Name

Felix Spira

Location

Rotterdam, Netherlands.

What was your ‘eureka’ moment for getting into sustainability?

Previously I was interested in human rights and conflict resolution. I got hooked into sustainability when I learned about climate change. Most of our efforts to help people move out of poverty, reverse migration, and resolve violent conflicts will be in vain if we do not manage to stop climate change. For me, climate change is the biggest social justice issue and threat to our survival that we face as a civilization. Another crucial moment was during a family gathering. We went for a walk with our whole family and I talked to my niece. She was born in 2000. It was easy to calculate in my head that with life expectancy expanding she has the chance to live until 2100. If we continue emitting emissions like we do now, we will have 4-5 degrees of warming then. Climate change is not so much about safeguarding the lives of future generations, but about the lives of people that live today.

What have you been doing on sustainability since?

Together with friends, I helped to establish Maastricht University Green Office during my Bachelor studies in 2010. The Green Office is the first student-led and staff-supported sustainability hub at a Dutch university where students, staff and faculty work together to make the university more sustainability. We wrote the first sustainability report of the university, set-up a student-led sustainability course and lobbied for changes in campus operations. In 2012, we established rootAbility as a non-profit social business with the vision to spread this model across Europe. Today we have over 20 of these GOs in four countries with over 1mio Euro in funding mobilized from universities to support these GOs.

What’s your vision for reaching a sustainable future?

My vision of a sustainable world is a world where our mind-sets and cultures do not see nature and other human beings as separate from ourselves. On the contrary, we experience the suffering of nature and other human beings as our own suffering. We see that the energies of all life on earth is interconnected and interdependent. We need to care for the collective well-being of trees, wildlife and fellow human beings, because our well-being depends on their well-being. So sustainability for me is about a deep shift in our consciousness of what it means to be human on this planet, within this university.

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