Students:Day Two - the sustainability concept at Leuphana University of Lüneburg

The day started off after breakfast when our hosts, Marlene and Insa, came to our hostel at 9.30 to introduce themselves and take us into town for a guided tour, including explanations of the town's wealth (salt mining), its uneven houses (a result of extracting so much salt from the ground), and the town's importance as a member of the Hanseatic League. Following the tour, we walked to the Leuphana University campus for lunch at mensa prior to a presentation by Dr Maik Adomssent on the basic concepts of sustainable development, beginning with an image of The Simpsons sitting together on the couch with Maik challenging the students to thinking in what ways the image represented aspects of sustainability and unsustainability. Maik made further use of "iconic" images of sustainability, including Rockstrom et al's planetary boundaries graph, the three circles representing the three pillars of sustainable development, the recycling logo, and the ecological footprint. Maik's presentation was followed by another delivered by two student representatives of oikos Lueneburg, Joscha Enger and Anja Zirngibl, on a student perspective of a sustainable university. This included an interactive session with all the Czech students to get them to think about sustainability ideas for their own universities back in the Czech Republic. The four groups that were created came up with the following ideas:


 * reduce the use of elevators in order to limit energy consumption
 * reduce the amount of conventional protein consumed in university canteens by promoting unusual eating habits (e.g. consumption of insects) at least one day per month
 * encouraging cycling to and from and around the campus
 * encouraging fair trade consumption and purchase on university campuses

In the evening, students were informed of their first assignment, i.e. to begin writing a field trip diary and to update it every day.