Enviroment

How youth can help to save the future

Wake up and realize that it´s we who have to start caring about the future now, because we are the ones that are going to live there. There are actually
a lot we can do. So if you have some interest in your future life, then you
have the interest of reading this article too.

There is a "youth Environmental parlament" here in Sweden which have the purpose to make the youth more concerned aboute the environment. The parlament is in Stockholm and they have seminars all around Sweden where they present the mselves and what they do. They also tell us what we can do in the schools and our surroundings.
In March, our schools environmental group , which we are included in, went to one of those seminars.
The seminar was about different environmental projects which YEP are involved in, such as Agenda 21 and kapitel 25(I hope you know what that is), Fältbiologerna (the Nature, Youth and Environment) and Det Naturliga steget (the Na tural Step).
They also talked about the "mission" and the "challenge" which is held every autumn. Then teenagers in Sweden work a couple of days with different environment missions e.g. work with environment crimes and check what clothes are environmentally marked (i n Sweden we have marks as "the Swan" and "the Greenpoint"). There is a deadline for the missions and after the missions are done you can do a paper which concludes the articles that we have done about the missions and then you send them to S tockholm. There the YEP decides who has done the best mission and then you can win a reward.
The reward is money that is going to be used to improve the conditions in school.

Explainings for some words:

Agenda 21

It's a plan for the 21st century. This means that you should have completed
some environmental aims until the year 2100.
It's a common agreement between several countries. The agreement was held in Rio De Janeiro.
Kappitel 25 (chapter 25) is about children´s & youths right to influence on the environment. 30 % of the people on this planet consists of youths and you
should let us, who one day will "inherit the earth", have the right to have our opinion s h eard. Unfortunately chapter 25 is quite forgotten.

If you want to know more about Agenda 21 you can look at this page: www.agenda21.se/sverige/index.htm

Fältbiologerna

It's an association for teenagers with 5000 members.
They have several activities for teenagers such as hikings and forest tours.

Det Naturliga steget

A foundation which educates in how to use the resources of the earth in the
right way.

Our school

In our school we have made a special plan to follow the Agenda 21.
We´ve got large milkpackets instead of small ones and we use articles made of
paper instead of plastic.
The teachers try to copy on both sides to save paper.
To save the electricity we´ve only got the lights on when it´s nessesary.
Also, we´ve got special environmental educationing for the teachers, and special
days when the theme is the environment.
As we said we have an environmental group, which includes five persons. We have meetings every other week. As a start we´ll try to do things like getting the school to buy food wich is environmentally marked. We will also try to make the school buy things that you can recycle and put bottle banks and paper recycle boxes more avaliable, for example in the cafeteria.

This article is written by: Linda Larsson, Jessica Andersson, Hanna Rydström and Stefan Lundmark.