Noi culturi, noi antropologii - Humanitas

other hand, the young people tend to focus on projects of
more pressing local concern, such as waste treatment, green
space protection, and trash collection. For example, Ioana,
the young woman who runs an environmental NGO without
even an office, has funding through a French organization
to install Ecosan toilets in villages. She expressed to me the
importance of empowering young people to make change
in their own communities, and she repeatedly mentioned
the danger of ignoring the problems faced by villages. The
enthusiasm shown by young people in Moldova to carry out
projects of local importance seems to run counter to evidence
from elsewhere in the region, such as that provided
by Edward Snajdr 377 . His study of environmentalism in Slovakia
found that many recently formed NGOs have ties to
Western organizations like Greenpeace and focus on issues
such as animal cruelty and nuclear energy, rather than issues
of more immediate local concern, like the construction
of dams.
Although the split between old and young within the
environmental community is striking, some overlap exists
between the two groups (such as people in their 20s
or 30s working on environmental projects through official
channels), which at times results in tension. For example,
a group of students I met during Ecoweek wanted to plan
a trash art project, which I mentioned to a young woman
who worked at a relatively well-funded NGO. She agreed
to meet with the students to give them some advice, and
she seemed to find the students’ enthusiasm somewhat naïve.
She stressed to them that she was impressed by their
passion, but warned them about the many official obstacles
they would encounter (for example, getting a permit from
the mayor’s office to hold such an event). A similar situation
occurred when two young environmental consultants met
with students who wanted to collect used batteries and send
them to Romania for recycling. The consultants told the students
that the project would not work due to international
377. Edward Snajdr, Nature protests: The end of ecology in Slovakia,
University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008.
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