/

Urgent: Mandatory Reading for All

This article by R.C. Guha highlights a view point that we are trying to convey through the blog.
All members are encouraged to go through this.

Guha - The Paradox of Global Environmentalism by rashif95

No water, No life, No blue, No green

The attempt of Green Watch 15 is to increase awareness about a very important factor, something we all need, which is water. We are following the motto: "no water, no life, no blue, no green" which explains the current situation in a gist. This year we talk about hydrosphere. Our aim is not only to bring about a certain degree of awareness to the people reading our blog but we also hope to help them bring about a gradual change in the hydrosphere.

Greenwatch 2015 by rashif95

We at the GWEC aim to implement newer ideas to spread awareness about the issue at hand. This year we are planning to hold up all recent issues and developments regarding the hydrosphere in our Green Watch 2015 which is the official magazine for our GWEC. 

Urgent: Meeting Update for 08/08/15

Cabinet general and alumni members meeting tomorrow from 9 to 12 at the class 7 Mars venue for making the GWEC schedule for the academic year of 2015 - 16
Please kindly attend tomorrow Saturday, 08/08/15. Thank you.

The World Tiger Day 2015 - GWEC (compiled by Abie Akhand and Rashif Al-Mahmood)

106? - this happens to be the result representing the preliminary findings of a very rather interesting population of tigers left within the boundaries of Bangladesh, it is indeed worrying to say the least. Especially for a nation that prides the great cat as its nation animal. Eleven years ago when the Bengal Tiger started to face extinction, statistics and data capture provided figures of the big cats to be around 440 in the wild. Efforts to help tiger populations began all over the world to help reduce the number of casualties in the ever growing war against poaching of these magnificent animals.  The people of the world helped by raising awareness and for a while due to selective and captive breeding, hope seemed to rekindle for the tigers representing our nations to the world. With everyone doing their part, S.F.X Greenherald International School also joined in on it. Our very own GreenWorld Earth Club (GWEC), led by Julian Malcolm Mendez and Shariful Anwar marched and enthusiastic faces consisting almuni as well as current students from Manik Mia Avenue with hundreds dressed in orange standing up for the endangered species. An army of orange made its way to Krishibid Institute of Bangladesh to attend a workshop on how to inspire the nation to dedicate its resources to save these magnificent animals.

Yet after so much effort, it seems the tigers are once again at the face of extinction. 29^th of July has been recognized as the World Tiger Day to raise awareness for the presence of such adversity to the cats. It is recognized all around the world every year and was founded at the Saint Petersburg Tiger Summit in 2010. Many animal welfare organizations pledged to help these wonderful creatures and are still helping to raise funds to reach this goal. The goal of Tiger Day is to promote the protection and expansion of the wild tiger habitats and to gain support through awareness for tiger conservation.

With every factor weighing in even if by the slightest, tigers are anything but safe from extinction. Right now, the best we can do is assist to raise awareness regarding the issue and taking a stand to help maintain more canvases of orange with stripes. For it’s our help that shall engender the balancing act and hopefully tip it towards the benefit of the Bengal Tigers.

The Poster by rashif95

At the Rally by rashif95

The Team at the Conference by rashif95

The Team by rashif95

The Rally by rashif95

The Bus Ride by rashif95

Tiger Day Conference by rashif95

The International Wildlife Day

Tomorrow is the International Wildlife Day. On this occasion, the Ministry of Forest has invited our school to join their rally. The rally will end in the Osmani Auditorium. Executive members, who are interested to participate in this program, are requested to report in the school tomorrow by 8:00 am.

Environmentalism: A Global History, by Ramachandra Guha. New York: Longman (2000), xiii, 161 pp. [Reviewed by Kathryn Hochstetler, Department of Political Science, Colorado State University]

Environmentalism: A Global History is best read as a short but ambitious text that will introduce readers to a series of environmental thinkers from across the globe.  In Guha’s own explanation of the book, “this is a historical account and analysis of the origins and expressions of environmental concern, of how individuals and institutions have perceived, propagated, and acted upon their experience of environmental decay” (p. 2).  As such, it is not a history of the environment itself, which he leaves to scientists, but a history of environmental ideas.  In just 145 pages of text, Guha covers many of the most prominent environmental thinkers over the last two centuries, and adds a few lesser known as well.  The thinkers are placed in their social contexts, with particular attention to the unfolding of industrial and colonial (and post-) processes.  Taken as a whole, the book is well written and engaging; I think it would be successful as a text chosen to instigate discussion of global and historical varieties of environmentalism.

Guha divides the book into two halves, one for each of two waves of global environmentalism.  In the first wave, which began in the 1860s and continued through the interwar period, three varieties of environmental thought competed to construct a diagnosis of environmental degradation and an alternative vision to it: the “back to the land” movement, the scientific conservation movement, and the wilderness movement.  The “back to the land” movement found strong adherents in England and Germany, as industrialization brought a revival of agrarian sentiment.  Pre-industrialized India also contributed a more practical agrarian thinker in Mahatma Gandhi, who read Carpenter and Ruskin while studying in England.  Scientific conservation, characterized by a concern with environmental degradation and confidence in science’s ability to reverse that degradation, also took root in Britain and Germany before spreading elsewhere.  Global transmission of the ideas of scientific conservation was more direct and custodial, as colonial powers established state-run departments to manage their colonies’ forests, soil, water, wildlife, and fisheries.  Guha strongly criticizes these management efforts on both social and environmental grounds, preferring Japan’s indigenous forest science.  Similarly, colonial rule spread the wilderness idea to Europe’s colonies, with protection of native wildlife often taking priority over native peoples.  The wilderness thinking of the Americans John Muir and Aldo Leopold (born in Germany) is presented more sympathetically, with attention to their differences as well as their shared appreciation for non-human species.

The first wave of environmentalism ended with an interlude of  “ecological innocence” after World War II, when both North and South were committed to economic growth through technology.  Dissenters from technological optimism ­ Sauer, Mumford, Schumacher, Mira Behn (in India) ­ were easily ignored in the industrialized world, and the newly independent countries sought economic liftoff on the western path, not a renewed village economy.

With numerous others, Guha dates the beginning of the second wave of environmentalism to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which he extols for its impact and quality.  Across the globe, the second wave added an environmentally engaged public to the previously expert arena of environmental thought.  Guha organizes his discussion of the second wave with three chapters on what would once have been called the first, second, and third worlds.  Among the affluent, both the threat of impending doom and the desire to consume nature as another good drove the steady growth of the environmental movement after 1962 (Guha’s data end with 1991).  Guha differentiates deep ecologists from environmental justice activists in American radical environmentalism.  A section on the German Greens, “the finest achievement of the second wave of environmentalism” (p. 97), completes this chapter.  Guha cites Gandhian influences in all of these branches of modern environmentalism, but still sees a strong polarization between this environmentalism of the affluent and the environmentalism of the poor of the next chapter.  He rejects the hypothesis of Inglehart and others that environmental concern belongs to the wealthy, but notes a change in its concerns.  When peasants and indigenous peoples of Malaysia, India, Thailand, and Brazil mobilize on environmental issues, they link environmentalism to social justice and livelihood concerns.  Sections comparing Brazil to India and Chico Mendes’ rubber tappers to the Chipko movement offer some rare extended concrete examples of environmental thought in action.  Finally, a brief chapter on environmentalism (or the lack thereof) in the Soviet Union and in China serves mostly to underline that the strongest debate of the second wave is that between North and South.

A concluding chapter argues that a shared global common future would have to be based on a genuinely equitable and participatory global democracy.  In the absence of that democracy, concrete environmental debates will be conflict-ridden.  Yet Guha’s final word is that two ideas unite all the kinds of environmentalists he has discussed: restraint, in the sense of limits on behavior toward both the environment and other humans, and farsightedness, looking toward “a common future ­ and the multiple paths to get to it” (p. 145).

As should be clear from this summary, this global environmental history synthesizes a very broad array of environmental ideas, across both time and space.  As Guha himself says, this requires him to be “savagely selective” (p. 7).  Fitting the introductory nature of this book, the selection criteria favor the better-known thinkers and movements, but there are plenty of lesser-known stories to send the more experienced reader to the bibliographic essay at the end.  (This is especially useful since there are few citations in the text, and no conventional bibliography.)

The first part of the book, on the first wave of environmentalism, best achieves Guha’s two aims:  to present a “trans-national perspective on the environmental debate” and “to document the flow of ideas across cultures” (p. 8).  In this section, we see clear linkages across cultures as travel, reading, and colonial institutions moved ideas around the world both freely and by force.  These chapters show at once the global relevance of certain environmental ideas, such as wilderness, and their very different local meanings depending on where, how, and by whom they are put into practice.

In the second section, on the second wave, there is much less attention to the transnational flow of environmental ideas, despite the fact that global news reports, the internet, and international travel and meetings have shrunk the effective distance between peoples.  This is especially noteworthy in the chapter on the southern challenge, where several of the examples Guha uses are commonly cited as classic instances of international advocacy networks (see Keck and Sikkink 1998).  Guha stresses their domestic origins, which are certainly also a part of the story, but his references to the “prolific misrepresentations...by the international media” (p. 119) do not do justice to the transnational flow of ideas, perspectives, and activists at work.  Similarly, he misses the ways that at least parts of the environmental justice movements of the north were inspired by their southern counterparts.  I would have liked to see a fuller analysis of transnational environmentalism as we turn into the 21^st century.  Is it, as some have argued, a new variant of the 19^th century’s colonial relations?  Could it be, in contrast, a manifestation of the more equitable and participatory global democracy Guha seeks?

Throughout the book, Guha’s characteristic post-colonial critiques give the book a consistent perspective, which will challenge the northern students who are likely to be among the book’s readers.  Because of its focus on environmental thinkers across the globe, it is not the best presentation of the complexities of Guha’s own perspective, however.  For that, I prefer some of his other works, such as Ecology and Equity (with Madhav Gadgil, 1995) and Varieties of Environmentalism:  Essays North and South (with Juan Martinez Alier, 1997).

References Cited:

Gadgil, Madhav, and Ramachandra Guha. 1995. Ecology and Equity: The Use of Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India.  New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martinez-Alier. 1997. Varieties of Environmentalism:  Essays North and South.  London: Earthscan.

Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

A notice for the participants

Registered GWEC members for the 1^st International Nature Summit called "Green Inspiration" of Notre Dame College Nature Study Club, are requested to report at school by 7:00 a.m. tomorrow.

A call for "Green Inspiration"

This is to attract interested students and GWEC members to register for the 1^st International Nature Summit called "Green Inspiration" of Notre Dame College, Nature Study Club. It is a two day event, which will be held on 23^rd and 24^th of January in Notre Dame College.

The summit also holds a range of competitions, which are suited for the following participants.

>For University Category (Graduates and Undergraduates): Confab seminar (Power Point Presentation), Nature Olympiad and Photography

>>For Higher Secondary Category (aged 15-18 yrs or Classes XI & XII): Transformation (Turn Coat), Confab Seminar (Power Point Presentation), Nature Olympiad, Eco-Friendly Project, Wall Magazine & Photography

>>>For Junior Category (aged 12-15 or Classes VII to X): Nature Olympiad, Eco-Friendly Project, Wall Magazine & Photography

For registration and more info: www.greeninspiration.weebly.com