The Commited MAY 2015 | Page 11

Foreword In 2019, the European Parliament declared a global ‘climate and environmental emergency’. This followed an eruption of public pressure (fuelled by righteous anger) designed to pressurise global leaders into addressing the reality of the unfolding climate catastrophe. Although climate-related citizen activism first evolved in the 1990’s, over the last two years we have seen a major escalation in direct action with an unprecedented series of rolling school strikes and more generalised mass protest initiatives bringing city centres around the world to a standstill. To accompany this pressure on global decision makers, we also, of course, need to make radical adjustments to our own behaviour in both our personal lives and in our public interactions with the places where we study, work or go for leisure. Although this, by itself, is by no means a sufficient response to the most pressing disaster of our times, we will from now on publish our CommitTED journal in electronic format. By using less paper, we will be minimising our negative impact on forests, reducing our use of energy resources and also limiting our carbon footprint… In short, this is an early salute to the annual World Free Paper Day on 6th November. In the words of the headline from a September 2019 article in the Guardian newspaper, ‘Tiny changes might seem insignificant. But they are how we save the planet’. Sevinç ATABAY Turkish Education Association General Director