Planning at our hands: Environmental Care
Many global celebrations recognize significant advancements in natural resources and basic amenities, including Water Day, Toilet Day, Town Planning Day, Environmental Day, and World Health Day. These observances highlight an essential aspect: the environment—especially pressing in light of the current global concern regarding climate change.
World Environmental Day in Kenya (Mazingira Day) has been marked with reforestation and planting of trees, but it is more than just that. While trees are important features for catchment areas laying a good foundation for the celebration of World Water Day, and trees for carbon sequestration directly involving climate change, other sensitization programs however, such as putting an end to open defacation by providing toilets in rural and remote areas, encouraging proper solid and liquid waste disposal significantly reduces the instances of disease outbreak which highly celebrates the World Health Day.
Town Planning Day in Kenya has mostly been marked with the revamping of public spaces (adding aesthetics to the environment). Physical planning is intertwined with the environment. If we cared enough for the environment, developers would provide basic amenities such as water and sewerage supply into their units, and if the enforcement bodies executed their duties diligently, cases such as construction of buildings that contradict the zonal plans of neighbourhoods and those which are built with no proper amenities would be a thing of the past (Pre-Independence).
While the above nuggets touch on authorities, it is a call for each individual, young and old, to take up the mantle of caring for the environment, making it a better place for humans and wildlife to co-exist. Human practices such as poaching, deforestation, car ownership (as rude as it may be is a threat to the environment), overfishing, and dumping plastics in water bodies affect terrestrial and marine life. Encroachment of land also meant for wildlife reservations bring about the human-wildlife conflict as wildlife too procreate and increase in number. But what if we cared enough? We won’t be here for long, but the environment is what sustains us (providing food, water, and space to carry out all activities on land).
Thumbs up to the new Competency Based Curriculum (CBC), which centres on a subject on Environment instilling care among children; hopefully they transition into responsible adults. But mostly, it is the adults who need the most education – how ironic it is. However, it is a polite reminder for us all, more of a threat perhaps, that the destruction of the environment directly impacts the existence of humans and wildlife and thus a personal responsibility to ensure that within the spaces we occupy, care is accorded to the environment.
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