When I discovered nature.is I told myself that this was a great (Icelandic) project and it should be presented to the volunteers in our environmental camp. I wrote to Guðrún Tryggvadóttir to see if she could be our first guest speaker for the camp; to give a great first impression of what a single person can bring to life with motivation.

I’m Sophie Boone, an environmental messenger for SEEDS Iceland. SEEDS is a volunteering organisation that organises over a hundred work camps every year around Iceland where volunteers come to work for two weeks. To promote its environmental activities, we suggested organising a specific work camp aimed at understanding the environmental problematic in general with a focus on some of these issues in Iceland. We look at many different topics, from food and water through to eco-labels and sustainable architecture. We involve guest speakers to come and talk about a particular topic. To include more active learning, we take the volunteers to visit places in and around Reykjavik so they can see with their own eyes what is going on (the landfill site, recycling plant, geothermal powerplant, Solheimar, Reykjavik eco hostel). So, through many activities, we hope that people experiencing our camp become more aware about the situation in the world now.

In one week I leave Iceland. I hope we will leave behind the start of something that will grow and maybe, even, one day in the not too distant future, we can get Icelanders taking part in this project…!"

Photo: Sophie Boone, to the right in the front row, with volunteers on a visit to Sorpa recycling.