Voices of the Square: Green School Bali — ‘the world isn’t learning enough’ about climate change

By Luba Bauer
GSS correspondent

Editor’s note: Green School Bali plans to attend the COP 23 climate change Nov. 6 to Nov. 17 in Bonn, Germany. Stay tuned to Global Student Square for stories, photos and video from our GS Green Generation correspondents.

BALI, Indonesia — Before we attended last year’s COP 22 in Morocco — the annual Conference of Parties that is the UN’s largest climate change conference — we were unsure as to what we should pack.

Should it be murals? Should we do a workshop? A PowerPoint presentation? What’s the best way to change minds about climate change?

Then we listened to “Really Long Distance”, an episode from the podcast series “This American Life.”

The episode delves into the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 and focused on one man who lost his family in the tsunami.

To remember his lost ones, he built a phone booth where he could “talk” to his family and named it “The Phone of the Wind.” People all around the world heard about his project and traveled to Japan to see it firsthand.

As a group, we were inspired by this moving story and decided to put our own spin on it: We wanted to connect with other people about climate change.

We did this by constructing a dome-shaped booth structure out of bamboo — bamboo greatly contributes to our identities as students of Green School — and lined the inside with cloth to make it a private space.

We picked out photos of environments that had been affected by climate change and hung them inside for people to see. We also placed a phone inside so people could record their stories.

This sounds relatively easy, but we faced many challenges.

Building the dome took two weeks of labor and we needed it to be transportable. We struggled finding the perfect measurements, trying to bend bamboo without breaking and carrying this big structure to Morocco from Bali.

We were also brand new at creating podcasts. A lot of things were trial and error. For example, recording people’s stories in the middle of a conference was challenging because sometimes you couldn’t hear them loud enough on the recording.

Our process went a little something like this: first, we interviewed with someone who we felt has a really inspiring story or one that needs to be shared. We recorded them and later a few students came together to talk about it. Then, we sent it to one of our IT teachers who helped us put it together. After that, we uploaded it to Soundcloud:

Our mission was – and continues to be – to raise awareness about climate change and share stories through our podcast. While it was first created for the conference, we now cover local stories because we live in an environment where we have so much information to share with the world. And of course we have a long way to go: We have many production improvements to make. We don’t have all of the audience we want right now. We are constantly trying to find ways to improve and learn from our mistakes.  

In the meantime, keep your ears open for our next podcast here on Global Student Square. 

—Student Melani Maciulyte of Green School Bali holds up a sign advocating action on climate change during the COP22 conference in Morocco in 2016. Photo by Roxana McDonald/GS Bali.