Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

I have lived most of my life in a corner of paradise. My hometown, Covasna, is barely larger than a village, surrounded on three sides by tall Carpathian forested mountains, in the heart of Romania. Every part of that town is twenty minutes on foot away from complete wilderness, where brown bears forage for food with their young, boars leave their marks from digging up roots, falcons and eagles hover overhead, and local people collect berries and mushrooms to preserve for the winter. A huge area is virgin forest. A few kilometers away from town are places never explored by people. In the twelve years I lived there, however, people have progressively been littering more, as tourists would come and have their picnics. More and more houses are being built ever closer to the edge of the forest. Young people have been growing more and more ignorant of their surrounding forests and lived many years hardly ever setting foot in them. I realized they weren't learning the necessary ethics about how to take care of them.

My parents own a private kindergarten, which, occasionally, can hold groups of older children to learn English. I took this opportunity last summer to organize a two-week English-Ecology teaching program, and, with the help of my mother, we explained the importance of protecting wildlife, telling them about endangered animals, and prepared lessons about different habitats.

The project included two excursions. The first trip was at a nearby lake, where we looked at wild animals with our binoculars - some of us for the first time - and tried to identify the birds with our bird books. We've seen Mallard ducks, gulls, divers and their young, coots, storks, scaups, even an otter.

The second trip was into the nearby forest, where we all picked garbage left behind by tourists, and explained how the garbage could damage the habitat. Many of the children viewed this activity as lots of fun, and afterwards we walked deeper into the forest to explore it.

Back at headquarters, we made two posters, one with endangered species, another about protecting our local wildlife, which the kids drew by themselves, and which we still have on display at the kindergarten, where parents can see them, too. We added information about how people can contribute and help endangered animals. I am hoping this can be a regular activity that can take place each year, teaching the kids more and more about global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, deforestation, pollution and, most of all, solutions, that each one of them can learn to do on their own, and, eventually, teach their parents as well. I am hoping we can reach out to as many young people as we can, before they do more permanent damage to our already decaying planet.