On Friday I had the good fortune of giving a green tour of the campus to some students in a third year environmental-history class. I typically give tours that last between 2 and 3 hours but we were able to condense this one into an hour and 15 minutes. I guess I can talk faster than I thought. Just to giving you a little insight, during these campus green tours I talk a lot about the physical campus, the recycling, energy distribution, and urban planing infrastructure that makes the University of Ottawa a green campus. We visit recycling centres, the vermi composter, the power plant, and even the shuttle bus stop. Anyways, it was on this tour last week that professor Darcy Ingram asked me if all this green infrastructure was listed somewhere. I said that it was available on our green map but I don't think that is what he was looking for. What he really wanted to know about was the narrative. Is the story of our green tour available anywhere? Yes you can go on our awe...

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...