ENG-1971 — Page 26

REVIEW

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organisations and government officers for several years. In 1971 more than 800,000 children and young people, most of them from the less prosperous sections of the community, took part in the programme.

The second Festival of Hong Kong was held between November 26 and December 6, providing a programme of entertainment for the local community of all ages. This followed a successful festival held in 1969 which had been greatly enjoyed by the general public and, coming after the disturbances in 1967, was believed to have helped to enhance community feeling and confidence in the future of Hong Kong. The 1971 festival was opened by the Governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, KCMG, MBE, as his first public engage- ment after being sworn in. Some of the major events were an open air fiesta in Statue Square, a pageant at the Government Stadium and a float procession through the streets of Kowloon which at- tracted tens of thousands of spectators.

The Urban Council, through its executive arm, the Urban Services Department, has increased the number of public gardens in town from 103 to 301. These range in size from the spacious complexes of Victoria Park and Morse Park to tiny rest gardens that form pleasing oases in the dust and roar of the city streets. There are another 59 that the department has developed itself in the New Territories, which would once have been thought to be better left unspoilt by artificial addition. But the New Territories have changed with the times too.

There has inevitably been growing concern, fed not only by fashionable intellectual crazes but by awareness of legislation in other countries and of the United Nations Conference on Develop- ment and the Environment to be held in Stockholm in 1972, to ensure the best use of the limited space that Hong Kong possesses and to reverse the rapidly deteriorating state of the environment, with its consequential spoiling of the quality of life of the people. An Advisory Committee on Air Pollution was reconstituted in 1970 to keep under review the worsening state of air pollution, and some significant and visible improvements have already been made with the co-operation of industry. However the Urban Council and several government departments have had to continue to battle manfully but almost despairingly with mounting problems of litter and dis- posal of waste matter. They are faced with a general public, certain industries, agriculturalists and others who seem blinded by selfishness or obstinacy to the fact that pollution is unhealthy and expensive, avoidable and invariably at least as much one's own fault as anybody