Workshop of Environment

We can stop the global warming from just around us!

Is global warming something that we have to prevent? If everyone could say YES to this question, we could surely make actions. Therefore in this workshop, we tried to feel the global warming issues as an issue quite closely related to ourselves.

First of all, we did a game called “magic carpet”. Together with the member of one’s group, we squeezed in ourselves into the limited space of the sheet which represented the land on earth. Every time the sheet was folded into half and all the participants had to try not to fall off from the sheet. In this game, we tried to represent the loss of lands due to the rise of sea level.

Secondary, we thought about what it really meant to “care about the environment”. If “environment” and “one’s own profit” were placed in front of us, which do we really care about? We used the famous TV commercial as a hint and made a situation card. Moreover, in the game called “four corners of the room”, we asked each other “do you do something for the environment?” and got an quite positive answer saying that “I have only bought two plastic bottles this year”. By shifting our way of looking, we also realized that every one was doing something for the environment. This game was very meaningful in that we could rethink about our own attitude toward the environment by referring to other people’s opinion.

Finally, each of us drew a picture of the ideal future earth. All the pictures had “smiling person” or “earth full of greens”, and it was a time when all of us strongly felt that “we all love this earth!”

Fields Study on Environment

We were honor to have Mr. Endo, who had been working in the field of education from the perspective of “agriculture”　ｆor more than thirty years, In this very last work shop of all the programs, Mr. Endo’s story started with the episode that one of the first commitment toward environmental issues in Japan was the attempt to use 100% recycled paper for the youth comic book.

Then the story moved to the Edo period. Edo was an era when there was no serious environmental deterioration for nearly 300 years and human and nature lived together in harmony. It was a time when the so called “zero emission” was actually realized. By using the keyword “lighting was the sun from last year”, he referred to the fact that people’s lives were sustained by the circulation of solar energy.
When we counted the number of the seeds of the sunflower, we were very amazed to realize that just one sunflower could have 2000bseeds and we were able to feel the strength of the sun and the plants.

We ended the work shop, which looked at the “environmental problems” from the perspective of “agriculture”, by weeding the garden. It was quite unexpected to see all the participants being happy to do the weeding. This might be due to the long life we had spent in Isumi. When I saw the smiles of the participants, I felt these “joys” were something that was very important.