Actions for Green Earth
Hello, I’m Paul Thomas Morijo!
I am a founder and the director of a small non profit organization called Loliondo Actions for Green Earth, an organization we founded on August 2017, working in Tanzania especially in Ngorongoro district among Masai community. This organization has a mission to create a society that takes environmental conservation and protection as its first responsibility.
I was born and grew up in a remote village called Sakala in Ngorongoro district in Tanzania where wildlife was highly protected and conserved. Our main economic activity was pastoralism and back then you didn’t see forests being destroyed or animals being killed but in the last 20 years everything has changed…
People shifted from livestock keeping to agriculture and became dependant on forest products for charcoal, firewood, building materials and killing animals for meat, which brought the mass destruction of wildlife in general. I used to take our cattle for grazing but the forests were so dense that we didn’t go deeper to the forests however, due to the change of weather patterns and human activities the dense forests are being destroyed and forest areas continue to be reduced by the enlarging of farms.
I started to understand the impacts and consequences of climate change in 2005 when I was a young boy. We experienced severe drought in our area and we lost so many cattle, rivers dried and ways of life changed. All of these were caused by climate change made worse by destruction of forests. So since then interest toward conservation became my passion. I felt that if action was not taken everything will perish. Life will be even more difficult since our family’s economy based on our cattle, and we can’t get rains or quality air without healthier forests.
The information about climate change and global warming were highly spread by global news networks especially radio and television (BBC). Until 2005 I had not heard of climate change but seeing and hearing about impacts brought on by climate changes like drought, floods and raising of global temperature was the most devastating news I had ever heard.
When I was in secondary school 2006-2012 I started my mission to plant trees and educate my fellows students on how climate change was affecting different areas and affecting people’s ways of life. Through Eco clubs I tried to share the importance of every single and small action to protect and conserve the environment.
In 2017 soon after graduating from collage I saw that there is a need to have an organization that will give my friends and I wide scope to take part in, and involve many people in, conservation. With seven other friends I founded this organization which focuses mainly in planting trees and spreading the awareness to the younger generation. With this organization we have planted 20,000 trees and spread the words to 17 schools (both primary and secondary) of at least 5000 students.
In 2018-2019 we initiated a project called Tree planting and conservation education. In this project two things were done: planting 8000 trees and raising climate change and environment conservation awareness to the community members in Loliondo, Sakala, Wasso and Ng’arwa villages.
In 2020 -2021 we launched another project called One Student One Tree which aims to plant 50,000 trees while providing conservation education to the students and young generation in Ngorongoro district in the Northern part of Tanzania. Ngorongoro is famous since we have Ngorongoro Crater within this district, the young generation has to be raised and equipped with conservation spirit since they are our tomorrow leaders and citizens. We feel it is so importanta to be imparting them with conservation spirit and preparing them to take part in the protection and conservation of our environment while they are young, but also when they grow to be elders. Through this project we planted 12,000 trees with students in different schools here in Ngorongoro district. We are continuing with this project and expected to end in June 2022 -though these two year has been very tough years because of Covid-19 which affected our friends from around the world who were our main supporters and donors.
I have faced many challenges while doing this work of saving mother planet. There are some leaders who still don’t agree with the fact that climate change is caused by human activities therefore when forest destructors are caught they don’t take action to punish them. In my country we still don’t have policies that give proper/enough attention to conservation.
The other challenge I’m facing, as are most of the new and young organizations, is to get trust from big and global conservation organizations when applying for the funds for projects. They have difficult conditions which are good in order to make sure the funds they give go to the said projects, but these conditions are sometime difficult for small and new organizations like ours to meet. For instance they have a criteria that the work experience of an organization has to be at lest a minimum of 3 years and at the same time they ask to show that you worked with a well known organization in previous projects. This has made it really difficult for us to get support from organizations. Instead we rely solely on small individual friends donations and support. The big conservation organizations have to seek a good way to help these small organizations to keep them growing rather than leaving them dying… though this can’t demoralize our organization spirit since even those big organizations were once new and small like ours so we will keep doing to our ability.
Working to protect and save our mother Earth has made me the man who I am today. I’m very happy to be a part of the solution, our planet is everything to human life. I’m calling every one to act now to be part of the solution since every single and small action counts.
PAUL MORIJO WEBSITE: https://loliondo-for-green-earth.jimdofree.com
Please donate to support Paul’s wonderful work in Tanzania!
“Failure of COP 26 to come up with a solid solution toward climate change can't make us stop taking actions for a better tomorrow for us and for the coming generation. Stop waiting for the politicians to act, change starts with you.” November 20th, 2021