FFSA: recent university engagements
We've been out and about on campuses talking fossil fuels and their demises

We’ve given several addresses at universities in recent months, including during a panel discussion at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies on May 2, World Press Freedom Day, May 2; a Climate Governance talk at Stellenbosch University that same week, and explanations about several of our campaigns at UCT during Green Week.
The World Press Freedom Day had the theme “Journalism in the face of the environmental crisis’” and during his talk our director, David Le Page, noted:
Our current economic paradigm is one of seeking profit above all else. This is one of the key drivers of the climate crisis, which both creates inequality and accelerates it… In this economic paradigm, extraction and exploitation are accepted as the main ways of creating value.
Later, he wryly added:
To refrain from naming the fossil fuel industry as the key driver of climate change is like living in Gaza and saying we have a problem with explosions without mentioning who’s causing them.
Our campaigners Stephen Horn of Clean Creatives SA, Thameena Dhansay of Fossil Ad Ban and Sarah Robyn Farrell addressed students at UCT during Green Week, as part of an Green Campus event where the student group announced a project investigating how much UCT is following through with their pledge to divest from fossil fuels.
David also recently spoke at a student-organised University of Stellenbosch event on climate governance, where he again argued that the “climate crisis” is in fact primarily a corporate governance crisis – that we can far better focus our climate efforts if we’re direct in naming the true authors of this “climate crisis” – fossil fuel companies – rather than allowing them to present the crisis as abstracted from their actions or by deflecting blame onto the billions they have coerced into continuing dependence on their products.
Other contributors on the SU climate governance panel were experts from local government, the university’s facility manager, and Prof Pedro Monteiro from the SU School of Climate Studies.