On 24 September, Food & Trees for Africa joined people across the globe in Moving Planet: a day to move beyond fossil fuels.

Food & Trees for Africa hosted The Maponya Mile, a mile long walk from Maponya Mall to Msilinga Street where 1 000 trees were planted with Soweto residents. These trees, sponsored by Nashua Mobile, were planted through the Trees for Homes programme, a registered carbon offset initiative that improves environments, climate change awareness and quality of life for residents of dusty and barren settlements.

For pictures click here

To have the greatest impact possible we need you. Please join us, and ask everyone you know here at home or anywhere in the world to get involved. This promises to be a day filled with fun, laughter and music. Come and get your hands dirty. Bring your spade, a hat and sunblock. There will be a magic hat doing the rounds on the day for those who are willing and able to donate towards the planting of more trees.

We thank all those who joined us and helped to make this day historic - a day where we mobilized an unprecedented wave of people calling for a shift in our energy systems to cleaner, safer sources and for real action on the climate crisis - at a scale that science and justice demand.

Some of the same people who filled Tahrir Square for the Egyptian revolution were leading up the organizing efforts in Cairo. In Afghanistan, a 14 year old boy organized his community to get involved. Thousands of farmers and villagers were mobilizing in rural Andhra Pradesh, India calling for clean, sustainable development, not the new coal plants that corporations want to impose there. In Chicago, USA, organizers moved forward on a ‘Roll Against Coal’ bike march past Chicago’s dirtiest coal plants, to move their city to a clean energy future.

This would not have been possible without Nashua Mobile’s commitment to lowering their paper usage and carbon footprint. In September 2008, in a drive to convert its customers to electronic billing, Nashua Mobile committed to donate R10 for every customer that opted to receive electronic rather than paper bills to FTFA to plant trees for disadvantaged communities. This innovative campaign has lead to the planting of 11 540 trees around South Africa. Nashua Mobile is clearly aware of the climate crisis and is doing their part to reduce their impact.

For more information see the Food & Trees for Africa event web page: http://www.moving-planet.org/events/za/soweto/1498 and you can visit: http://www.moving-planet.org/.

The walk's route