GoGreen Week, an annual tradition in its third year, returned to NYU Shanghai this spring with a flurry of events related to the environment, wildlife, energy, food and sustainable development organized by the student club Green Shanghai.
Trash fashion
Kickstarting the week-long celebration was the trash fashion show on April 16. Some 20 students transformed upcycled garbage materials into 13 self-designed fashion statements presented on the catwalk at the Envision Pavilion outside of the Himalayas Museum. The show's many environmental allusions especially highlighted issues of sustainability in the fashion industry.
I noticed that there were many expired posters on campus, so I decided to turn them into floral decorations on my dress, said Lu Ziyu.
Noting that the fashion industry is a known culprit for water contamination and excessive material wasting, Green Shanghai President Nofar Hamrany said that the club was out not only to decrease local waste levels, but moreover to prove that fashion design can become an effective and creative measure for addressing environmental issues.
Watch the full video here.
Art meets environment
Echoing the GoGreen spirit, the NYU Shanghai Art Gallery hosted exhibitions and workshops by Danish visual artist Rasmus Degnbol that examined human relationships with the planet.
Monday, 17 April, brought the opening of Degnbol's photography exhibition 'Breathe', a cross-disciplinary project about pollution and air quality.
'Breathe' features a series of microscopic air sample images juxtaposed with photographs of the sites from which they were taken, including cities such as Shanghai and Xingtai.
It's the first time that I presented photographs of this project. I wanted to bring science and art together in portraying the micro-particles we all breathe in every day, at familiar places where we live and work,, he said.
Throughout the week, the award-winning artist also gave workshops for community members on how to tell stories with an environmental lens, through portraiture and landscape photography as well as videos and mixed media.
Elephant protection and climate change fiction
On Tuesday, Andrea Turkalo presented her experience with and research on forest elephants, an endangered species in Africa's Congo Basin, to an NYU Shanghai audience.
As an Associate Conservation Scientist, Turkalo leads the Dzanga Forest Elephant Study, Central African Republic, a programme of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
She pointed out that encroaching human activities, such as population growth, civil strife, an increase in extractive industries (including logging and mining) and the global demand for ivory have contributed to the decreasein forest elephants.
On Thursday, the Literary Reading Series hosted Australian novelist and one-time Shanghai resident James Bradley, who shared his new work 'Clade', which imagines a future shaped by catastrophic climate change through as seen through the lens of one family's story.
In a discussion moderated by NYU Shanghai Language Lecturer David Perry, Bradley fielded questions covering a wide range of environmental subjects.
Earth Day conference and market
GoGreen Week culminated in an Earth Day conference that included panels and workshops along with an eco-market. The event provideda platform for stakeholders from academia, international agencies, non-governmental organizations and ecological businesses to meet and discuss working together for a sustainable future.
About the author
GoGreen Week, a student-led initiative, aims to raise awareness of environmental issues and eco-friendly solutions, and inspire positive action toward a clean, healthy world. What started in 2015 as an eco-challenge for NYU Shanghai students to give up meat has evolved into a week-long panoply of environmental talks and events across all of NYU's global campuses.