Eco-consciousness and environmental health advocacy: A theatre-for-development approach

Abstract

The challenge of environmental sustainability is not peculiar to the Third World but is a global concern. Thus, one of the eight adopted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for the year 2015 following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000 is ‘to ensure environmental sustainability’. Thenceforth, eco-conscious campaigns have become a more popular social engagement while eco-critical discourses now characterize scholarship more than ever before. Man’s unrestrained activities have resulted in lamentable environmental degradation with serious ecological, economic and health implications. Typical of Theatre-for-Development (TfD) projects, this work adopts an egalitarian method of accessing and extracting information from individuals in the location under study and establishing a self-sustaining platform for dialoguing and proffering solutions to a set of identified problems. It embraces an interdisciplinary effort between the Theatre and Environmental Health Science in salvaging the deplorable environmental situation in Aba through the use of a TfD performance entitled in the people’s language ‘Tuturu Ya Tufuo’ (translated ‘Pick It up and Throw It Away’). This study adopts the sociological and artistic methodologies and discovers indiscipline, poor environmental sanitation attitude, improper waste disposal, unrestrained industrial activities, individual and government’s negligence to be the factors responsible for the alarming environmental degradation in the city. It recommends individual consciousness, collective participation in sanitation exercises and adoption of eco-friendlier industrial processes as the solution to the problem of environmental degradation.