The environment: not a concept or an academic discipline, but the world we experience every day.

The ESI in five minutes

A new five-minute film to summarise and explain exactly what the Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) is for has just been launched.

Narrated by the Institute’s Director, Professor Kevin J Gaston, the film is an attempt to outline the range of the ESI’s work and to describe why that work is so crucial now, and so important to Cornwall.

It talks about the Institute’s three principal research areas – clean energy, living landscapes, people and sustainable communities – in the context of keeping a growing population fed, healthy,  supplied with energy and housed. The need to try and do all this while cutting overall emissions and maintaining fragile ecosystems is also stressed, as is the challenge of maintaining some connection with rural landscapes in an increasingly urbanised world.

Professor Gaston said: “All of us are always so busy and preoccupied with our research that it’s all too easy to forget the need to explain our work to as wide an audience as we can. Obviously, every academic and researcher here could easily spend hours talking about the work they do, but the idea behind the film is to try to boil down what we do and why we do it into a form that as many people as possible can understand.”

The film, along with more than 20 other films about the ESI’s work, can be watched here, on the Institute’s YouTube playlist.

Date: 7 October 2015