UCL students and staff to join global climate strike
Photography by Vanessa Tsao
Vanessa Tsao reports on the upcoming UCL Strikes for Climate, organised by several UCL societies, including the recently-founded Environmental Collective.
On Friday 29th November, the UCL Strikes for Climate – organised by the Environmental Collective UCL, Fossil Free UCL, UCL Supports the Strikes and several other groups – will take place, with students and staff joining the global climate strike. The march will begin at Malet Place at 12pm, and protesters will join SOAS, Imperial and King’s College in a march to Parliament.
The climate strike will be carried out in solidarity with the UCU strike, so Friday’s protests will be themed around the climate crisis. Lecturers will be conducting “teach-outs” from 10am to 12pm, prior to the march. These “teach-outs” will be lectures held outside the department to discuss what a curriculum centring issues of sustainability and climate change would look like. The Bartlett School of Architecture in particular has declared a climate emergency and emphasised the need for sustainability to be a core part of the curriculum.
As a new student society created this term, the Environmental Collective UCL aims to foster collaboration between students to campaign against climate change. Founder Mae Faugere’s passion for the climate cause began when she joined a charity called Climate Collage in France, which reports and raises awareness of climate change. “It [. . .] made me really aware of environmental issues and what climate change is really about. For instance, plastic is a biodiversity problem, not a climate change problem,” she said. Since then, she has created a branch of Climate Collage at UCL alongside the Environmental Collective.
Environmental Collective member Aida Mulugetta-Lopez is deeply passionate about the cause and went on a four-day hunger strike this week as part of the Extinction Rebellion protests. She told Pi News: “I’m really lucky that I live in the UK and I never faced hunger, but some of my extended relatives in Ethiopia have not been as lucky. There are millions of people affected by starvation, [which] is intensified by climate change.”
Photography by Vanessa Tsao
During her hunger strike, she and other students marched to parliament square, joined up with other XR groups, and sat outside the area to demonstrate. She described the varying degrees of support received from passers-by: some were supportive, but some disapproved of the hunger strike as a method to support the cause.
The Environmental Collective UCL organised their first event, a banner-making session on Friday 22nd November at the North Cloisters to prepare for the march, in collaboration with other societies including Amnesty International, the Art Society and the Conservation Society. They also held a Global Strike Planning Committee event with SOAS at 5.30pm on 25th November at UCL.