While activists are gathering around the world to take part in the Global Climate Strike this week, students here in Sudbury are also joining the movement.
Students at McEwen School of Architecture showed their support for the actions of 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Sudbury's 12-year-old climate crusader Sophia Mathur by creating manifestos that they hope will inspire people to create a better planet.
In solidarity with the activists who took part in the climate march in New York, students at McEwen marched through the downtown on Sept. 20.
McEwen students are also focusing on environmental issues as part of their coursework.
The Well-Tempered Environment course at McEwen is a third-year course designed to look at ways in which architects can create buildings that are more supportive of the natural environment.
"At the beginning of the course, we dive into this idea of what it is to try to prompt action to make change," Laurentian University McEwen School of Architecture master lecturer Ted Wilson said. "Each year we do a poster, which represents some transformation of a place locally to have people better experience what that could be about."
This year, to celebrate the 50 years of the moon landing, students focused on the old NASA training site located at Lake Laurentian and how the space could be reinvented.
Casey Ouellette's poster spotlights Sudbury's regreening efforts and how the landscape is now reversed from the moonscape it once was when NASA astronauts visited the Nickel City for geological training in 1971-1972.
"I focused on the history of Sudbury by bringing people to the site in the daytime to appreciate the regreening as well as the nighttime," Ouellette said.
Third-year student Jonathan Kabunbe explains his vision for the former observatory site.
"This proposal displays an integration of a pavilion displaying the history of NASA in the region of Sudbury," Kabunbe said. "But also the pavilion could be used as a gathering place. The diminution of density of the envelope toward the centre refers to the sensation of the forest as the elevation brings the attention to the sky."
