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Since the 1980s, Jeunesse Park has been a pioneer of the green movementLong before the rest of us became aware of the Inconvenient Truth of how we were negatively affecting our planet, Jeunesse Park was already trying to fix it.
A pioneer of the green movement, in the 1980s when the rest of the world was only thinking about wildlife conservation, Park’s mind was already set on the big picture of climate change.
She was having meetings with industry heads by that point, trying to get them to implement policies to offset their carbon emissions.
But in the 1980s, all Park was getting was blank stares; no one knew what she was talking about. The basic knowledge to even grasp the problem was simply not part of the public conscience yet.
But she was not the kind of person to bang her head against a wall that she knew was not ready to budge. Instead, she became creative and found an inventive solution to a problem that no one knew they had.
Park changed tack and started presenting her organisation, Food & Trees for Africa, as a means to enable social upliftment. Poverty was a problem that people could understand.
Today, Food & Trees for Africa runs a number of programmes that teach people how to produce their own food and to plant trees to beautify their neighbourhoods. This was positive work, which was easier to present to sponsors and which made more sense to them.
And, while in truth she was helping people toward a better life by helping them battle poverty, she was also subtly preparing them to accept the fact that they had to make bigger changes in their lives, when the realisation of climate change finally dawned on the masses.
Leadership spoke with Park about her work and the changing landscape of the green movement.
Were you always someone who had an environmentally aware nature, or was it something that came to you later in life?
It’s something that’s always been with me from a very, very young age. I was born in South Africa, but grew up in the northern England coal-mining villages; my father was a Yorkshireman.
So I was very aware of pollution from the start. It was very bad.
When we moved to South Africa, all my father talked about were the beautiful blue skies and the vast spaces and the fresh air. So I was aware from the beginning.
I didn’t get involved with the environment as a calling, or a profession, until toward the end of the ‘80s.
In the early ‘80s, the “Save the Whales”, “Save the Rhino”-type of sentiment was fairly prominent, but an overarching “Save the Planet” theme was not in place yet. How did you come to think so much broader?
At the end of 1989, when I moved back to South Africa, as Nelson Mandela was about to be released, I really wanted to do something meaningful for this country because I was born here.
At the time, South Africa was already a leader in animal conservation and the environmental movement at that time, but heavily focused on wildlife. I found that to be not too meaningful for the majority of the population, living in really barren and degraded townships.
That was when you started Food & Trees for Africa in early 1989?
Actually, the organisation launched in 1990, and back then it was just called Trees for Africa.
Did that name change reflect an awareness on your part to move beyond simply the environment?
I was very fortunate to travel; and in travelling, going back to the same place again and again, I saw environments degraded within a matter of years. In the late ‘60s, the Mediterranean was heavily polluted.
I understand that we are of this earth and that this planet has limited resources, and I can’t believe how arrogantly we use and abuse them.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, not many people were thinking this way. Do you think of yourself as a pioneer of environmental awareness?
No, there were many before me – but I think in South Africa, yes.
When I started Trees for Africa, it was to address climate change as well as uplift disadvantaged communities. But when I started, I went around with that message, for example, going to the chief executive of Eskom and asking for one cent to be added to every electricity bill and use that money to plant trees to sequestrate the carbon dioxide emissions.
In those days, we were in the top five in terms of harmful carbon emissions, but no one even knew what I was talking about. So I had to drop climate change from my pitch and rather talk about community development in order to attract the necessary funding and the attention.
No one was thinking around natural environments, urban environments and environmental education awareness on a broad scale.
So my idea was, in 1990, to address climates and to uplift the quality of life for the disadvantaged through greening because everyone can plant, or look after a tree, or conserve a tree.
Also, with an understanding that we couldn’t do anything unless there was awareness and education, and that the planting of trees was a really good way to produce really broad environmental awareness and education – all the way from recycling compost from the earth, all the way up to global warming.
Was this five- to 10-year period not particularly frustrating for you? You were talking to people and you knew their actions were indirectly damaging the environment, but they simply did not understand the problem.
Yes, it was a bit frustrating but, also, you can look at it both ways: it was also greatly challenging and I was extremely excited because I had finally found my passion in life – so it became a mission for me.
It was very difficult to get people to fund trees. People were not, in those days, anywhere near as aware as they are now.
But my core of this thing is education and awareness; and the older I get and the longer I am in this, the more I understand that without the education and awareness, we are absolutely wasting our time. We needed to get to this critical massive consciousness as fast as possible, to effect the changes that we need if we are going to have a future species on this planet.
How important or how encouraging was the movie, An Inconvenient Truth? I think, for most people, that was some kind of touchstone.
I think we are just really immature as a species, and yes, Al Gore really helped to make this topic sexy.
So in 2006, we could actually take climate change back off the shelf, dusted it off and we launched the very first South African carbon calculator. You can source it from our website (www.trees.co.za). It’s a piece of open-source software that can be used by anyone.
We were then able to start focusing back on climate change, which had been our aim originally.
It (the movie) has been a great catalyst, particularly in motivating world leaders in government to pay attention to this very real threat that is affecting us all already.
However, there is still a huge lack of awareness and a lack of action and an enormous lack of political will, which is very disturbing.
So why do you think that is? It seems to make good economic sense to actually “go green”, as it were.
Well, they are trying to get their heads around that now with talk of a new green economy.
But for me, it’s just common sense. It’s obvious: If you use up everything today, then what do you leave behind? Do we not care about our children and their children and the future of the species?
Why do you think there is this resistance then?
I think people are lazy, but also I think a huge part of it is that they’re completely uninformed.
And I think that we live in a very self-centred, selfish and greedy society.
So what we actually need, is sound leadership, with a thorough understanding of what the problem is and a willingness to tackle it. Or is it more than that?
Yes, more than that. We need to educate our children all the way through to adults to corporations. Each one of us impacts on the planet, and that affects us all.
So education and, yes, leadership are good things.
You have been doing this for 20-plus years now. In your opinion, is the situation improving?
I am more positive that there is more awareness and there is more talk about these things.
There is now a greater sense of urgency about the planet.
Yes, I’m very optimistic.
Zaid Kriel
