Tree-hugger
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 1 » Good start » Tree-huggerMeet green-fingered teenager Emma Bowering
Photograph by Mark Hamilton
An environmental crusade couldn’t ask for a better cover girl than 15-year-old Emma Bowering. A bewitching combination of youth and passion, Emma is the motivational force behind school tree-planting project Plant It Forward.
For the past six years, she and fellow pupils from her former school, Kamo Intermediate in Whangarei, have toured the country giving primary and intermediate schools native trees.
“We give a school three trees, then they give a school three trees, and so on.” Thus, the nation’s playgrounds are re-forested and the students get an environmental wake-up call from their peers.
Emma was one of a group of students who became concerned when a bird count at their school in 2001 turned up only eight native birds. They raised the funds to plant 800 native trees and create a nature garden featuring a waterfall and worm farm. The results got everyone so excited they decided to take the idea on the road.
The team has now visited over 200 schools. Emma says the younger kids are easy to crack, but the older ones take a little more persuading.
“At first they don’t want to get their hands dirty, but when they start planting trees, they’re like ‘This is really cool, when can we do it again?’”
Her next goal: the concrete metropolis of Auckland.
Emma credits her Dad with her own environmental awareness. “He used to take us bushwalking and point out all the trees”. But for someone so young, she has done a lot of thinking, too. “If we keep cutting down trees, all the wildlife will disappear. I don’t want my kids growing up surrounded by buildings with Astroturf for grass. I want them to have trees to climb,” she says.
She reckons she has a good chance of making a difference. “Adults have got deaf to each other but when a child speaks up, they listen. And when an adult listens to you, you feel like you actually count in the world.”
Wed June 18, 2008 @ 02:42 PM
