January 2006: Stop Climate Change
The group report on a busy month as they set up a Stop Climate Change campaign, continue promoting fair trade and begin to contemplate the opening of Primark in Oxford.
In response to the issues raised at the Shared Planet conference and to the recent media interest, we decided to start 2006 by taking on climate change - who says we’re not ambitious!? Tom had eagerly pressed a whole stack of People & Planet pledge cards (to send to Tony Blair) into our hands so we decided to distribute them throughout the school. On each one there was a personal pledge for the sender to fill in on how they would cut down on carbon emissions, and a call on the Prime Minister for his own, hopefully rather larger, contribution.
The fair trade group all took a wedge of cards and fanned out around the school distributing them to pupils and teachers who filled them in under our beady eyes; most people were pretty interested and enthusiastic or at least happy to help. Although this may seem like a drop in the ocean (no pun intended as what the ocean really doesn’t need is more drops), it helped people to realise that there is something they themselves can do on a personal level to alleviate such a huge, potentially cataclysmic issue.
We underestimate how much carbon is emitted domestically and it is ironic that, whilst it will be the poorest people who suffer from global warming the most, it is the richest who have the most power to influence governments and big businesses to cut down their emissions. Even George Bush has made some small concessions to a more sustainable world in his state of the union speech, so hopefully progress is being made!
Ghandi said ‘be the change you want to be’ and we are trying very hard to follow in his footsteps (apart from the protest by self-starvation bit that is - we wouldn’t last a minute, and the loincloth-wearing hasn’t really caught on yet in Oxford). We’ve learnt that it’s not just cutting carbon emissions that begins at home; it took a ridiculously long time to persuade Oxford City Council to hook us up to their recycling scheme (thanks to all the non-People & Planet group prefects and staff who helped with this) and in the end it felt like they were doing us a favour as opposed to the other-way around…
We’re also leading by example when it comes to stocking Fairtrade tea, coffee and sugar in the common-room (thanks Ellie Matthews!). Hopefully the staff will soon follow suit or we’ll have to start some kind of sit-down protest, preferably in our A level mock period!
But it hasn’t all been youthful high jinks; there have been some very high-powered conferences on the ethics of the new Primark store opening in Oxford. Yes, they do use sweatshop labour and, as all the members of the OHS fair trade team are beautiful in their own unique ways, they are really worth more than a £3 belt. Far more pressing is the slight problem of Valentine’s Day - how does one ethically secure the Valentine of their dreams? Watch this space!
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