ÇEVRE HIGHLIGHTS - 21.SAYI

Röportaj InterviewwithGüven İSLAMOĞLU 1) In your Green Nature program, you inform us about the destruction of natural beauties. As your philosophy, you chose the saying “If you protect nature, you protect people.”. What does this word mean to you? How did you start your career journey? Recently, it is necessary to redefine environmentalism. Current environmental groups all have their own goals. These goals are often more people oriented. They are meant to protect people, but I don’t have that concern. The process will take place whether we are present or not. Because nature has already gone through five extinctions and protected itself, it has no such problems. We are deceiving ourselves. That’s why we set out from the philosophy that if you protect nature, you protect people. The real question is will human beings be in nature or not? We’re trying to get it down there. For example, 65 million years ago, a huge meteor fell into the Gulf of Mexico. The Earth come from there to here, will it not be able to renew itself after this? That’s why we don’t have a problemwith nature, but we have to decide whether we can live in harmony with nature. The future for you, young people is different. I don’t think this future is a future to come so I do a lot of programs about nature conservation. 2) Do you think that social media and the sharing of people who are popular in these channels have positive effects on people’s awareness of nature? Do you think what these people share can lead us to different thoughts? Some people buy clothes to go out in nature, they say that if you are in nature, you should be like this in the wild. There is no such thing. A person living innature liveswith twopairs of regular shoes andone pair of trousers. The important thing is the information. People are starting to get scared. Why do they start to be afraid, if I go out to nature, it should be like this, I have to wear outdoor clothes... They make nature look like a bogeyman. When you make it look like a bogeyman, people are afraid to go out into nature. There are also some other popular people that share only the good things, but no one is after good things that disappear. Everyone is after beauty, but not after preserving what is the vanishing. This is a topic that bothers us a lot. Because there are thousands of people who share nature and travel photos, they have millions of followers. Open websites, you can’t find one bad thing, a mine, a vanishing mountain... Behind the 1 million photos they took, there are 2 million distorted photos, we don’t want to see them, that’s what we want to tell you. 3) Who is your primary target in awareness raising activities? What do you think might be the reason for the lack of awareness? What can be done to inform people better about it? Our target is people who have exaggerated consumption. For example, textile is one of the important problems for us because one out of six people in the world is a textile worker. As we dress too much here, thousands of people lose their lives. The happiness of one person in the world becomes the unhappiness of thousands. In fact, aperson’s happiness or unhappiness does not concern us much. If we live in a country and want to draw our future, we need to change these habits. The world will show us examples of this. The world is an organism, a living organism, and this organism also has a fever, so it will react just like a human. Our fear is those reactions. The world has already given this reaction five or six times, it may be 250-300 million years later, it may be 150 000 years later, but we have achieved this in the last 250 years. We are on the wrong path, and nobody wants to see the truth, so my philosophy is to tell about the nature first, to tell about the world, to tell about the planet we live on, and then to tell the problems because we don’t even know the planet we live on. 4) Do you think the stories told really changed people’s perspectives? What can you say about the harm plastics cause to nature? In fact, things change when you talk about the unknown. You start to explain, and a lot of things come into play, then we see that the Earth is not just a piece of land, a planet is not just a shell, we feel it is alive and this living organism has its own dynamics and will set them in motion after a while. This is our fear. Since these movements are clear, our aim is to get prepared for these movements and to work on this issue. There is no point in cutting down two trees here, because in return the man plants 1000 trees, but the destruction of trees in the Amazon forests affects us all because 30% of the oxygen comes from these forests and 70% from the sea, plankton. You can live on the garbage if you want, you can live on the plastic. Aplastic-free world is not possible, andwe are currently working on plastics. A lot of things are plastic, and spaceships are plastic because it’s lightweight material. Plastic was considered to be the culprit but actually the plastic falling to the ground is the problem. We can live on plastic, but not in chemically polluted water. 5) You do not present yourself as an environmentalist. What exactly is the difference between you and environmentalists? Do you think our young people’s work on nature is correct? While there was a water problem in Istanbul, 150 km of pipes came from Melen in 2009. We are currently drawing water to Istanbul from the Melen Basin. They cut down about 4.5 million trees to pull that pipe, now when you look from the plane you see that pipe bed. Who voiced the problem? No one did. While the İzmir highway was being built, nearly 7 million olive trees were cut down. What are we doing as humans? We are dealing with two trees that were cut down in Çırağan. Environmentalists also focus on this, but we are also against it because our goal is bigger. Some say, “You criticize us too much, we will plant trees.” I say don’t because you will do more damage with the vehicles you will use to go there. Sit in your seat, you will benefit us more. When you look at things like that, they sometimes get upset, but now we must look at it that way, so now young people have to look at things that way too. I often come across recyclable things made of garbage, but are there young people doing something for nature? There are. For example, a village boy was breaking the traps set by the hunters as his father was a hunter. That’s great because he works for nature, he works for animals. 6) We observe that the balance of the world is disturbed by the excess carbon footprints and the slightest increase in carbon emissions. What is the reason of this? Have you ever thought about how 350 ppm carbon can affect the world? 21% of the world is oxygen, that is, out of 1 million particles, 210 thousand of them are oxygen, 350 of them are carbon, when this number is 400, it affects the order of the world. In other words, I thought that only 1% of the world is changing the balance. I learned that our harmful effects are only a very thin layer in the last lower layer of the atmosphere, that is, in the part that we can see from the plane (maximum 10 km). All the greenhouse gases were there and this layer was umbrella thin. It’s like we’re holding an umbrella against the sun. Since this layer is a thin layer, any damage we inflict from below can change and disrupt the balance very quickly. That’s why 350 carbons affect the world so much. 91