Little Things Matter

By Tomas Sinicki
(Age 23, Lithuania)

I never cared much about environment. I thought people on a ship cruising in the middle of the sea protesting against pollution are useless and should be doing something more productive. I knew about Kyoto Protocol just enough to pass an introductory environmental science exam at university. I earned four credits for it. In fact, thanks to Kyoto Protocol I even won a public speaking competition in my first year at university. At that occasion, I managed to perfectly fake my concerns over the future of the Earth, which almost made my English professor cry. Four years later, things are different.

I was born in the most industrial part of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1982. With thirty thousand people and six huge factories, we believed we lived in a Lithuanian Manchester. All these factories are now empty, employ nobody and produce nothing. They were all closed down at the beginning of the nineties as a result of diminishing demand from former Soviet Union. Our neighborhood went from full employment to eighty percent unemployment. No wonder ordinary workers were protesting against the new order. At that time, nobody really cared that the river which is passing our suburb was so dirty that parents never allowed their children going by the riverside. Once I got a week of home arrest for trying to catch fish there. That was 1988 and I could not possibly catch anything. But about a week ago I caught a 20-inch trout from the same river.

Paradox as it may seem, the river cleaned up thanks to changing political and economic order. In a way, this clean river is a symbol of improved transparency and clarity that we achieved after the shift in our political system. We are living a happier life with less heavy production and less dirt around us. But as ever, there are areas in which we can improve.

Like many Lithuanians, I am obsessed with fishing. My favorite pond is situated about half a mile away from my home at the outskirts of Vilnius. In the summer, my brother and I go there almost every day. Two years ago, a furniture factory was built next to it. At the beginning of spring, they spilled some unidentifiable substances to the groove near it, but it soaked through to the pond. Fish died. My brother and I, and a bunch of childhood friends got upset. Suddenly, I found myself protesting, just like those "useless people on a ship in the middle of the sea", against pollution. A soon-to-become business graduate was protesting against a new venture which was bringing over a hundred workplaces to families of workers who lost their jobs at the beginning of the last decade – me, who was taught to always advocate entrepreneurship, investment and job creation!

Fortunately, we were very persuasive. We went to municipality, but that did not help. We called a Lithuanian television program called TV Help Line to help us clean the pond and threatened the factory their brand would suffer if we showed this on TV. That worked, and thanks to their financial support, we cleaned the pond. We bought several hundreds of small fish and let them into the pond to have it full like in the old days. This was an achievement that made me proud much more than the speech on Kyoto Protocol. After all, this was true.

Two years have passed and the director of the factory is a friend of ours. We suggested him using the pond for personnel management practices. Consequently, twice a year, the company organizes fishing competition among its staff members. This, they say, help them unify people and make their personnel stronger. Moreover, the manager went beyond mere use of environment for internal business purposes and became a spokesman on responsible environmental practices. He started to deliver speeches on environmental issues as a guest lecturer in business ethics at my business school. This surely can be thought of as a mere public relations campaign, but if his words can raise awareness of at least one young soul, I am willing to applaud it and will have nothing against an increase in demand for this man's production.

Two years ago, I suddenly understood that it takes one moment, one single instance to enlighten a person to change his mind for the better. I wish everybody to have this moment. I wish every single one of us to experience a few seconds in which something or someone strikes you so much that you start to care. Be it a polluted pond, a dead fish, a smoking chimney, burning fields of grass in early March, or a piece of garbage in the middle of a forest – as long as it can make you care, YOU will make the difference.