At the PRBB, we care about sustainability. Since a few years ago, there is a sustainability movement that consists of two complementary groups: a sustainability board that officially represents the institutes hosted by the PRBB, and a grass-roots group composed of volunteers from all centres.
Victoria Shabardina, a postdoc in the Multicellgenome Lab at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE: CSIC-UPF), is a member of the latter. In this article she tells us about the recent activities organized by this grass-roots group.
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For the last three years, the PRBB sustainability group has been organising sustainability seminars online, where different speakers cover multiple aspects of sustainability: from waste production in the lab and carbon footprint of computational biology, to the role of science in the sustainability movement, social sustainability and ecofeminism.
Although the online format of the seminars allows for more flexibility and makes it accessible to more people, we all know that in-person interaction is an important asset in any social activity. This is why the members of the group decided to include in-person events, too. From now on, we will have seminars in different formats: online, hybrid, and in-person only.
Our pilot was the hybrid seminar by Adrià Auladell, a postdoc in the BEAP lab (IBE-CMIMA). In his talk Adrià touched on a very itchy question on whether we can fight the “system”. He talked from the perspectives of ecological sustainability, politics, and academic environment. Adrià cited Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Diego Rivera and even (inevitable these days) Elon Musk. He also used internet memes and ended up referring to some renowned sociologists from Barcelona. The talk was filled with inspiring and sometimes provocative ideas. The most important was probably the idea that we need better communication between natural sciences, humanities, and the public outside of academia if we want to have less stress and more prospects in our future.
“We need better communication between natural sciences, humanities, and the public outside of academia if we want to have better prospects in our future”
Inspired by the number of people who came to hear Adrià’s talk, we next invited Sara Verstraeten, CEO of the science communication agency KOI and former communication manager for TREC-EMBO. Sara organized a hands-on presential-only workshop, which was both informative and a lot of fun. Participants tried to create their own public communication projects (completely unexpectedly, everyone chose the topic “sustainable tourism in Barcelona”). Throught the workshop, they learned that public communication of scientific knowledge helps informed decision-making and making better life choices. It also helps people to understand the dangers of climate change and the current biodiversity crisis – and in the end, we hope, it can stimulate them to take action.
The next seminar, “Sustainability update at the PRBB”, by Mònica Rodríguez, will be online, on May 14 at 2 pm. And we will soon organize a special event where you can learn more about the PRBB Sustainability Group and have some sustainable fun. Stay tuned!
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If you want to learn about all the things the PRBB Sustainability group does, you can join the monthly lunch-meetings every first Wednesday 13.00 at the PRBB cafeteria; send an email to prbbsustainability@gmail.com; or a message in the LabShare chat in Telegram.
