“Reclaiming Energy” with People & Planet
Two weeks ago, Greenpeace made an appearance at a full-day event here in St Andrews hosted by OneWorld, in collaboration with the national group they are a part of – People & Planet, a campaigning network aimed at creating sustainable change in Scotland. The event concluded our University’s Green Week, and seemed particularly special to me due to the amount of support and enthusiasm I saw that day from the students who had travelled from all over Scotland to join us in discussing the energy-related problems our world faces and how we can work together to make our future a more positive one.
Reclaim Energy Day was aimed at learning about unconventional fuels and the problems associated with them, with the day revolving around workshops dedicated to issues such as tar sands, fracking and oil drilling in vulnerable areas. The day began with an introductory lecture followed by a morning session of workshops in our student union. One of these workshops was being run by Friends of the Earth Scotland, whose representative was there to talk about oiling drilling in the Arctic. Due to the overlap with our current Arctic campaign, Greenpeace St Andrews was asked to join in and introduce the topic. Two of us from our local group arrived early in the morning and set up the room, putting out Greenpeace materials while we waited for the day to begin. I have to say, I was rather worried about the turnout since we had no estimates of how many people would be coming, and with a fairly under-publicised Green Week as a whole and the group split into several discussion areas, it wouldn’t have shocked me if we had ended up speaking to just two or three fellow students. But when the time came, things started looking up immediately as at least twenty people filed into the room. We projected the official ‘Save the Arctic’ website and went through each of the main issues listed there, focusing particularly on the problems associated with oil spills in the area, and on the political consequences of leaving the region unprotected. To wrap it up, we explained Greenpeace’s goals and how people could help by signing our petition, and then handed things over to the man from Friends of the Earth Scotland who talked about what they were doing and the specifically Scottish context of this problem. After some group discussions about how to spread the message to people and brainstorming action ideas – a group which we were asked to join to provide our ‘expertise’ on campaigning from our time with Greenpeace – the workshop broke up for lunch, and after an afternoon session of workshops, we all met up again for an open-session at the end. Here everyone could split into groups according to what they wanted to talk about and spend some time simply discussing. For this hour, we ran a quick Arctic knowledge quiz to end the day on a lighter note before everyone had to catch buses and trains back home.
Thinking about the event as a whole, I realise that while it’s so easy to see the negative when talking about problems in the world – the bad intentions and the self-interested attitudes – days like this are about teamwork and about understanding what is wrong and broken while coming up with ways to fix it. As an international relations student, I find myself all too often becoming overwhelmed and disheartened by the global injustices which exist in a system which seems too established to change. It’s frustrating to learn about the problems, the intricacies, the obstacles and to hear that this is just “how the world works”. Problems like energy are the ones that make you feel small and helpless but events like the one we attended here demonstrate just how widespread desires to make a difference are. It wasn’t a huge group there that day, but there were people from Stirling, from Glasgow, from Edinburgh, all willing to take their time to travel to another town and simply discuss the future. It’s an inspirational feeling, to participate in something larger than yourself like that, and I hope to attend other events similar to this one in the near future.
Lucy DiSanto
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