A renowned environmental campaigner and his dog met with community volunteers yesterday as part of an awareness-raising cycle across the UK.
Martin Hutchinson and his dog Starsky, known as ‘Starsky and Hutch’, visited Springhill Community Garden in the Sheddocksley area of Aberdeen yesterday.
Mr Hutchinson, who has been raising environmental awareness for the past 16 years by highlighting various projects, has been documenting their travels on YouTube.
Spreading the word across the globe
Originally from Manchester, one of his biggest achievements was when he walked over 21,000 miles through 21 countries in Central and South America, a trip that included visits to 600 schools.
As well as this, he travelled round 16 countries in Europe, where he visited 152 schools across the continent, as part of his environmental awareness campaign.
At the Springhill Community Garden, he met Sharon Driver, who runs the open space.
She said: “I just think that there’s loads of things going on in the community with people and growing things or getting out and doing things like litter picking and stuff, and it’d be nice for more people to know that that’s happening.”
Mrs Driver said that they have “done a lot of work in the past year” and are growing more this year, with hopes to get the produce out to the local community.
‘Amazing’ number of people doing their bit
Springhill Community Garden has been working with Kingsford Primary, and Mrs Driver said she was looking forward to sharing her knowledge.
She said: “It’s funny seeing the kids coming out and hearing the way they talk about plants and growing things and where food comes from, you realise how little they actually know. So I’m quite excited about that aspect of education.”
Mr Hutchison said his journey was “going really well”.
“There’s an amazing amount of people out there in all different kinds of ways showing what they can do and not relying on the government, that we just do it ourselves and get on with it,” he said.
“The idea of my point is to try and highlight all this to encourage other people, so these people get noticed for what they’re doing, because no one knows what their doing really. So my idea is to try and get them out there and learn from their experiences.”
He described Starsky, who he found as astray in Portugal, as a “godsend” and “really brilliant”, adding: “We are a team. It’s Starsky and Hutch, 21st Century environmental explorers. He causes attention and gets people to come and talk, people who wouldn’t generally come over, but because he’s there they come and talk.”
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