An environmentalist has urged people to teach school-going children the importance of planting trees at school and their homes as a way of conserving the environment.
Founder and CEO of Revitalize Homes and Gardens, Susan Rodrigues, on Wednesday said the best way to teach children about environment is by assigning them to care for trees, documenting growth progress and encouraging them to motivate each other to plant more trees.
She said her company will be visiting different primary schools to enlighten learners on the need to grow trees.
Rodrigues says the move will support and impact the tree-planting exercise that was started by President William Ruto last December with the aim of planting 15 billion trees by 2032.
“We will teach children how to take care of the trees they plant and encourage them to document the journey of the trees growing as they themselves grow and graduate from one class to the next,” she said.
“When a child has a document showing trees planted, those trees cannot even be cut down, meaning they will remain for years” she added.
Rodrigues urged parents to complement what they enlighten their children about environment for the sake of country's future.
The environmentalist said whatever children are taught in school will rarely be forgotten and they will live protecting the environment even after they grow up.
“The impact of the training we have started will see children becoming environmentalists on their own since they will know the importance of conserving the environment” she noted.
Rodrigues spoke at St Paul’s Nursery School in Githunguri in Kiambu county where she donated tree seedlings.
She later led her organisation to Joypot and Kamondo primary schools.
Rodrigues commended environment stakeholders and partners for supporting the government to plant trees in its bid to achieve 30 per cent tree cover by 2032.
She was accompanied by Joseph Kiarie, a retired forester, who said most of the schools they visited had conducive environment for tree growing.
Kiarie applauded Rodrigues for initiating pupils' involvement in tree planting saying the government must come in and assist schools with seedlings to grow their own seedbeds.
"If schools had seedbeds, the move would ease the initiative to move a bit faster. However, we applaud Revitalise Homes for providing seedlings to be planted by the pupils. We do not want to see the project stopping after the Revitalise Home have left, we want to see continuity” Kiarie said.
