Fighting climate change is not a lonesome battle. That’s why the UvA and the HvA have combined their strength in their sustainability mission: enter GREEN WEEKS. During the month of May, students can join a bunch of green activities to learn more about how they can participate in saving the planet. However, the organizers of GREEN WEEKS also want to focus their attention on what the university staff can do themselves.
On Thursday, April 21st, the GREEN WEEKS officially opened with their kick-off exhibition called All Gone. In the hideout of FLOOR, the cultural platform of the HvA, the Visual Methodology Collective of the HvA (VMC) stalled out several collages, all of them created by Artificial Intelligence. The VMC teamed up with UvA/HvA students from the Green Office to organize and plan the exhibition about our possible future in the age of climate change. After talking about the impressive AI constructed artworks, the attention of the kick-off hosts from the Green Office shifted towards the main goal of the GREEN WEEKS: everyone at our university should start reflecting on their own role in combatting climate change, students and staff.
Joep de Hoog, the organizer of the GREEN WEEKS, believes the latter to be the real challenge: ‘University board members are quite hypocritical regarding their sustainability plans. Students are constantly being pushed to live more sustainable, university money is being invested in greener energy output, but at the same time the board is not motivating its own staff in living sustainable.’ He continues: ‘People constantly have excuses, but the problem remains the same: human patterns are really hard to change. My colleagues are giving their best effort in educating students about sustainability, but these same people complain when a single printer is being removed on their floor for sustainability reasons.’ De Hoog thinks students will not change their habits if they see that their teachers are still driving around in highly polluting cars: ‘We as university staff have to give the right example, otherwise this is never going to work.’
Creator at FLOOR Demi van de Worp also helped organise the GREEN WEEKS. He is mostly concerned about the GREEN WEEKS attracting only 8% of students who’ve already adopted a more sustainable way of living. ‘Our main challenge is reaching out to the 92% of students that may not be so interested in changing their living style. In normal conditions, this is hard enough, but with the GREEN WEEKS, it’s even tougher because our public is both the HvA and the UvA students’, shares Van de Worp. ‘These are two very different types of students and that’s why we’ve tried to come up with both practical and more abstract events. In this way, we can hopefully attract people outside of the ‘green bubble’ to our events’, ends Van den Worp.