How You Can Save the Planet, by Hendrikus van Hensbergen

Author: Hendrikus van Hensbergen. Review by James Gordon

When young I read The Man who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, a visionary work from 1953. This was a decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, widely seen as having launched the environmental movement. I remember the exhilaration of reading about this man who quietly and single-handedly reforested his land, and the sorrow when I realised it was fiction. I also remember thinking: ‘Yes, but it could be true. It could become true.’ In How You Can Save the Planet, it has.

Lesein Metunkei, a Kenyan boy aged twelve, a keen footballer, vowed to plant a tree for every goal he scored. He upped it to eleven trees per goal, for the whole team. The idea caught on, and spread across Kenya. Now Lesein dreams of ‘Trees for Goals’ projects across Africa.

Lesein wasn’t the first. He got the idea from Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan professor who started the Green Belt Movement. It planted fifty-one million trees in Kenya, and also spread. Robert Pierson (www.jstor.org/stable/24461937) has written of how Wangari’s story brings to life the Quaker Advice: ‘Let your life speak’, showing how she too may have been inspired by an ancient Taoist story. The word can become flesh, and it has.

At fifteen, Londoner Amelia Lam was inspired to make birdfeeders out of old pencils. Again, her idea spread to her schoolfriends and beyond. Another Londoner, Kabir Kaul, used blogging techniques to create a map of wildlife areas across London, now a major resource. Deep Shah in Wales fought to stop a former military site, ideal for wildlife safehavens, being purchased by a property developer. He had worked hard to persuade the MP, who lost his seat at the last election. Deep is working on the new one…

Each of these stories of dedication jumps off the page alongside smiling faces. Through them, and other practical tips from his Action for Conservation project, Hendrikus van Hensbergen has created a true manual for young people, inspired by examples of concrete actions. There are twenty-nine in total, spelled out in minute detail, with beautiful drawings by Anita Mangan.

The reading age is given as nine to twelve, but it can be read by those over that – I am seventy-six! The actions are ones that parents, teachers and grandparents can become involved in.

In every case in the book, the initial inspiration was a personal encounter. Aditya Mukarji found a turtle with a plastic straw stuck in its nose. Lily Macfarlane was charmed by a sea view but was galvanised by reading that, within thirty years, the sea could contain more plastic than fish.

We can’t let that happen. Of course we have let it happen. It was on our watch (though the book is most courteous about saying so). These are young people living the truth, persevering in it, undeterred by indifference or even hostility. Change, Friends, is happening. This beautiful little book is both evidence and prescription.

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