My Life, Off Course...with Jes Ebrahim Izaidin
by Richard Pillar

It all began for me with the turtles. Did you know that a turtle egg buried deep in the sand will hatch a male; but if the egg sits closer to the surface then the turtle inside will be born female? I was seven years old when I learned this on an animal conversation program run by Bukit Damansara primary school.

Every year we'd campaign to save a different animal. One year it was elephants, the next rhinos, and then sharks and every year my passion grew for saving these creatures and their environment.

When we helped the primates it frustrated me that people complained about these so-called 'urban monkeys'. Don't forget that Kuala Lumpur was their habitat first and it's our city limits that are encroaching on their land, not the other way around.

My parents recognised my interest in saving the planet and supported me fully and so together we found more and more environmental projects for me to get involved with.

I first got picked up by the United Nations in 2004 and I was sent to America to attend the International Children's Conference on the Environment, as a Malaysian delegate.

For an 11-year-old boy this was a great honour but I didn't let it go to my head and made sure that we all focused on tackling the important issues that were raised during the talks.

Our main concern was finding the right balance between living in harmony with nature and at the same time using cutting-edge technology to conserve the environment.

I was in my early teens and was better able to understand the crimes against nature that were being committed in my own back yard, such as deforestation through illegal logging and the polluting of the Straits of Malacca.         

I had always thought that when a tree is cut down you just needed to plant a seed right? Well, I was wrong. I learned that it doesn't work like that and you actually need to plant between four and ten seeds to ensure that a healthy tree grows in its place.

I was soon elected to be a Junior Board member for Tunza International - Tunza means "take great care" in Swahili - who sent me all over Malaysia to participate in conservation projects and help secure the future of our age-old forests.

My trip down the Kinabatangan River was one of the most enchanting experiences of my life and we saw colonies of fireflies dancing on the moonlit water and witnessed a herd of Pigmy Elephants taking a late night mud bath. It all went into our documentary promoting eco-tourism in Sabah. 

Not only is the jungle beautiful but it's also a medical treasure chest. It turns out that there are many types of herbs and plants that are effective in the treatment and the potential curing of global epidemics such as HIV and terminal cancer.

With this in mind it became our number one priority to save the trees so we began campaigning for World Tree Day. Five million Malaysian school children supported our memorandum which was submitted to the Prime Minister himself.

30,000 trees were planted in schools across the country but somehow it wasn't enough. We needed a new approach. Our message wasn't being heard and the time for change was imminent.

So, following in the footsteps of some my personal heroes, such as Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens, we formed the Tree Theatre Group to express our concerns through a medium that everyone could relate to - music and dance.

Instead of paying our dues in the battle of the bands, we got the chance to perform our eco-play called 'The Last Tree On Earth' at a conference in Stavanger, Norway.   

"Only fools cut the air, we breathe in,
Only fools cut the trees that feed him,
Remember, together we can make a stand,
Hand in hand, to save a tree is to save humanity" 

Nowhere did they take our message more seriously than in Kampala, Uganda where we aided a project to plant 50,000 trees. Visiting Africa was a real eye-opener and made me feel so lucky to be Malaysian yet so bad for taking it for granted.  

I've been an active environmentalist for ten years now. This comes as a surprise to most people when they realize that I'm actually still only in high school.

2010 is the UN's International Year of Biodiversity and it is an important year, not just for me and my studies, but for people all over the world. I hope you'll all be doing your part. I know I will.