24 February 2006
Maya, RW volunteer deckhand, Japan
Hi, my name is Maya, I am 23-years-old and I grew up in the countryside of northern Japan, surrounded by rice fields.
I now live in Tokyo where I work as a waitress in a Thai restaurant and during summertime I work on organic farms. In college, I studied media communications.
I first became passionate about forests while staying in Tasmania with someone who was volunteering at an environmental centre. She took me to visit the local forests. This had a big impact on me. I learnt from being in the forest how well ecosystems use resources, how nothing is wasted. Leaves compost down to become fertiliser for growing trees and dead trees become habitats for new plants. But humans waste so much of their resources. We need to learn from the forest, we used to live as part of the environment without destroying it, and can again.
I joined a forest rally organised by Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society and there I found out that it was Japanese who are using wood-chip exported from Tasmania. I was shocked that it was my country destroying this forest and felt people at home needed to know about it. This was when my interest in the forests campaign grew.
Back home in Japan I started volunteering for Greenpeace, doing office work and helping out with events and actions.We visited the paper companies that use woodchips from Tasmania and showed the staff huge, actual-size pictures of the trees. We also handed out fliers to passers-by while the campaigners spoke to the company representatives. We had a good response; some of the companies stopped using Tasmanian woodchips.
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Comments
happy birthday maya
love you always and forever
joe
Posted by: joe at April 11, 2006 7:55 AM
