Oh Good Lord, what fresh lunacy is this?
22 July 2009 – United Nations peacekeepers are no strangers to working in some of the world’s most hazardous regions, and they are now helping out on a new battlefront: combating climate change.
“The care and protection of our environment is everybody’s concern,” said Lieutenant Colonel Um Bello, who heads the Alpha Company of the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL).
He is leading his troops in a new exercise: planting 1,000 trees in the country’s west this year, as part of the tree-planting campaign of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which seeks to plant 7 billion trees – or one for every person in the world – by the end of 2009.
“As a contingent, we have resolved to join efforts with the international community” and others to ensure that the war against climate change “is fought, won and our planet Earth is saved,” he said.
Well, it’s pretty quiet in Liberia these days, I suppose. Anywhere else the UN has troops twiddling their thumbs? Why, yes:
Blue helmets have already planted nearly 30,000 saplings in 11 peacekeeping missions worldwide, in countries including Timor-Leste, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Georgia and Lebanon.
That’d be the Congo that’s teetering on the edge of chaos while the UN mission is still 3,000 troops short? The Georgia from which the UN was just expelled? And the Lebanon where 14 peacekeepers were wounded this month in rioting after two Hezbollah arms dumps blew up? Any other trouble-spots requiring landscaping?
For its part, the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID, has embarked on a scheme to plant 1,000 seedlings at all of its compounds in the war-ravaged Sudanese region by December.
What are we planning here, to fight the janjaweed off with sticks? Sod the war on climate change and go on patrol, I say. Someone else can handle the tree stuff…
Groups such as the World Organization of the Scouts Movement, with 28 million members in 160 countries, committed to plant 65,000 trees as well.
