Kerala Wakes Up to the GreenDream

Written by Caroline / 09 April 2009 / Read Caroline's latest blog entries.

In a week of travelling through God's Own Country, the coastal paradise of Kerala, we discovered one of the greenest states, the most lush landscape, the most beautiful coasts, with so much at stake. When we spoke about rising sea levels in Trivandrum and Ernakulam, we were not talking about distant lands, we were talking about this auditorium, that student's home, this fishing communities' harbors. Students got it. They spoke to us about the rising issues of waste, pollution of waterways, increasing traffic and air pollution, and the increasing temperatures in cities particularly due to tree felling for road widening.

Kerala is not just a land of green threats. It is a land of the GreenDream.

Arun and Varun Raj, two unstoppable twins, along with their best friend Vinuju have started GreenDream as an initiative to inspire and engage youth across the state to take action on climate change. In partnership with IEEE, an international engineering institution, they've gotten groups started on ten campuses across Kerala, with more than one thousand members across the state, most of whom participated in our Climate Week activities, including trainings on university campuses, visits to solutions, and late night discussions about international climate policy!

It was most exciting to hear and see what students are doing on their campuses. So many universities already did have biogas installed in all of their hostels or had started recycling water from sewage treatment plants to water their gardens. Students had come up with innovative ways to decorate the venues without creating waste -- green events! Most campuses painted their own banners or used recycled construction paper to create the designs. On our second day, we visited students who -- literally in the midst of exams -- had designed the IEEE sign above out of soda cans. Students had arranged poster competitions before we arrived, most of which told the messages even more clearly than we could have in our presentations! Especially, of course, that "each person, each idea makes a difference". Students in Kerala were ready to take action as well. Entire rooms of hundreds of students agreed to take on the Narayan Murthy Challenge -- to use less water than Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys Technologies Limited, one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs in India's history. For his entire life, he has used no more than one half bucket of water to bathe daily, and while no student in Kerala could say the same, we all agreed to try. To try - in this one way - to beat Narayan Murthy! To take on his challenge!

All across Kerala, we found people who were much more in tune with the land around them than in our cities of Mumbai (Ruchi and Rashi) and Delhi (Caroline). We visited one of Kerala's most famous temples in Oachara, where the entire temple is outside, designed around the massive banyan trees throughout the area. In the fishing communities of Oachara, we met people who relied entirely on the land for their livelihoods.Even in small ways, it felt like we were closer to the land around us. We were surrounded by green trees, ate honey straight from the honeycomb, and swam in cool rivers in which the bottom could be seen clearly.

On our very last night in Kerala, we visited the Cochin Renewable Energy Park, where we found some old solar cookers, as well as a ton of litter all over the ground -- ice cream wrappers and popsicle sticks. Vinuju said, "Let's clean it up." I'll be honest, it seemed like a daunting task. There were three of us at that point, and acres of area full of litter, on a dark night when we just wanted to be together and talk about solutions.... But what hypocrisy! Vinu reminded us that we were here to BE the solution, so we started. We cleaned up a small area of the park, and then started singing! A few young people joined us, and even more when Vinuju asked them, "If three of us can do this much in ten minutes, imagine how much we could do together."

This message was the message of the GreenDream team. If three boys with a vision for a new Kerala could mobilize one thousand young people in three months, how many people can one thousand people mobilize? How many parks can those thousand clean? How many trees saved from being cut? How many coal plants switched to renewable energy? How many campuses can become carbon neutral? How many tons of waste can be composted instead of landfilled? The answers are as large as any one person can dream. But these GreenDreams are no longer fantasies, they are well on the path to reality, as the young people of Kerala wake up to dream together.