Trinity College Dublin Environmental Society Interview with Becca

Becca is giving the CEI 2021 Educational Workshop entitled 'Climate Justice' on behalf of the Trinity College Dublin Environmental Society. CEI Young reporter Selin (Turkey) sat down with her for a quick chat to find out more.

Interviewer: Selin (Young Reporter, Turkey)

Interviewer: Thank you so much for accepting the interview. I would like to start with an introduction question. Could you please introduce yourself and briefly the organization you are a part of?

Becca: Hi, I'm Becca and I'm the incoming chair for Trinity Environmental Society, which is actually one of Trinity’s lead green societies. We try to promote climate conscious activities on campus as well as collaborate with green campus and the student societies to engage students of environmental, ecological and climate actions.

Interviewer: What is your story of meeting CEI?

Becca: I actually know Laura through orienteering because I was the captain of the orienteering club in Trinity last year and she's the president. I saw in her story that she was promoting CEI and I was like “looks really interesting”. Later on, I think she talked to Jana, and they asked if the Trinity Environmental Society wanted to do a workshop and we said “yes, we would love to, that would be really good”.

Interviewer: That sounds really sweet. As a workshop leader do you have any expectations something you hope to see in your workshop?

Becca: So, our climate workshop will be focused on climate justice, and I mean as a person from the global north like as the people running the society, we are aware of climate justice and we do make our efforts in it. But obviously we don't have first-hand experience and I know CEI will have students from all over the world and some of them will probably be seeing the impacts of climate change in their own countries. I'd love to promote a big discussion within the workshop and find out what they're doing and encourage them to pursue their own climate justice and activism paths wherever they may be.

Interviewer: Could you please give us a small insight on the content of the workshop?

Becca: Yes, so I broke the workshop down into three sections. There’s a climate justice section, an activism section and an awareness section. The climate justice one will help focus on what is the meaning of climate justice as well as deconstructing some of the language used around it compared to, for example, climate action which is kind of a bit of more of an umbrella term. The activism one is more focused on the different kinds of activism you can take. Finally, the awareness one will be talking about the obstacles to climate and environmental knowledge, and education, both so physical and psychological and then sort of looking at the individual and systematic approaches to implementing climate activism and awareness.

Interviewer: That sounds like an amazing workshop. I have a more specific question to you. I’ve seen on TCD Environmental Society’s social media that you organize many webinars, competitions and activities. In my opinion, your way of using art is very engaging and fascinating. Could you please explain how you use arts in your activities to raise awareness and do you have a favourite one?

Becca: Yes, actually using art in the awareness didn’t come about until this year when we ran our climate and inequalities webinar, which was focused on climate justice through the arts. Since then, we've tried to apply it to our society, in a way to get the students doing their own art to I guess get them to understand inherently what their connotations of environmentalism, climate justice and all these things are. And, we recently collaborated with Nature 2020, where we got students from Trinity to donate clothes and we made like a massive fair in appeal to promote awareness of the endangered birds. I think that's kind of the biggest thing we've done with it so far but it's definitely something that we're looking forward to doing next year.

Interviewer: Thank you so much.

TCD Environmental Society’s Social Media: @environmental_soc_tcd

You can find some great suggestions of accounts to follow, podcasts and more, all recommended by Becca here