Maya de Groot
The past ten weeks I followed the course Engineering for Sustainable Development, with as goal to design a 100% self-sufficient future for Texel in the year 2065. During one of the workshops the question arose as to how all this research had influenced your personal life, did we make changed in our behaviour? How sustainable are we actually living? And I’m ashamed to say that it hadn’t, at least not that much.
This question, how sustainable are we actually, came to me once more the night before we left for Texel. I was actually packing my bag and I kept staring at the pile of clothes on my bed. Wondering what on earth I should take with me and of course the how much? I kept thinking about that study trip to Berlin I took last year and seeing some people only travelling with the smallest of the smallest suitcases, wondering how do they do that? For me that was the first thing about this trip whether I questioned if I could improve on this. Of course the logical thing to do is find clothes that can mix and match. And that’s exactly what I did, but I also think I still took more than necessary because I have a certain amount of space in my suitcase. And why not fill this?
The second thing that comes to mind was the actual trip towards the island; all of which was done by either public transport (bus, train and ferry) or by bicycle. Both sustainable options, except for the fact we accidentally got back into the Texel hopper on the boat and therefore got out at wrong place (Den Burg). Instead of walking towards either Campus the Potvis or de Verzamelpost we waited for the bus to return to take us back to the boat where we would rent our bikes. The trip itself, if communication had been better, could have been even more sustainable.
Together with three other students I researched the subsystem of food on Texel and amongst our conclusions were not only reducing the amount of meat one eats, but also focussing on eating locally produced foods. Personally I like meat and I think it would be hard for me to give eating it up all together, but that does not mean I eat it every day.
Focussing on buying and eating locally produced foods is something I don’t do (yet) and I think this is for the same reason it might be hard to implement this on Texel. Currently it’s often more expensive to buy these foods and as a student I simply don’t have a lot of money to spend on food. During the field research we asked some locals and we came to the same conclusion; that it’s overall a bit more expensive. And with a large group of low income residents making this change to solely locally produced foods is difficult.
This was also translated in the meals we ate during our week. It’s hard to say where the products used in the lunches and dinner came from, but those for breakfast were products you can buy in any supermarket in the Netherlands, not locally produced foods and this was as mentioned before (partially) a budget problem.
Something that was decided upfront was the fact all meals would be vegetarian. As said before, I like meat, but I didn’t mind not eating it. It’s not like I really missed it, there were enough options to choose from, but once again communication proved to be a bit lacking. What does one consider to be ‘vegetarian’, is this just no meat, or no meat and fish? Where our perceptions of vegetarian in line with those that took care of our meals? And I’m not writing this to criticize, but there were two occasions on which ‘fish based products’ (tuna salad and prawn crackers) were served.
Looking back at this week in Texel, I think we tried to be as sustainable as possible, but of course improvements could have been made. I think besides the willingness to change your mind set on of the things we realized was how important communication is. Not just between us as a group of thirty students and organization, but between the locals as well. I believe the first step in becoming more sustainable is improving communication. Exactly what we defined to be the current ‘crisis’, the lack of it.