What needs to be protected? Charismatic nature.

This workshop started with a review about the previous week. At the end of last workshop Eco-patrol team got some homework, but not traditional ones. This time their task was to make a “Picture Collection” of each plastic waste they trashed during the week. As a result you can check the Photo-collage below. Our leftovers says a lot about our way of living, after one week each of the participants daily create plastic waste. After this discovery there was a common discussion about how to reduce the quantity of plastics in everyday life.

For this Saturday, the topic selected was Charismatic Nature. Nowadays scientific studies showed that the rate of species extinction has increased more than 100 times in the last 5 centuries and their natural habitats are decreasing faster than ever. Around the planet, a huge amount of animals, plants and their habitats are threaten.

What can we do about it?

On the workshop, through an energizer game, Eco-Patrol Participants were divided by groups to talk about this topic and on the way how protect them. Later on, they created a poster promoting one Adriatic threatened species in order to show the other the importance of protecting for that specific animals.  They were introduce to conservation theories like the umbrella species and others like keystone, flagship and indicator species which helped them to understand the position of different kinds on a global context.

It wasn’t easy to choose which species must be protected over the others, which was a good conclusion real life problem about conservation.

Afterwards, during 2 minutes participants wrote down how many National Parks, Nature Parks and other type of biological reserves they know in Croatia. The results of this competition were really good and most of them identify all of the eight National Parks. Near Murter Island many surrounding areas are protected. The nearest from Murter is Kornati National Park were some of them spent almost all of their summertime. Therefore it is very important remark how to behave in these areas. Which kind of action is allowed and which one is prohibit.

But this knowledge can be learned on a funny way. Eco-patrolers prepared a short role play. Still divided in diverse groups, some of them became employees of the national park, part of them became tourist and part of them were animals living in these areas. They played two variants of a situation. On the first on the tourists do not behave properly and soon it grows into chaos. They disturb the animals and dirt the nature without taking care of their environment.  Secondly there was a discussion about what needed to be changed in their behavior of each part and finally they performed a Second scene including the behaviors remarked on the discussion. At the end it turns into a good example how spend a nice time in harmony with nature and its habitants were everybody felt good.

For the next workshop, we will go further in the explanation of the importance of creating Protected Areas like National Parks or Nature Parks, etc. and introduce them how these areas are managed. How? We are going on a trip to Krka National Park to spoke about this topic with rangers on the field.