How I become an environmental freak
Posted by Kan Hong Hong , Thursday, August 19, 2010 11:10 PM
| I came from a struggling middle class family, not too poor if compared to some families with women who had to work on farms while carrying their children on their back, not as bad as that. My dad was a salesman for a hardware store and mom used to babysit children. We got through fine with the 'saving' mindset in every one of us in the family. We were taught to save whatever and whenever we can. My mommy used to teach us to collect rainwater and the water used to wash rice to water our plants later in the day.My mommy also taught us to switch off lights in all unoccupied rooms in the house. These were mom's simple instructions for the purpose of saving money. Now we do what we did because we have a different vision. The vision is to save our beloved Mother Earth. Being obsessively devoted to this issue, it used to make me feel upset over the critical deterioration of our Earth in less that 3 brief decades. I starting caring for the environment since I was a teenager. I was inspired by the cartoon we used to watch : Captain Planet..I still remember its theme song, my goodness...and the other day I just sang it to my children...I love it so much that I had used some of the phrases in my poem submitted to my school mag. |
My published poem inspired from the cartoon series 'Captain Planet'.  |
I had greater awareness when I started scuba-diving....seeing and hearing about coral bleaching made me so sad, that I decided to be eco-friendly in whatever I do. I've known some diving instructors who are super-aware on the environment, that inspired me too. Underwater living organisms are in great danger from cyanide fishing (a method using poisonous compound to fish) as well as the pollution caused by human...I found some countries actually use their sea to become garbage slums! Turtles are especially attracted to these slums as they see plastic bags as their main source of food, the jelly fish!! They end up choking to death or trapped in the tonnes of garbage....:( |
I love turtles. Knowing about turtles extinction (especially the ever-graceful princess, the leather-back turtle, the largest of its species, also called penyu belimbing in Malay) awakens me more. My school text books used to display pictures of leather-back turtles, that were still landing in Malaysian beach, 'Rantau Abang' in the 1980's. It only took less than 1 decade to make them disappear...started with people eating their precious eggs...:( and of course the disturbance they get during their process of laying eggs. Click here to read article courtesy from Yahoo! GREEN. Tune in to read more about more animals under threat. |
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Of course I remember you, Chee chong, thanks for being environmental aware!