ENV Class hosts new, creative competition – Festival for Green

Festival for Green, hosted by Dr. Peter Griffin’s Environmental Issues class, is a new competition involving creative video entries and posters with environmentalist themes.  It was held on October 21 in the second-floor auditorium with one purpose: raise awareness for environmental issues.  Representatives from local environmental organizations in Shanghai were invited to attend this semi-formal three-hour event.

A short talk by a representative from environmental organization Green Initiatives covered documentaries, recycling of electric devices, and promoting environmentalist education. After this, students presented their videos. These included creative entries from a stop motion about ocean pollution to the tragic story of a dolphin mother. In the end, Evan Chang (9B), Sean Tsou (9A) , and Eric Kuo(9B) won first place for a video of artistic shots of Shanghai’s busiest road—depicting the many facets of Shanghai’s pollution.

A student leader of the event, Angel Wang (12B), said, “We started planning from the middle of September…[the science department] wanted to host this inter-school environmental competition to raise awareness for students to protect the environment.”

“The judges were invited by Dr. Pete,” she continued. “One is from Roots and Shoots…the Environmental Club has worked with their Million Tree Project for some time.”

The event highlighted a variety of environmental issues and included all types of videos. Jaebin Choi (9B), a member of the third-prize winning group, made a video arguing for vegetarianism as an effective way of reducing pollution. He said of his project, “None of us were good at editing videos. It wasn’t as cool looking as the other groups. But we were glad that the judges and people voting for our video saw the message we were trying to send instead of the video quality.”

Festival for Green, with its video and poster competition, creatively communicated the problems of pollution in our world but also offered possible solutions as well. With the awarding of first to third place certificates, the ceremony came to a close.

Featured Image – Dr. Pete awards the third place winner Courtesy of KaiXing Tan