World Environmental day 2010 – Activities in Melbourne

For last 9 years since ECO-V has been established I was actively involved in World Environmental day celebrations (However personally I believe that each and everyday should be an “Environmental day”, “Mother’s day” or “Father’s day” etc.etc.).
We were expecting to get involved with the annual exhibition that the Ministry of Environment of Sri Lanka organized. However I was told that this year it was not held .Since I am away from Sri Lanka Harsha and the team has decided to stay without doing any activity on that day.
However, I was very busy as usual in this environmental day too and lucky. I was able to get involved with some environmental activities in Melbourne on the World Environmental day. It was the first time for us to meet some nice volunteers of Riverland Conservation Society (http://riverlandconservation.org) thanks to Guy Dutson my friend from UK who (now he is in Vietnam) introduced me to these groups before he left Melbourne in early May. Both me and Thushara got involved with the volunteers of Riverland Conservation Society for a tree planting campaign. It was really strange for me as we planted many Eucalyptus and Acasia species which we do not want to plant in Sri Lanka. However those species are really needed here as they are native to Australia. We enjoyed the handy equipments they used to make the task easy in cold winter, way of conducting planting and how enthusiastically people of all age groups got involved in environmental campaigns. According to Sri Lankan experience it is bit difficult to bring the grown up to campaigns but youth involvement is at higher level.
On the 12th of June we all went again to Cox reserve in the near by council to plant some more trees where Boo and Nipu also really enjoyed getting involved with the tree planting campaign. Again we met few committed environmental enthusiasts who invited us for a meal after working in the rain and cold weather. Both events gave us more experience and nice and happy feelings of doing something good. No matter where you are you are a son or a daughter of Mother Earth so why not helping her to make a better place for all of us to live?