“I am truly looking forward to my second season as Patron.” Porträt Schirmherr Jens Schröder

“I am truly looking forward to my second season as Patron.”

As a fan and visitor of many years, GEO Editor-in-Chief, Jens Schröder is looking forward to all the festival hustle and bustle and, particularly, to the flood of images projected every evening on the beach. In an interview, he explains about his connection to the festival's food theme.

horizons zingst: Jens, you have once again taken on the patronage of the Environmental Photo Festival. We are very happy about this. What are your reasons?

Jens Schröder: Last year the Zingst team did absolutely everything to create an outstanding festival, despite the restrictive circumstances and a necessarily smaller audience. That was truly remarkable! However, as a long time fan and visitor to »horizons zingst«, I know how things were in the past, and my hope is to return on an even grander scale this early summer, 2022. In that sense, as patron to the festival, I look forward to participating a second time in a hopefully more “normal” season. It's not without precedent either: I'm a native of Rhineland, and in Cologne this year they've kept last year's Carneval triumvirate in office for another term.

The festival title is EAT IT; and it's all about food. What connection do you have to the theme?

With this theme, the festival touches every single visitor in a very personal way – including myself. The pandemic has taught me, like so many others, that the preparation of food can bring a lot of joy. Why I had to live a whole 48 years before this became obvious is a mystery to me. In that sense, I think it's wonderful to see that, in addition to the more challenging issues currently surrounding food, there are also photos being exhibited that highlight the sensual aspects of food. That's also an important aspect of this theme.

As Editor-in-Chief of – among others – GEO magazine, you have been an advocate for sustainability for quite some time. What meaning does sustainability have to you specifically?

That's a big question. In essence, sustainability to me means being future-proof; or as some put it these days: safeguarding a future for our grandchildren. Sustainability is encapsulated in individual behaviour, but it's also a way of running an economy and the life of society, to ensure a good and healthy future. Sustainability is also an attitude, which does not trade at the cost of the lives of other people or regions of the planet. The long-term, resulting conflicts are also factors that threaten a more peaceful and healthy tomorrow. I also think it's important that discussions surrounding sustainability shouldn't always have to give us a guilty conscience. It can be simply fascinating and interesting to delve into the complex connections between systems, and how one interacts with the other. We try to cover these things in our magazine. There can be joy in working on this, so that our way of living can be better and more responsible. The ability to take responsibility, to draw out the best in ourselves, is what makes us human.

To what degree does food play a part in this broad issue of sustainability?

The way we humans feed ourselves is one of the biggest points of leverage we have, if we want to make our way of life more sustainable; because an economy that feeds seven billion people every day is probably the single largest factor we can influence. And the great this is that every one of us can participate.

What does the content of your fridge reveal?

Firstly, it is not as stuffed full as it used to be. One of our first goals at home was not to throw away expired groceries any more. As a result, we began shopping less, and more mindfully. Apart from that, our fridge is filled with a lot of vegetables, though we still have meat and sausage, albeit almost exclusively organic options. In fact, there are also a few meat substitutes our whole family enjoys. The door of the fridge has most recently been stocked not only with cow, but also with oat milk.

Which of your duties as patron do you look forward to the most?

That question is easy to answer. I'm most excited about the extremely important task of sitting at the beach on a sunny May evening, a cold beverage in hand, enjoying the projected flood of images, and talking shop with photographers who have come from around the globe for this event. These are my fondest memories of »horizons« in the past, and are the moments which make this festival so special. This only happens in Zingst. Now, I'm not certain this “beach sitting” is strictly speaking a “patron duty”, but I'll plan time for it, to be on the safe side.

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