Reduce / Reuse / Recycle

June 25, 2007

 

Children Experience Recycling Lifestyle with Traditional Windbreak Forest

Keywords: Ecosystems / Biodiversity NGO / Citizen Reduce / Reuse / Recycle 

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An event to offer children the chance to experience a traditional recycling-oriented lifestyle is held every summer in Sendai, northern Japan. Organized by the Sendai Igune Association, the "Igune School" event is designed to: 1) provide children with hands-on experience of a traditional lifestyle with igune, an island-shaped forest planted around traditional Japanese houses in the region; and 2) let children consider how they should live their lives. Igune plays an important role in fire and crime prevention. It also supplies material for pillars, flooring, fuel, or even chopsticks or soup bowls. Trees are replanted when they are cut down for such purposes.

The association aims to promote a recycling lifestyle with igune as traditional wisdom that should be effectively incorporated in our modern lives or in environmental education, or as learning tool to support people's lives in developing countries.

"Igune School" is held at "Horaguchi House," one of the important national designated cultural properties in the Omagari area of Natori, a city located south of Sendai. Participants experience a traditional Japanese lifestyle, including cooking rice using a traditional stove, making plates from bamboo, rice-cake making, craw-fishing and plant dyeing. In addition to the "Igune School," the association's activities include: 1) trading vegetables for food scraps that have been dried and compressed; 2) experience-based wet paddy rice growing; and 3) hosting the Tohoku Global Seminar to promote its activities and enhance environmental awareness on a world-wide level.



Posted: 2007/06/25 11:17:21 AM
Japanese version
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