I sat down with Oscar Welchman, current student Environment Officer for the SU, to talk about sustainability on campus, the role of the arts and media on driving climate action, and Climate Week at UEA.

Would you like to introduce yourself to Venue’s readers?

I am Oscar Welchman, He/him. I’m the Environment Officer, which is a volunteer position at the SU. I’m also an environmental activist. So, I actually attended the United Nations Conference on Climate Change last November and campaigned specifically on the presence of the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuel lobby within international climate change decision making. I was working, actually, as a youth representative – a Youth NGO Civil Society representative, and I was alongside the UK Youth Climate Coalition, which is a big group who gets involved with international climate change decision making. That’s one of the things I get up to. Climate change isn’t my whole life, by a long way! I’m learning Japanese at the moment, I lived in Japan last year. It’s a big passion of mine! One day I would like to be fluent, and I’m conversational now. So that’s kind of a hobby of mine I suppose. Also, I’m an English Language and creative writing student, so I like writing and I’m really passionate about it! That’s what I get up to!

Touching more on your role as Environment Officer, you mentioned it’s a volunteer position, what sort of work does the role involve? Do you feel happy with how you’ve been able to affect change at UEA?

So, it’s really what you make it. Some people do very little-to nothing as officers and I think that’s a shame. Other people get very involved, and I feel really lucky to have gotten very involved.

First of all, one of the first things I did was something called the ‘Student Sustainability Network’. It’s a big network of now over 150 members. It’s now an official new group called the ‘SU Sustainability Working Group’, which has representatives from all the different sustainably minded clubs and societies, student groups and some student officers. Anyone can attend these meetings, and the idea is there’s lots of different sustainable societies, sustainable causes, sustainable campaigns and activism on campus, but they often don’t communicate with each other very well. They stay within societies, or they don’t communicate with the SU. It’s about information sharing and capacity building – community building. I have been really lucky to work on that with a big coalition of people, a big group of people, and together that’s perhaps been what’s helped engage lots of people with climate week as well. We now have about 30 volunteers running climate week. We were able to build that number up through advertising on social media but equally through advertising on the Student Sustainability network.

But also, I do lots of other things. One thing that’s really important to me and I’ve been working on lots is interactions with the UEA staff and the UEA staff sustainability team, which is this big extensive thing. There’s the sustainability management team, and then below them there’s all these different implementation teams for different areas. So, you’ve got the transport implementation team, the water implementation team, the energy implementation team, biodiversity…waste. I’m on waste specifically, but what I’ve been trying to do is to get – I’m working on this at the moment – to get students in every one of those implementation teams holding UEA accountable and making sure that students are aware of what’s going on, and then feeding back through the SU Sustainability Working Group on what they’ve learned and what’s going on in the different areas of sustainability on campus. [Discussing UEA] They’ve stopped publishing an annual sustainability report, they stopped publishing it in 2017, so it’s been a long time since there has been an annual sustainability report, but they’re getting back on it. It’s a pivotal year for them and for choosing how to be sustainable. I think it’s important students are really involved in that.

You’ve mentioned a lack of accountability and a lack of transparency. You’ve mentioned things like bureaucracy and a lack of communication, what would you say is the biggest barrier to sustainable change on campus and more broadly in wider society?

I think it can be hard to approach. People just don’t understand it. You know, it’s scary. It’s scary to think about, and it’s big, how can one individual learn to tackle it and make a meaningful difference? You know, it’s not really easy to answer, it’s difficult to approach. I really believe in making sustainability a community-based activity. For example, what’s been wonderful this year is there’s… a biodiversity volunteering team run by an amazing staff member on campus, and students and people from Norwich just go and work on different areas of the grounds, helping out with the biodiversity on campus, and it’s so fulfilling. I’ve done it, I love it, it’s a really good example of what sustainability can mean for people. Often it doesn’t touch people’s daily lives. It feels like a big political discussion when really, as far as I’m concerned, it’s apolitical. It’s an obvious truth and obvious fact, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, that we need to change our practices to be more sustainable. That’s why I was able to create the student sustainability network. I think it’s all about…just capacity building, community building. It shouldn’t be about individual sustainability, it’s about togetherness.

What would a fully sustainable campus look like to you? What would a green campus offer in terms of services, infrastructure and initiatives?

It’s a difficult question because…fully sustainable – at least net zero – would indicate a kind of circular economy; UEA does have a net zero goal. I believe it’s 2045. Incase you don’t know what net zero is, it’s just about producing net zero emissions. In other words, any emissions that are produced are then retaken back in. It’s a threshold to try and reach for any company, for any industry, for any government, any nation. It’s difficult to do that, but I think actually the practices which are involved with it are important because it’s about making UEA a sustainable, net zero place with clean water, with good, sustainable public transport etc. etc.

There’s the arguably more important part, which is engaging students, all students, in sustainability, and I think that’s the important part. That’s something that I’ve been really working on with the Student Sustainability Network and I think, for example, one thing I’m trying to bring to campus – and it’s coming very soon – is the charity shop. It’s going to start by opening monthly and then hopefully open weekly in the future at some point. It’s going to be selling secondhand books, clothes, textbooks, CDs, you name it, you know. It really encourages circular economy. I think it’d be a really nice initiative on campus for students to get involved with, just second hand purchasing and donating to charity. I think as well often people don’t think about the waste they generate. Low plastic or zero waste food shops are great. It’s a really nice way for people to get used to a more sustainable lifestyle.

Is it more about changing people’s lifestyles rather than the available services?

We’re a university, and what a university does is it’s an education forum, right, and it teaches people how to go towards the future and do what they want to do. Fundamentally, no matter who you are, no matter what you’re going to go and do, sustainability should be a part of it, as far as I’m concerned. So, I think if we are engaging people who are here for an education, we should be engaging them to think sustainably, no matter how they’re being educated

Venue readers are interested in arts and culture; how do you think that media can be used to fight climate change? What’s the way forward in terms of art, literature, film, TV and music? How do you see the content we consume driving us toward a green future?
 
Do you remember the post office scandal? There was, I think it was a Channel 4 or Channel 5 TV series that was made about the scandal, exposing it, and it was very popular. A lot of people watched it, and it really brought the scandal into the mainstream. By creating a piece of fiction, a piece of entertainment, a piece of media that the general public will watch that will also educate them about issues that are going on. I think that was a perfect example. What can people do to help, to engage with and understand what sustainability looks like – because it’s complicated, right? It can be about food. It can be about habits. It can be about travel. It can be about so many different things, and that’s overwhelming. I find it overwhelming. Anyone would find it overwhelming. The media has such potential to do that by either implementing sustainable practices into normal TV shows, normal movies and books. It’s just a normal way of life; It’s a healthy way of living. Or, by creating amazing documentaries or based-on-real-stories, fiction series and movies.

So, you’d say that getting more eyes on the effects of climate change is important, especially those who aren’t already sort of looking at mainstream news or engaging with the intelligentsia.

Yeah, I think that’s right. Often the people who are reading the articles that are most important are the people for whom it’s least important that they read it, because they’re already aware and engaged. And I don’t blame people for not reading those articles. They’re heavy, they’re scary, they’re sad. But if you can make someone feel like the arts do, you know, make someone feel beautiful, happy, excited, and then also engage them in real world problems – like Seaspiracy does – like other movies and documentaries do, then no wonder they’re more successful than the new stories that do tend to only reach a very small audience.

You’ve already mentioned the impact of the fashion industry in the project to set up a charity shop on campus, which seems like an important note on the impact of the fashion industry on waste and climate change.

Yes.

The edition comes out on March 18th in UEA’s ‘Climate Week’ – Tell the readers about Climate Week and any events on the 19th, 20th and 21st that you’re looking forward to!

So, Climate Week is completely student run. It’s coming to UEA, it’s not ‘UEA climate week’, but it’s ‘Climate Week at UEA’ because it’s run actually by an external institution, something called ‘Youth Climate Solutions’, which is founded and run by a second-year Environmental Sciences student called Jazz Brook. She is organising Climate Week, and she’s organised all of us volunteers around her and around this group, which is incredible that she’s been able to do this and props to her for it.

Climate week is effectively a five-day series of many events, talks, workshops, club and society engagements, stalls and more, and it’s kind of for everyone. You know, there’s bits of it for everyone because like I said, sustainability and environmentalism are for everyone. There’s an environmental or sustainable careers fair that’s coming to campus, which can help people look for careers that are specifically sustainability focused. But then again, I would also argue that all careers should be somewhat sustainable. There’s a sustainable lifestyle fair as well where we’re having local businesses come onto campus selling their stuff. We’re having lots of different UEA institutions coming to talk about how to recycle properly and stuff like that. I’m running my charity shop for the first time during that time, so the charity shop will be coming to UEA for the first time!

Greenpeace is going to be involved as well and they’re going to be giving a talk, lots of societies are doing events and talks, there’s many climate journalists coming to speak, and I believe local government is coming as well! I would strongly suggest you check out the Youth Climate Solutions Instagram to see the events in detail!