行者保罗的故事 保罗的故事

　　The story of Paul Coleman 　　A man who walks over 42500 kilometers to plant trees
　　Resume:
　　Name: Paul Coleman
　　Gender: male
　　Date of birth: March, 1954
　　Home place: Manchester, England
　　Belief: in everything nice in the world
　　Marriage Status: has a nice Japanese wife named Konomi
　　Previous Occupations:
　　1979-1989
　　Chauffeur to Mrs. J.A. McDougald. Duties included the care of thirty priceless cars, organizing tours around Europe and the United States and advising on personal and business related matters.
　　1971-1977
　　Served in the British Merchant Navy and on luxury yachts in the Mediterranean and the United States as a chef.
　　Occupation: Full time earthwalker. Also a tree planter, author, lyricist, narrator, singer, and ambassador to the "We the Peoples" Initiative, a United Nations Peace Messenger Initiative.
　　How many kilometers has he covered: over 42500 kilometers
　　How many trees has he planted: because of him, over 6 million have been planted.
　　
　　Early Life
　　Before becoming an environmentalist, Paul traveled around the world as a sailor. Inspired by his grandfather, a seaman who served in the British Royal Navy during WWI, he joined the British Merchant Navy when he was seventeen. He began his seagoing career as a Catering Boy, the one who washes pots, and progressed rapidly through the ranks to become Chief Cook.
　　
　　Six years later, in 1977, he left the Merchant Navy and went to work on private yachts in the south of France. Life on a luxury yacht was quite different to the Merchant Navy. He worked as a chef, and got a nice wage and a fabulous expense account.
　　
　　In 1978 he left the south of France on the M.Y. Les Amis, a fifty-one meter multi-million dollar yacht owned, apparently, by a mafia family. Thanks to them, he sailed to Florida via Marseilles, Gibraltar, and the islands of the Azores and Bermuda. That was the end of his seagoing career.
　　
　　He gave up his work as a sailor a year later, and moved from Florida to Canada. In Canada, he got a wonderful job he never could have expected.
　　
　　He worked as a private chauffeur for a Mrs. JA McDougald, who was very rich; her palatial estates were in Canada, England and the United States. She employed a large household staff working for her to keep her life in comfort, elegance and sophistication. Mrs.
　　McDougald had a large number of cars. There was an assortment of American Lincolns, Cadillacs, convertibles and limousines, plus a very formal "61 Rolls Royce Phantom V, for use in Canada and the United States,
　　
　　and, for use in Great Britain, a luxurious "69 Rolls Royce Phantom VI painted in the Queen"s color of Garnet Red and on occasion used by her friend Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. His job was maintaining the cars and chauffeuring not only the lady and guests, but also her dogs. The relationship between him and Mrs. JA McDougald was a classic Chauffeur - Madam one. Sometimes, when she sought advice, he would give it to her.
　　
　　On one hand, he enjoyed his luxury life very much but on the other hand he felt rather bored. He was driving the best brands of car, traveling all around the world, taking part in a lot of parties with the upper crust but he felt he wasn"t having fun. Just at that time, he noticed a large amount of forest always in flame on the television. He began to think about what he himself could do for the world.
　　
　　Amid the parties and traveling he was given a five-week vacation. He chose to travel around Iceland by bicycle, because he wanted to get a chance to find out what he really wanted. The journey was a difficult and exhausting experience, but he enjoyed the beautiful land. It was there that he had an awakening. After he returned, he quit his wonderful job and decided from then on he would devote himself to protecting the world.
　　
　　From 1990, he began his walking expeditions. In this way, he hopes he can inspire more and more people to do something for the environment. He decided to encourage individuals, organizations and governments to plant 100,000,000 trees before 2010. Now, according to Paul, he has had more than 60,000,000 trees planted.
　　
　　The Journey
　　Through China
　　Recently, the earthwalker has been walking through China and will now walk through Korea in the second section of the Earthday/Earthwalker Friendship Walk. The Earth Day Walk will end in Tokyo on April 22nd 2006. Walking with Paul is his wife Konomi, who wrote a book about his life that was published by Kawakawa, one of Japan"s leading publishers. Konomi fell in love with Paul when they walked around Okinawa, and they married shortly after that walk was finished. Before this, Konomi was an author; she wrote a lot of stories about her life.
　　
　　On January the.15th, they began their walk in Badaling, Beijing. One day they lost their way in the Fangshan area. It was nighttime and they felt puzzled. Just at that moment they met a young Chinese lady named Yang Yang, who was driving a car on her way home. She stopped and asked "do you need any help?" Yang Yang took them to her aunt"s hotel, providing them with a room for free. On the Chinese Spring Festival, Yang Yang invited them to visit her family. This was the first time Paul had celebrated the Chinese Spring Festival; he said it was wonderful. On February the 9th, he and his wife came to plant the first tree of this year. On February the 11th, Paul and his wife started their walk to Tianjin. Some people came to send them off; they walked with them for several hours.
　　
　　An Interview with Paul Coleman
　　Bilingual Time: Why did you choose to devote your energy to environmental protection and become an earthwalker?
　　Paul: I"ve seen tremendous environmental destruction all over the planet, and it"s because of this that I do everything that I can to help preserve the environment. When I"m walking, I meet thousands and thousands of people, and everybody knows I mean what I say; I"m not just talking, I"m walking. And because I meet a lot of people, people become inspired, and they think - they say to me "Oh, I can"t walk around the planet like you but I can plant a tree", so that"s the idea.
　　
　　Bilingual Time: How long do you walk each day?
　　Paul: One night (time) we walked, we walked all day. We walked from midnight till one o"clock
　　in the morning, and then slept outside. But some days, maybe only four hours or something.
　　 Other days, maybe eight hours. It depends. Because if you walk all night one day, next day
　　you"re going to feel really tired, so you"re not going to walk as many kilometres.
　　
　　Bilingual Time: Why did you choose the "China-Korea-Japan" route?
　　Paul: I was invited to make this particular journey by Earth Day Tokyo, the Earth Day organisation. They wanted to unite the Earth Day organisations and environmental organisations in the three countries, so that everyone could work closer together, to promote, after this Earth Day, to keep on promoting Earth Days together. So I was invited to make this journey. I chose the route, and you can see really that it"s working because, when we came here, I didn"t know anybody in China and the Global Village of Beijing people said "oh, we"ll help!" Now, I feel like I know everybody in China!
　　
　　Bilingual Time: How many trees have you planted yourself?
　　Paul: I"ve planted thousands. Myself. But, because I"ve been planting the trees, other people have planted millions. The goal is a hundred million. That would be my dream, to see a hundred million trees planted. So, every time I am in, say, a newspaper, perhaps being received by a minister in a country like China, this really helps to achieve that goal. It gets the word out all over and people start planting trees, or maybe the government of China will also say, "oh, we"ll plant a thousand trees"?and it happens. The goal is a hundred million trees?to inspire that.
　　
　　Bilingual Time: We have many things to do for the environment, why did you choose to plant trees?
　　Paul: Each of those trees, I"ve been planting them for a person killed in war. What I want to do, I want to basically say there have been a hundred million people killed in war in the last century, and now"s the time to start giving life and to stop taking life. You look on television now, watch CNN or the news, all over the world, there"s problems, wars going on, and you go "my gosh!" This is something - if people could be inspired to begin making another statement, to say "oh, let"s plant trees, let"s not do this any more", then that"s positive. And it"s what we need. It"s what the Earth needs, to be preserved.
　　
　　Bilingual Time: There"s not a long time for you to reach your goal, are you sure you can achieve it? And why?
　　Paul: It"s like a snowball. If you roll a snowball, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It"s like here, you do one journey and then you go to another country and another country. It gets bigger and bigger and more and more people plant trees, and then next thing you know, there will be one country that will say "we want to plant one tree for each of our people who were killed at war" and the very quickly, all the other countries will do the same.
　　
　　Bilingual Time: When will you finish your walk? Do you have further plans?
　　Paul: I want to finish walking by 2010. Then, I would like to build environmental homes. Beautiful environmental homes. I would like to be able to have people help me to build the homes, haha. And then I want to live in them and write about my experiences of travelling the world. Then, I could show people that we can live environmentally and wonderfully. People sometimes think, they say to me, "oh, you environmentalists, you want us to become cavemen". But I want to show them that, no, you can live like kings in palaces if you build sustainably. Because we have all the designs now of solar power, and ways to preserve water, and so I want to display just how environmental we can be. We can live a nice quality life and be sustainable.