Showing posts from November, 2008
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Another Dimension of Sustainability

So recently the City of Ottawa decided to put a hold on moving the U-pass closer to fruition. On November 12th, City councillors held a spirited bout of politics at the expense of moving the U-pass forward. I think that the council could use a lesson about another aspect of sustainability, sustainable funding sources. The hope of the SFUO and the University of Ottawa is to use the U-pass pilot project to determine the true cost of transit for all students. Once the pilot project is finished and a true cost is determined, the students at the University of Ottawa will vote again on a referendum for the U-pass at the true cost. But the story doesn't end there, for you see students at Carleton University are ready to make the same vote. And the word on the street is that students at Algonquin College, Saint Paul's, Dominican College, and La Cité Collegiale are ready to vote as well. So if all goes according to plan than that means that there are potentially 100,000 students in th...
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Campus Sustainability

So there are like 100 different definitions for sustainable development. My little chunk of the pie is on the campus side of things. You see if there is going to be a big change in the way that we do things it is going to be here at academic institutions. Universities are centers of learning and excellence; they are the centers for innovation and analysis; they are the places where people become ideas and those ideas become change. So if we can all agree that universities have a big role to play in pushing the sustainability agenda, then I suppose the next thing to do is define what sustainable development actually is. Like I said, over 100 definitions to work with and although some of them are kind of the same... many of them really aren't. And of course the only one that I really care about, I mean right now that is, is the one that deals with universities. When we break all the definitions down, there are 2 principles that emerge. The first is inter-generational equity and th...
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