Last night, as I do every year, I gave a presentation to the University of Ottawa's student ambassadors team . If you aren't in the know, the ambassadors team is, and I quote, "an essential tool for the University of Ottawa. It represents an invaluable resource for prospective students and their parents, providing everything from tours, tele-counseling and special recruitment events." So every year I give a presentation to the ambassadors about the neatest green things on campus so that they in turn will tell prospective students about them. I love presenting to the ambassadors. Not only do they dress nicely, but they also ask really great questions, which makes sense since they have to explain everything to our visitors. But last night the questions were better than my answers, so I thought I might take this post to clarify some of the great questions I got. 1. Is the University going to create a park in the middle of parking lot X? Yes, the plan is to one da...

Yesterday I had the chance to give a presentation to the new Health Promotions ambassadors. The whole thing took place in Terminus and I think things went pretty well. My job was to explain to the group why sustainability was important for the campus and why it was important for one's personal health. In turn, those ambassadors would spread the word around campus over the course of the year (no doubt during the many many many events that they participate in). There are a couple of themes that are really easy to link to health, like food and water. And of course there are a couple that aren't so easy, like energy management and green space. I did my best to fill in those blanks. For example, energy management is directly related to green house gas emissions and air quality. The more energy we burn, the more stuff we dump into the atmosphere, the worse our air quality. Poor air quality leads to a tonne of horrible health effects. Green space and nature deficit dis...

The University of Ottawa is and has been a very green campus for many years; perhaps even since its inception. You don’t have to take this fact completely on faith, I promise to lay out my argument for this in future blogs, but for now let’s assume that uOttawa is one of the greenest institutions in North America. This begs the question; if we are so green why is it that no one knows this? The answer unfortunately is complicated, but I will do my best to keep it simple. I have actually mentioned this problem in previous posts but the University of Ottawa’s green initiatives are almost all invisible. Allow me to illustrate; the University employs a district heating system which means that there are pipes under the campus that shares the heat between buildings. Not exactly the kind of thing you would notice while strolling around outside. So the name of the game is to make the invisible... visible. Tricky, I know. But fear not, we here at the office have been dreaming up tonnes o...