My Lamma Forums

[Lamma-Gung]

Have you heard about the 3-year tree planting project on Lamma starting this Sunday morning? Yes, me neither. Why have tree plantings recently become so secretive?

Following up on a little notice on the public bulletin board, this is what I found out so far about this most welcome initiative from the HK Conservancy Association and HK Electric, after quite a lot of prodding & chasing various people. Locals residents are invited to join in with the tree planting, but they'll have a lot of children and HEC staff working already. My chart of the location, see below:

[Alan]

The primary school is involved in this event, my daughter is signed up for it, but I didn't know where it was as they just said "near the beach", which from the map isn't very near at all. Having the ceremony at the football pitch is about as far from it as you could be, but convenient for the fat cats who won't bother to come to the site I suppose. Anyway, now I know where it is we can skip the ceremony and just go to the site.

This is apparently part of the gratuitous project to widen the path to Sok Kwu Wan, because of the terrible congestion tourists face when walking there. The engineers told me there would be some tree planting. Too bad there's no coordination between the various departments doing these plantings, not to mention no local input, but it's the same reason they dig up the same patch of concrete three times in a month to lay cables and pipes.

[Lamma-Gung]

Well, Alan, you're quite right with most of your comments, but can we look at the bright side here, for once?

Local school children planting trees and learning about nature conservation,
planting at least some local tree species this time,
a large, reputable HK non-profit organising the event,
HK Electric footing the bill,
a bit of extra income for our local VV drivers, transporting all these sapplings from the YSW ferry pier to the tree planting site today,
and the event not being a one-off, but an ongoing initiative, at least for the next three years.
What's there not to like about it?

I personally think that this is a great event and should be encouraged and widely promoted (which I'll be helping with). If the weather is bearable, I might even hike over there and shoot a few photos of this happy event. The officials officiating at the launch ceremony in the football pitch won't come along, I think.

ABLE won't do any more tree-plantings for the time being, so we should be glad that the HK Conservancy Association has stepped in and actually plants the trees in a place where most Lamma visitors can actually see and appreciate them close-up, on the trail from Hung Shing Yeh to Sok Kwu Wan; unlike the quite remote "Lamma Forest" planted by ABLE above Pak Kok.

So, who's coming along tomorrow?

[Alan]

[Alan]

We've just come back from the tree planting. It was a strange exercise, quite different from the SWAT team approach of the CED, planting 300,000 (?) trees with military precision and secrecy; this planted about 300 with maximum publicity and photography. One suspects the location was chosen because the backdrop of the power station for the pictures.

The trees planted are however all native, which is excellent. But most of those participating were off-islanders, from schools and HKE. The local primary school was limited to 15 students. In my view conservation requires some change of attitude of the residents, the Lamma people who mostly ignore and sometimes casually destroy our local environment. There was no attempt to reach out to them, just to get lots of photos for newsletters and possibly newspapers.

[Guy MIller]

Good to hear the trees are native.

If you go along to the next pagoda along the route to SKW, there was another tree planting excercise a few years ago - loads of conifers.

Having been to the place many many times & never seen a single bug or bird on any occasion here's hoping it's a step in the right direction.

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Talking of local attitudes - here's a novel one for you (if the refuse collection Dept are reading)
How about the refuse collector that empties the rubbish over the wall to save himself the trouble of taking it to the refuse collection centre.
Have only seen him do it once but new rubbish is piling up daily.

Think it's time to start taking people pics.

[Lamma-Gung]

[Alan]