I love the fact that more events are held to improve our natural environment in my country recently. Events such as planting 1 million trees, cleaning up a mountain, saving Bali mynah bird, or Jakarta’s blue sky are all worthy. But sadly, I don’t know if these events are being followed up or only a one-day celebration. The truth is, I rarely hear a significant change or improvement in our natural environment.
I read an invitation to an event in the newspaper, an organization is planning to plant mangrove trees along the coast of North Jakarta. It’s really wonderful. Being advertized in a big newspaper means more people would likely join the event. I just hope these people won’t litter too much. Littering? Yes, it’s our culture, sad to say. I’m just imagining that people would flock to the coast, the weather would be so hot, people would be thirsty, and they would bring glasses of water and some snacks. I bet there would be no garbage bins out there. There would always be people who throw the plastic glass, tissue, etc., just anywhere. I hope I’m just imagining it all.
About two years a go I heard about Jakarta’s Blue Sky. It’s a program to reduce air pollution in Jakarta. One of its agendas was to ban vehicles with black and thick exhaust smoke. If we were on the street and spotted a vehicle with very bad exhaust smoke, we were supposed to send a short message to an organization who cared about the clean air, informing them the kind of vehicles we saw and its plate number. For a month or two I was so eager to send them SMS, because I saw many vehicles on the streets, mainly buses and trucks, with very bad exhaust smoke. But then their number was unavailable, I couldn’t short message them anymore. Now, I still can see buses, trucks, cars, and motorcycles with bad thick black smoke coming out of their exhaust pipe running around the streets PROUDLY. I have to believe my eyes, do I?
I just wish more similar events are held and being followed all the time. I wish people could start loving their own natural environment, AT LEAST. Everything has to be started from ourselves.
