Saving Paradise

Category: Heritage Gardens | Date: Oct 15 2009 | By: savingparadise

Today is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the world are writing about the single subject of climate change in order to draw attention to it. This post was inspired by members of twenty two School-based Wildlife Clubs of Seychelles who, through replicating the Heritage Garden model, are showing that growing and consuming locally is possible.To celebrate World Food Day tomorrow (16 October 2009), the Heritage Garden at Roche Caiman will be officially opened. It is a model for the Heritage Gardens project whose aims are, among others, promoting the love, nurture and propagation of traditional plants (edible and medicinal) by young people thereby passing on a rich biological and cultural heritage and encouraging a return to ways of sustaining life that were beneficial to people, the environment and left the least impact. See related post below for more information.

Heritage Gardens are also being used to encourage people to reduce the country’s ecological footprint by growing foods locally. Seychelles has limited land for agriculture and the country imports almost everything it needs. An ecological footprint is a measure of sustainable living, and by this measure we are not sustainable at all. We contribute to climate change because the imports arrive in ships and planes that produce global warming gases. The Heritage Gardens are intended to help reduce our ecological footprint by encouraging people to have pride and joy in producing and consuming locally.

So far Wildlife Clubs in 22 schools have small to medium gardens based on the Heritage Garden model. They are demonstrating that it is indeed possible to produce food locally.

Tags: heritage gardens project, wildlife clubs of seychelles