J'espère que vous avez tous hâte aux semaines vertes! Attend une minute... vous ne les connaissez pas? Pour une période de deux semaines, les Semaines Vertes visent à vous impliquer et sensibiliser aux initiatives de développement durable sur le campus de l’Université d’Ottawa; avec des ateliers et évènements. Cette année, les deux premières semaines du mois de Novembre sont dédiées aux Semaines Vertes. C'est une initiative de la FÉUO et le Bureau du Développement Durable qui est dans sa troisième année. Nous avons développé une liste d'événements fabuleux à ne pas manquer : Gratuiteries lors des deux semaines Foires d’Information – 10 et 12 Novembre Film : Borealis – un événement organisé par la SNAP et MEC « Students on Ice » avec professeur Copland Collecte de déchets électroniques Ateliers: produits alternatifs menstruel, manger de façon durable et à moindre coût, et plus encore! Art inspiré des Sables bitumineux et un vin et fromage avec l'artist Louis Helbig Soir...

Jon wrote a post in January about defining Sustainable Development. Here, we’ll revisit and maybe go a bit further, just for fun. Right now, I’m taking a course on environmental policy and sustainable development. Here, sustainable development refers to development in the developing world. Not just, “development” as in “progress” or any other way you might fathom before we get into more definitions. We’re at a university. And we work in sustainable development for the university, which is not a developing country. So, what does it mean here? Universities have a huge role to play in becoming the leaders of sustainable development. They are building and growing, researching new ways of doing things (integrated environmental approach anyone?), and teaching people who are going to influence the world we live in. At the university, we’re looking at environmental “sustainability” as a goal. So, Jon took the pretty well known definition, coming from an important report (the last of a s...

Click here to link to video Have you seen the piano stairs video? Really? Are you serious, cause it’s posted like everywhere. I even added a link from my Facebook account. Anyways you should take a look because it is pretty awesome and it reveals one of my big pet peeves; lazy stairs people. Allow me to preface with my list of annoying lazy people things. First are people who take the elevator when they could easily take the stairs, next are people use the handicapped button to open doors, then it’s people who don’t turn off their computers at night, and finally people who stand still on the escalator. Each is especially annoying in its own magic way (Seriously you can’t open the door with your hands? Cause the more you use the handicapped button for your own lazy purposes the more you increase the likelihood that it will break when a person who really needs it comes by – Or standing on the escalator? I know it isn’t the biggest crime in the world but if you don’t have a mobility i...

A little while ago, I came across this website for a program that runs in Toronto called Not Far From the Tree . The basic premise is that this group of volunteers goes around picking the fruit out of the yards of those who register on their site. They then divide the fruit 3 ways between themselves (as payment for their work), the owner and a charitable organization such as the food bank or a soup kitchen. I thought this was a great idea since I myself have an apple tree and a grape vine that I rarely find the time to harvest and thus the majority of the fruit go to waste. I started to look into the possibility that Ottawa has such a program, and it kind of does. Vegetable Patch operates a land sharing program within Ottawa’s city centre. The idea is that you offer up your unused land, they come in and make a totally organic garden and care for the plants all season long. In return, you get a weekly vegetable basket from the stuff grown in your yard and elsewhere around...

Il semble que les colloques/congrès sur le « développement durable » ont augmenté au cours des dernières années. La raison est assez simple : la durabilité est très importante ! Pour être honnête, la durabilité peut être un concept difficile à appréhender et certains pourraient penser qu'il n'est rien d'autre qu'une tendance, en particulier du fait que les entreprises font beaucoup de « lavage vert » avec leurs produits, services, événements, etc. L'affaire est, la durabilité ne touche pas seulement l'environnement ; elle affecte également la société et l'économie. C'est pourquoi les colloques/congrès sont idéales pour éduquer les gens à propos des solutions durables ! SPECTRUM 2009 a touché ce concept à différents niveaux avec des experts en matière de politiques ainsi que des dirigeants communautaires et des représentants de tous les ordres de gouvernement, du milieu universitaire, du secteur privé, de groupes communautaires et d’organisations ...

School’s in! It is probably appropriate to talk a bit about courses on campus. Why? Because they can contain sustainable development content, or they can be environmentally conscious in the way they are run. We’ll touch upon the latter first because it’s pretty basic: less paper, less resources, less waste. Tips for students and professors to green their classroom (these items generally must be mutually agreed upon) Double-side your assignments, or print them single spaced or on already used one-sided paper Have assignments submitted online or via email Use online course material (also lowering costs to students for copyright material) Encourage taking notes and not printing all slides or readings on paper Buy recycled paper notebooks, or reused one-sided paper notebooks (can be purchased at Reprography) As far as sustainable content, there are a number of courses offered that talk about issues of sustainability and sustainable development. The next blog post will likely be an offs...

I thought that I should make this entry based on other people’s work. Normally I love having to do very little and take credit for other people’s work, but this time I can’t really take any of the credit. And bravo to all those who had the tenacity to put a little elbow grease into their lives. There is an old adage in the waste diversion game that goes like this, “Reduce before you reuse; reuse before you recycle; recycle before you trash.” It’s a simple thing to follow and it is structured in a way that saves the most resources. If you can reduce something than you don’t have to reuse it, and so forth and so on. Now let’s put this whole thing into play. We are working on a furniture recycling program here at the University. Most of the time we are catering to the campus services but every once and a while we have some stuff we are going to throw out and we have some people in need. So why not give it to them? Well that’s exactly what happened here; some people in need of chairs ca...

I am. Are you? Is your wallet? A common immediate response to how to solve issues of environmental damages, poor animal treatment, and unhealthy food in the food industry is to focus on concerted individual (often read: consumer) efforts to make change. The idea that (and this is a direct paraphrase from the movie) your vote is your dollar. You tell the food industry that you want organic, good for you food, it will happen. I saw the documentary Food, Inc at the Bytowne Cinema. I quite enjoyed it. I found it to have a lot of useful information and even be relatively accessible to folks who may not know much about the food industry. It was pretty graphic at times, which is effective and necessary however it obviously turns some stomachs. Let’s think about this. There is something wrong with the food industry. Most can agree with this, no matter which side you are coming from. It is efficient in ways, but very inefficient in others. There is overproduction, increased risk ...

So the Katimavikers are back in town, and not a minute too late! For all of you who don’t know about the program, Katimavik is a national program that teaches youth a valuable lesson about life, the universe, and everything. Follow this link for a much better description than mine. Now this is the third year that Katimavik will be working with the Office of Campus Sustainability. I will be the first to admit that I perpetuate the myth of the Katimaslave (esclavavik pour les francophones). Really! I have them come in every day and work like dogs for basically no pay. And of course this blog is about demystifying things… so here goes. It isn’t actually easy keeping Katimavik participants motivated (that’s their real titles but sometimes I just give up and call them parts). Think about it, if you weren’t getting paid, what could I possibly offer to get you to do some back-breaking labour? Especially if some of the things we have them do is pretty monotonous. So the solution??? W...

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...