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By: Isaac Chang (Yr9)
Interviewers: Nazla Nuradhari, Adriana Azman, Sahana Rajinikanth
In times of struggle, participating in the fight for environmental sustainability becomes tougher and demotivating. However, the students at JIS are not easily shaken by the troubles of online school and many are still working towards a greener future. We sat for a Meet conversation with 2 students who are working towards achieving the Duke of Edinburgh (DOE) Gold award and are undertaking an environmental initiative as part of their activity requirement. The two new students to JIS, Ester and Akshayaa, from Year 12 share their insights and passion about caring for the environment in this article.
Nazla: Tell us about your activity and what it entails?
Akshayaa: My activity is beach cleaning and the main target is to collect as many bags and rubbish as possible in an hour weekly. I initially planned to collect a particular amount in kilograms but there’s a possibility that certain beaches may be cleaner than others which means that there might not be a lot of rubbish to collect. Therefore, I just went with the goal to collect as much as I could.
Ester: I’m aiming to clean about 4 to 10 kilograms of litter over a period of 8 weeks or so. I’m expecting myself to collect around that much to achieve my goal.
Sahana: What prompted you to take on a sustainability-related activity for your DOE gold award?
Akshayaa: The main reason I chose beach cleaning is that I didn’t know what else to do as other options I considered such as tutoring kids online can be really challenging. However, I got the idea to do beach cleaning from Ester and so I decided to go with that.
Ester: I love the beach and how it makes me feel and I chose to do beach clean-ups as part of my DOE activity because it’s something I can do at my own pace and it helps me relax. I also think it’s a win-win situation because the beach is just a beautiful place for meditation and relaxation. In a way, I’m also helping other people by cleaning the beach so that more people can enjoy it too. By cleaning the beach, I can also help make it less of an eyesore and help reduce any pollution around those areas.
Adriana: Why do you think taking care of the environment, especially during these times
is important?
Akshayaa: Probably because we’ve taken the environment for granted for many, many years already. Humankind has destroyed a lot of nature already. For example, deforestation and throwing plastics into the ocean to the point that it’s formed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, whose diameter is just too awfully large due to the amount of rubbish inside it.
Thinking about this pandemic situation, it’s the only time when not many people are leaving their houses which means there are not many people going out throwing rubbish here and there making it the ideal time for us to go and clean the environment. I think that this is also a sort of healing time for the Earth since fewer human beings are around and there is less littering and pollution.
And besides that, generations to come need the environment. We can’t use all of it and leave nothing for future generations. That’s one of the key reasons why we have to keep the environment as good as possible.
Another thing would be global warming. In fact, our generation is going to face the peak of global warming and although we can’t fully eradicate global warming, we could work to decrease the effect it has on us.
Ester: I don’t think I can say anything else better than that because she has pretty much covered everything to a certain degree.
Nadia: How well do you think our school has approached sustainability and is there
anything you think we can improve on?
Akshayaa: Well I started in JIS virtually so I haven’t been on campus to see what JIS does that’s eco friendly and stuff like that but maybe I could say that they’ve done a good job incorporating positions such as eco reps and deputy eco reps into each house. I think that’s a good initiative to bring about awareness as students in these positions can influence other students in their houses to think about the environment more.
Ester: The same goes for me. I’m a new student so I don’t know much about this and JIS and all and so I don’t have much to say about it.
Nazla: If you were to encourage someone to become more environmentally friendly, what would you tell them?
Ester: I would say treat it as your everyday life. If you don’t want to live in a place where everything feels dirty, no one else can clean it up except yourself. Do it for you and everything else will fall into place.
Akshayaa: As for me I believe that’s it's a sort of give and take situation with the environment. It provides us with many resources and allows us to make things like medication, building resources and things like that and so we should be thankful and take care of it in return.
That covers our discussion with Akshayaa and Ester. We should take this article as an opportunity to do the same for nature, immediately as otherwise, we will become subject to the detrimental effects of these environmental issues. Hopefully, with the rigour of JIS students, more sustainable and impactful change is to come.
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