MAINTAINING GAIA

This Saturday saw the culmination of a two month WWF climate change campaign in Fiji with a big public event at Suva’s central park – Sukuna Park.
The EARTH HOUR event hosted a number of local entertainers, an excellent Meke performance (traditional Fijian dance), while the popular Hong Kong rugby 7s tournament was projected on a big screen and a lot of candles were lit as the lights around the park were switch off as a symbol to encourage people to think more about climate change.

The general consensus was that the campaign was a success – a large number of people turned out at the park with many more people across the country participating at home and over the two months leading up to Saturday the WWF team handed out thousands of climate change information leaflet.

Climate change receives near universal support in Fiji. Many people, especially those on the coast are already reporting changes in their environment like rising sea levels and with high profile events like the two destructive cyclones to affect the country this year, people are very receptive to the issue.

Earth Hour is a yearly event that started in 2007 and this year over 120 countries participated reaching an estimated one billion people.

Related Earth Hour posts can be found HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE - god it was hard work!

Veronique is a young French photographer who has been living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, and other places, for a number of years and she has recently completed a series of images on Nigerian Oil Pirates.

Think you’ll agree that she paints a pretty grimacing picture – she must be pretty wild to have taken this on and definitely deserves some respect for it.

You may remember the Fiji Island Voyaging Society from a recent post and you may remember that they are embarking on a 3 month voyage across the Atlantic soon.

To mark their upcoming departure the WWF organised a media event at the office under the guise of a film night to encourage support.

After a typical media conference, the guys from the Voyaging Society performed a bit of a cultural display for the cameras and everyone sat down under the stars with a beer to watch a nice cultural film about the New Zealand Maori – Whale Rider (2002).

The Earth Hour team also took the opportunity of an interview for a local TV programme – Talking Business.

The film In to the Wild is one that resonates with my sensibilities deeply and if you have not seen it I strongly urge you to. I have not yet met a person who does not relate to its romantic vision of separation, exploration and freedom.

It is, therefore, not surprising that I find the extraordinary photography and writing of Ben Speck in Riding the Rails truly touching.

I will not foreshorten Ben’s story by tying to explain, summaries or paraphrase it for you here, you will have to read it for yourselves, but what I can tell you is that is drew my smile high, dampened my eyes, and inspired my dreams – thank you.

I hope it does for you what it did for me.

If you have read this, you’d be utterly mad not to read every word of this and you may enjoy listening to this while you do.

Yesterday, I went to the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation’s recording studios with colleagues to record some radio sound bites for our Earth Hour campaign which the FBC are kindly going to air everyday from now until Earth Hour (27th March).

As any of my close friends will know, I DO NOT have a voice for radio. The dull dreary mono-tone grumble exiting my mouth that sometimes resembles speech could not be less appealing to radio listeners. So you will be happy to know, as will the FBC’s listeners, that I didn’t participate.