Page 75 - EarthHeroes

people to raise money and plant trees by giving presentations and interviews, organising information events and hosting tree-planting parties.
Felix and his friends were angry that adults had known about climate change for decades but had failed to act, leaving future generations to live with the consequences. In 2009, Plant-for-the-Planet launched their ‘Stop Talking. Start Planting’ campaign, which featured fun photos of children holding their hands over the mouths of famous supporters. Their message was that adults talk
too much and do nothing about climate change, while children are actually making things happen. One image – with Felix and King Felipe of Spain – was on the front page of many newspapers, and the campaign went on to include musicians, athletes, scientists, politicians and actors, including Harrison Ford of the Star Wars movies, who Felix ran up to after seeing him in a hotel where he was attending a biodiversity conference. That same year, Felix spoke at UNEP’s youth conference in South Korea, where he finished by asking who would plant one million trees in their own country. Within minutes, hundreds of children from 56 different nations had joined him onstage. Plant-for-the-Planet was now a truly global movement.
Felix finally met his hero Wangari Maathai at a UN meeting in New York. She gave him a huge hug on learning how she had inspired him, and the two agreed to work closely together on a joint campaign. By May 2010, the one millionth tree had been planted by children in Germany, and soon after, the Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation was formally set up with the help of Felix’s parents. By February 2011, when Felix met Wangari again in New York at the UN General Assembly, over 12 billion trees had been planted by their joint efforts and there he proposed an ambitious new
target of one trillion new trees – 1,000 billion. That July, Felix visited Africa for a meeting at the UNEP headquarters. He
had hoped to visit Wangari during the trip, but sadly she was ill. When she died two months later, Felix was deeply affected but determined that children would continue her work to re-forest the world. That November, Plant-for-the-Planet officially took over responsibility for the Billion Tree Campaign. Now every company, citizen or government reports to the children the trees that they have planted or pledge to plant.
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