Last week, at Varndean College we celebrated our Big Green Week. Throughout the week, college campus buzzed with excitement as students, faculty, and guest speakers came together to explore innovative ways to promote eco-consciousness and effect positive change within our community.
This year we saw Sussex Green Living pitch up on our campus with their eco-display on a quirky, retrofitted milk float from 1974.
There were also talks from visiting Professors from UCL; Professor Dan Osborn and Dr. Carla Washbourne who are based in the university’s Earth Sciences Department and who came in to discuss career opportunities in conservation and sustainability to our Geography and Environmental Science students. They also discussed varied job prospects in the local region and volunteering work with prominent organisations involved with preserving natural habitats, promoting biodiversity as well as conservation and sustainability campaigns.
Students were also able to hear from Hemantha Perera Trevelyan, a business professional whose background is in the built environment having trained in design and working largely in architectural and engineering practices. She talked about her work in business development and stakeholder engagement highlighting that climate crisis and social capital are important factors in building design, how we inhabit space and the spaces in between that ultimately impact socially.
Her work in helping businesses and organisations across different sectors operate more sustainably through their compliance of governance, social and environmental reporting and behaviours was particularly interesting and useful for our students.
There were some livestreamed talks in the circular economy (Claire Potter from Sussex University), on renewable energy usage (from Ben McCallam, Senior Climate Officer at Surrey County Council), equitable economic degrowth (from Barbara Williams, an architect of the UN Charter for Ecological Justice) as well as a pre-recording from Envitia, a local, data software and services company that solves complex data challenges and they discussed how data can be used to combat climate change.
Students also organised a clothes swap and the canteen provided a meat-free menu on one day for that week in a bid to engage students with the debate around intensive farming and carbon emissions. It was hoped that students could see how feasible it could be for them to make small changes to their food choices in an effort to reduce their own carbon footprint.
This year’s Big Green Week, originally scheduled for June, was moved to March to ensure Year 2 students could participate. While our college event has concluded, the nationwide Big Green Week is set for June 8th to 16th, 2024, promising further opportunities for collective action and environmental engagement.
