Anissa S. Febrina, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
From officials planting trees at a suburban campus to celebrities talking about how to save electricity, "green" was the color of the moment as Jakarta commemorated Earth Day on Sunday.
But whether the events in the city actively engaged people or seemed like bland official functions was entirely down to how they were organized.
At University of Indonesia's campus in Depok, Governor Sutiyoso led a green campaign to plant 1,000 trees in the area.
The event, attended by Jakarta Environment Management Agency head Budirama Natakusumah and the university's rector Usman Chatib Warsa, had initially been planned as a public campaign to urge the public to build underground storage pits of excess floodwater, known as percolation pits.
The administration had issued a regulation last year requiring all premises to have the pits to help prevent flooding.
Environmental agency officers demonstrated a simple method of building small pits in the garden, a concept introduced by the Bogor Institute of Agriculture.
However, very few of the local residents and students expected at the event actually joined in, turning a supposedly educational session into a mere ceremony.
"I thought there were going to be artists like most events at this campus," said Anni Koentari, resident of Beji subdistrict, a settlement just outside the campus fence.
She stayed less than 10 minutes before heading back to her home with some friends, saying she found the percolation pit demonstration uninteresting.
A separate Earth Day commemoration at South Jakarta shopping mall Cilandak Town Square would probably have been more Anni's cup of tea, with celebrities and musical performances wrapping the campaign up in a more glamorous style.
Organized by environmental group WWF, the event brought the often unpopular issues of energy saving and waste management closer to the public.
Celebrities taught mall visitors how to choose energy-saving home appliances, and showed how electricity bills could be cut by simple changes in behavior.
Others at the event talked about endangered species and forest depletion, issues further from listeners' everyday lives.
Several booths set up at the center of the mall offered crash courses on how to do composting at home, billed as a way of solving Jakarta's waste disposal crisis.
"Tips like this are more useful for us. They touch our everyday lives and are simple and applicable. I am more interested in this than listening to facts about endangered sea turtles," said booth visitor Aditya Permana.
On top of the practical advice, bystanders were drawn in from the sidelines to the middle of the event by the promise of the bands on stage getting ready to play.
At the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle in Central Jakarta, some 300 activists from the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) tried to attract passers-by with banners and speeches about forest depletion.
No surveys were done to evaluate which of the three different approaches worked best. But looking at the crowd of curious visitors at the mall green campaign, one can probably guess.
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