UK Uganda Network - Venture Scout Resources - The Environment

The Environment - Programme Ideas

1. What's the connection?

It is often very hard to understand how our actions can have an effect on the environment or on people in another part of the world. This game reveals some of the connections.

The first example shows how our consumer choices in this country are linked to the environment in Uganda, the others explore other issues.

'What's the Connection?'

A. What's the connection?
A fashionable bathroom and finding a cure for AIDS?

B. What's the connection?
Pineapples and custard for dessert and famine in Africa?

C. What's the connection?
Saturday sport in Northampton and skin cancer in Greenland?

Instructions to Leader:

1. Cut each of the statements above from the sheet, and stick on the front of a long envelope.

2. Cut each of the statements on corresponding 'links sheet' below into a discrete strip. Jumble the order. Insert in to the envelope.

3. Ready to play! Give each group an envelope and ask them (without opening it) to try to work out the connection. If they can great! Have them make up one of their own.

4. If not. Have them open the envelope and make links.

Links Sheets:-

A. A fashionable bathroom and finding a cure for AIDS?

a. You buy a mahogany loo seat.

b. The wood is imported from Uganda.

c. The timber is logged in virgin rainforest.

d. The rainforest is degraded irrevocably.

e. Many unique rainforest plants and animals disappear.

f. Undiscovered species are lost forever A vast medicinal resource-bank is destroyed.

h. A possible cure for AIDS is never found.

B. Pineapples and custard for dessert and famine in Africa?

a. Pineapples grown by big multi-national fruit company.

b. Fruit company buys up most fertile land for plantation.

c. Local farmers forced off fertile land.

d. Farmers occupy marginal land unsuited to agriculture.

e. Tree-cover and vegetation destroyed by over-grazing.

f. Rapid desertation of marginal land.

g. Desertification leads to even lower rainfall.

h. Drought/famine cycle established.

C. Saturday sport in Northampton and skin cancer in Greenland?

a. A football fan has a message.

b. It is sprayed on a wall.

c. The spray can used CFC propellant.

d. The CFCs are released into the atmosphere.

e. The CFCs dissolve the high ozone layer.

f. The sun's gamma rays are no longer screened by ozone.

g. The ozone layer thins, especially near the poles.

h. The gamma rays cause skin cancer, specially nearer the poles.

N.B. CFC stands for chloro-fluoro-carbons.