One task a month

Jonathan Gerstner

Cellist

  • Home is wherever the people I care about live

  • Any lake or river with a lively forest next to it

  • What I love the most is the diversity but if I had to pick one: the Blackbird. When it starts singing it's like every other noise vanishes and this instant can brighten up my whole day.

  • Classical music not only deeply needs more awareness about environmental sustainability, but also presents several opportunities to have a considerable impact in the global fight against climate change. And social imitation projects and challenges like 1 Task a Month seem to be among the most powerful tools to bring positive change.

(c) Andrej Grilc

May 2025

Task taken on:

This month I’m taking on this task: talk to 2 people in classical music about climate change or environmental issues. Choose people you've never spoken to about it. For example you could tell them what you're worried about, what you're trying to do, what inspires you, cool solutions you've seen etc. 🌟

Completed?

Winter 2024/25

Tasks taken on:

Developing the ecoclassica project, taking part in webinars about culture and climate, trying to eat less chocolate :)

Completed?

Mostly I did a lot of things for my organisation EcoClassica, like recording videos, writing posts, etc.

This month I also took part in 3 webinars about culture and climate, very inspiring.

On top of that I've been increasingly in contact with 2-3 people at my music university who are really involved in this. I took part in a session of the university's climate working group on how to integrate climate change into artistic research topics, as well as an informal meeting with the university's sustainability manager and 2 other people to organize the yearly "bike-action day". My personal conclusion: find the people in your local community who are already involved in this and just meet up for a tea or a walk. It's sooo motivating to see people in real life, discuss, and get the physical feeling of not being alone in this. Because we're not! :) I got a lot of motivation out of this, especially in this January where so much stuff happened everywhere.

Also: it may sound irrelevant but I've been exercising more (more than the 0 min/week before) these past 3 months. Running for 15 min. every 2-3 days. And I honestly think it might be one of the roots to how I kept my motivation for the heavy climate topic this winter. It really makes me feel so much more optimistic and energetic about many things. Can recommend

As for my chocolate task, I would say my general chocolate consumption has gone down. But I didn't manage to totally get rid of it - it's hard! Luckily the emission factor is per 100g and even though I loooove chocolate, I wouldn't eat a 100g of chocolate as I would 100g of cheese. And eating milk chocolate or cookies with chocolate chips already helps reducing co2 emissions a lot.

September 2024

Task taken on:

Turns out I was already on a kind of unexpected vegan trial period these past few weeks, born out of summer-break-related food-boredom 🌱 so let's make it officially the september task! Basically I'm currently trying and reviewing all the vegan cheese and protein alternatives I can find in the supermarkets... My only non-vegan consumption in normal everyday-life: butter, cheese, and ice-cream and milk chocolate here and there. Cheese is difficult. Some of the alternatives I could find are honestly and sadly kind of inedible, but some are actually amazing. Yet to find a cheese alternative that actually tastes like cheese though... Is it even necessary? My heart still says yes... I just love cheese, the rest turned out to be easily avoidable for now. In the mid-term I might just end up being vegan, with one cheesy Gruyère exception a month... If you guys have some vegan cheese experience let me know :) let's see where this gets me for the rest of the month.

Completed?

As for my vegan trial in September: it went really well! I replaced or removed a lot of my usual vegetarian animal consumption (butter, cheese) with alternatives and also experimented with vegan alternatives for other products. I found a nice cashew nut based wild garlic "cheese" in Billa that tasted good! I also tried the Beyond Burger alternative, which actually tastes amazing! Not exactly like meat (as far as I can remember from 7 years ago), but the texture and juiciness were very, very close. And when I was in Germany, I found a nice salami alternative at Rewe called "Mühlen Feinschmecker Salami" (as well as another one, but this one was better) - it actually tasted very close to what I remember salami tasting like. But then - I haven't really missed meat in recent years, I usually prefer some home-cooked alternative (instead of burgers, some pumpkin patties). So it will probably stay that way. But these 3-4 supermarket alternatives will definitely stay on my list :)