"For the love of nature: German businessman on a green mission"

Text by Gercine Carter / WEEKEND NATION / Friday, April 8, 201 / Barbeidos

Preserving the environment is Dieter Mennekes' passion. The German-born philanthropist and businessman has been investing his time and money to ensure a healthy environment for Barbadians and for all others who, like him, come here to enjoy the salubrity.

From January to April each year, you are sure to find Dieter challenging the wind and the waves off Silver Sands, carefree, losing himself in the beauty of nature amidst foaming surf, riding the azure waters driven along by the wind.

As a windsurfer, Dieter once rode the waters off the Canary Islands. That was until he read an article on Windsurfing in Barbados and came here to check it out. He was sold from his first visit in 1983 and has made Barbados his second home, purchasing property here and spending thousands of dollars supporting environmental causes here, specifically the late Dr Colin Hudson and his work with the Future Centre Trust.

"I like very much what Colin Hudson did. He was so humble and we could learn so much from him. Whenever you visited him you took so much more away when you left him," Dieter said during an interview with the Weekend Nation.

Recalling his first meeting with the late environmentalist, he said: "I was on a hike with my family, and at six o'clock in the morning I was there on a garbage dump in rain with Colin Hudson and he told us about Barbados, and I was fascinated so I thought this guy, who was at that time working 80 per cent for the sugar industry and 20 per cent for environmental protection, should be working 80 per cent for environmental protection and that's what we achieved.

"The thing we achieved together was that Colin could focus completely on environmental protection," Dieter reflects as he talks about plans Hudson had for a green telephone line. "What he wanted to do was to make a green phone so that people would see that somebody was polluting the environment and over this green line they would tell him and he could take action to prevent them."

Such a line operates in Germany and, like Hudson, Dieter wanted to see it happen here as well. "He (Hudson) tried to do it here too, and there was a lot of Opposition against it. But I think it will sooner or later come because the tourists get more and more conscious about the environment and Barbados has become cleaner at the beaches," Dieter observed.

Cleaned beaches
So committed is he to Barbados that this German national walked the beaches of the south coast participating in clean-ups organized by the Future Centre Trust. He told the Weekend Nation: "I cleaned the beaches at Silver Sands and Silver Rock and also the south coast, and Colin did it at other places one Saturday morning so that it was an island-wide clean-up."

"I wanted (Hudson) to work as much as possible for the environmental thing and that is what he did," Dieter said of his deceased friend.

In Germany, Dieter is an engineer, the associate of an electrical component manufacturing Company run by his brother. He has interest in other companies, real estate, the Germany Stock Exchange and he is engaged in forestry. He has established an environmental fund, the Dieter Mennekes Umwelt Stiftung (Environmental Foundation), and is also involved in other environmental protection ventures – "All things that can make our world better," he says.

Dieter maintains, "You cannot do it alone. You can only do it with good people who work with you. You cannot be a star in the front; you have to put the cause in the front and your person in the back, so that many people will come and join you."

Horrible
"If we go on with all this consumerism and polluting the air and the water in nature, then it goes the horror way. If we are intelligent and wise, we go the hope way. This has been shown in the Future Centre Trust building" he observes "and it is really a good display for the teachers and the students in Barbados."

Dieter has also been sharing his experience as an environmental campaigner with the National Committee for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Drug Dependency. Referring to that involvement, he remarks: "In Barbados you have a magnificent law for banning tobacco smoke in public. We would like to have this law in Germany, but we don't have it because in Germany the tobacco laws are very strong, but we have to fight them."

He continues to do just this in his homeland while keeping up with wider campaign for a clean and healthy environment with his money, time and energy.

"I have the experience. The more I give for the Community, the better my other businesses grow," he said.