To what extent are environmental concern a priority among Tanzania Communities?

Introduction;

The matters of environment are very crucial to human life, since all human beings are depending upon environment to satisfy their needs even the environment is all about depending to human in order to be well protected as well as to be well utilized for both humans and environment to survive, In Tanzania there is the special ministry that is dealing with the matters of environment and it has under the office of the Vice President of United Republic of Tanzania , this ministry is quietly dealing with environmental matters in order to be going in parallel with the United Nations order on how to keep environment for the better survival of all humans and other animals in the settings.

Definition of key terms;

Environment may be referred to as the general surroundings that are within our home settings and other specifies areas like all water bodies, air, earth surface, plains, lands, deserts, storms, weather conditions and climatic factors. As well as the wilderness pact at large, for it consists of things that are provided by nature for it includes physical conditions of life (Shankar Rao C.N 2000).

Community is any circle of people who live together and belong together in such a way that they do not share this or that particular interest only but a whole set of interests hence the community comprises of the two major elements that are localities as well as community sentiments (Manheim, 2000).

 Community is a social group of any size whose members resides in a specific locality, share government and have common cultural and historical heritages.

Environmental concern, in general may be referred to as the awareness of those matters relating to environmental protection, having knowledge and education for the betterment of environmental survival, in genera in our country there is small percent of this knowledge and awareness towards the matters relating to environment, Environmental concern is impriority to Tanzanian communities due to the following elaborations;

The shortage and sometimes absence of dumping areas, this is among of the bottlenecks that faces mostly Tanzanian communities, Since most of areas especially in urban settlements where the people are nucleated as the result areas of dumping garbage’s are few which is caused by poor planning, furthermore this is caused by the increase of the number of people in various communities.

Inadequate technology especially in the matters of recycling the wastes as we may find the environment is full of plastic bags and other plastic bottles, environmental concern in Tanzanian communities can not be quite good just because of the societal tendency of seeing that dumping wastes in any area is a legal thing.

Poverty is another factor that initiates people to be off less concern towards the matters of environmental matters, since the same poverty makes people to employ themselves in the sector of environmental conservations, as we are able to see that there are various companies that are legally registered to perform the task of environmental cleaning, for example around Teofilo Kisanji University there is Dowima investment company that is dealing with cleaning the environment around our University since it may sometime cause the notion to community that dumping wastes in any area is quite a simple thing just because there are special people to perform the task of cleaning, then also the point of poverty rises due to the presence of the need of charcoal as the means of sourcing energy, even in now days the Environmental conservation agencies are emphasizing on the use of alternative means of energy but the communities are still unable to use such alternative means of energy,  for example those trees that used to make charcoal that we always use, the question comes, are those trees that used to make charcoal replaced?

Societal conservatism is another factor that forces the communities to be less concerning on the matters relating to environment, the theory of conservatism is basing on ones ability to know what he or she knows is more perfect than what he or she is given education, this is directed to most of Tanzanian communities, for example people may be given education but they can not be able to implement on the matters that education is given, so environmental concern will never be well implemented if the community is still conservative.

Large numbers of people in Tanzanian communities are doing the activities on the issues of agriculture as well as pastoralism, where people are cultivating near water resources and also these agriculturalists are sometimes cutting down trees with no replacements, and indeed the livestock keepers are having large groups of herds where this is leading to soil erosion and land degradations when the livestock keepers are searching for pastures to the wilderness hence it is difficult to have environmental concern with the situation of having large number of herds to some of the societies.

Low percentages of the experiencing the problems that are caused by the matters of inadequate environmental keeping ways, In Tanzania people are mostly experiencing diseases like Cholera as well as drought in central and some northern parts of Tanzania, since people are seeing that, there is no any difficulties ahead, even if they know hey don’t have an experience on how large problems like tsunami, deserts, famines, lack of water, lack of rainfall.

Written By AUSI CHIWAMBO (2014)-Teofilo Kisanji University