Junichirou Kusama , Yukiko Kusama(participants)
*Group name
Discover Nature
*Country/Region
Nagano Prefecture, Japan
*Type of Group
Others (Family, friends and their sisters.)
*Number of total members of your group/project
1 guardian, 1 junior high school student, 6 elementary school pupils
*Number of regular participants in activities
7 persons
*Characteristic of members
We try to participate in all kinds of community activities related to nature, and always do trash picking. After attending lectures or events, we discuss the issues together in order to develop our thoughts and ideas into further activities. All the kids in our group are lively involved in the activities.
*Theme(s) of your group/project
*Biodiversity, *Energy Issues, *Forests/Tree Planting, *Nature Conservation, *Wastes and Recycling, *Climate Change/Global Warming Effect, *Urban issues
*Missions and activities of your group/project
Doing trash picking, conducting water creature surveys, and attending lectures on fireflies. We also participated in a tree-planting workshop in Finland, which was organized by UNEP. We made a commitment, submitted to Nagano City, and are currently putting them into practice. The commitment can be found in the website of the city. Raising fund for tree-planting through usage of "my-bag" is part of our activities as well.
*Characteristics of the group/project activities
Many people believe that there's a lot of nature left in Nagano City. Yet, it is not correct. We aim to carry out projects to let other people know about environment activities and the importance of tree-planting.
*Most importnat way of thinking of your group/project for environment
The main objective of our project is to learn about nature from different aspects such as making research on fireflies, water creatures, nocturnal forests, and etc. We believe that studying broadly will eventually lead us to one direction where we
can think about our environment. Therefore, we strive to participate in as much environment-related lectures as possible.
Start with what you can do! We would like to be proud to show big forests to our children in the future saying "Look at it! All these trees are what your father/mother planted when he/she was your age".
*Major publications and articles
Shin-etsu Broadcasting (SBC): Our activities were picked up by a TV program called "Forefront of Ecology".
Our group's project is introduced in "Pal" (A community magazine of Nagano), "Econnection" (printed matter distributed by Nagano City), Nagano City Newsletter, Nagano City Website, Nagano Prefecture Website, and etc.
*What kind of group/project do you want to exchange for imformation and experience with?
Through firsthand experience of tree-planting, we learned that it is important to make an intense research on the target area so that appropriate trees will be planted. Therefore, we would like to get to know other groups that are also involved in tree-planting activities and exchange information to enrich our knowledge.
*Short message for exchange with other group/project
During winter time, we cannot go and see the cedar trees that we planted due to heavy snow. Thus we would like to know if there is anything useful we can do while waiting for spring to come. What is the ideal form of tree-planting that is really earth friendly?
*Impression of Children's World Summit for the Environment 2005 Aichi
The summit was a big opportunity for us to learn many things. Through attending the national meeting of wall newspaper last March, we got to know what kind of activities other Japanese children were engaged in. After that in July, our vision became even clearer by attending the summit. We were impressed to see that the commitment was really created by the children who participated. Now that we are back to Nagano, we proposed our own commitment to the city cooperating with some pupils of another elementary school, all together by nine people. We really appreciate this great opportunity!
*Others
It was a wonderful experience for us to participate in the tree-planting activity,
which took place on the same day in many places around the world. This was achieved
by the cooperation of our counterpart in Finland. We will keep on studying about
tree-planting. Our latest plans are to do weeding and ecology cooking with wild
vegetables. It would be great if we could get some advice from specialists regarding
forests, goshawks, and other creatures. We keep in touch with some children from
abroad that we got to know in the summit. Finally, we would like to humbly report
that we received an encouragement prize in the essay contest of the Daily Yomiuri.
*Contact person
Rieko Kusama
*Contact Address
472-1 kojima,Nagano-city,Nagano 381-0017 Japan
nyanta@janis.or.jp
