Enviro Collective

Our membership is open to any and all students who are passionate about creating change for the better. We’re not just ‘woke capital-city greenies’, and we’re not all vegans. You don’t have to be a loud person who knows all the rally chants or has a list of least-favourite MPs in order to join.
While we do organise and take part in campaigns, protests, and fundraisers, we also function as a space where like-minded people can come together and empower each other. We’re here to help students who want to develop their knowledge on current environmental issues and critical, independent thinking. We regularly hold skill-building workshops to train us in tackling these issues in our own lives and communities

It’s important to understand the context which underlies the world that we live in today. Our society is built upon the dispossessed lands of First Nations people—and thanks to their sustainable management, this country has harboured a natural abundance of life for tens of thousands of years.

This country is now being catastrophically ravaged by bushfires, as record temperatures strain our ecosystems and the regional communities whose livelihoods are linked with the land. While they are starved of water, our neighbouring Pacific communities are being inundated by increasingly powerful storms and rising sea levels. Millions of people in Asia and Africa are already being displaced as unpredictable rainfall makes it harder to grow food.

There is absolutely no doubt that these shifts are due to human emissions and the changes in climate they have created—and yet, the governments and “leaders” of the world remain complacent in taking decisive action. Our social and political systems continue to reward greed and shortsightedness instead of forward-thinking and collective good—and change will not come unless we radically reconfigure our ways of life and living.

For these reasons, we must be intersectional in responding to environmental issues and recognise that their effects are focused on populations who are already disadvantaged and underprivileged. Righting these wrongs requires the application of climate justice—the people most responsible for climate change should be held accountable for solving it, and voice must be given to those who are often overlooked.

Together with other UTSSA collectives, we ensure that we place disadvantaged and marginalised people at the forefront of our advocacy. In 2019 we worked with FIRE (Fighting In Resistance Equally) to fundraise for the town of Walgett in northern NSW—due to water mismanagement and drought, the town’s water supply has been critically low and unsafe to drink. Enviro Collective members participated in water runs to deliver drinking water to Walgett, and engaged with members of the community first-hand.

As a member of the Australian Student Environment Network (ASEN), we also work with enviro collectives from other universities and organisations from the broader climate movement. In January the annual Students of Sustainability conference was held in Sydney, and UTS Enviro members took part in building a stronger grassroots activist community for the environmental movement. Further days of action are scheduled for the remainder of 2020.