Students:Lucia Patoprstá

Hey there,

I am a student of the Environmental Studies on the graduate level and I have my Bc. in Sociology (both from Masaryk Uniersity in Brno). I am originally from Bratislava, Slovakia, but have been living in Brno for the past five years (with the exception of 6 months spent in the UK as an intern in Reading International Solidarity Centre - RISC). Currently I should be working on my diploma thesis with the topic on wilderness education so I am a bit interrested in that ;-)

My hobby and my passion is photography and I have my own photography project called Project 365 (yeah, it´s a whole year where I take pictures every day and post it on http://luciapatoprsta.tumblr.com/ so it serves two purposes --> to master my skills in taking pictures, like the techinque, lighting etc... and the second one is to be my visual diary) Expect me to take my camera everywhere on the course, and sometimes panicking about not having taken a picture of a day! :-D

Moreover, during my stay in Reading, I have participated in a project called Town Meal. It is an event organized by RISC held annualy in cooperation with local community gardens. The volunteers gather the fruits and veggies from the gardens and then the local Reading College students cook a meal from it. It´s a perfect event to show the priciples and benefits of community gardens and to promote local charities and NGOs (mostly environmental ones) and at the same time, promote sustainability.

--> final assignment:

As a student of environmental studies, most of the topics that were presented at the Spring School of Sustainable Development were topics I deal with on a daily basis at school so not a lot of them were an absolute novelty for me. One thing caught my eye though (or an ear perhaps? :-P), it is the concept of decoupling. It might have been interesting having a discussion between the promoters of decoupling and the advocates of degrowth and what kind of a conclusion would come up from that. Generally speaking I think the presentations and little workshops between the groups were very interesting (given the fact that we were from different fields and different parts of Europe), I just missed some kind of a more practical side. For the future I would recommend the organisers to divide the time in a different manner and include more outdoor activities or more energisers perhaps so that the time spent listening and learning is more balanced with the time spent doing other activities.