My dear, old French teacher in high school would pointedly announce periodically throughout the semesters, during which he taught 15, 16 and 17 year olds. Mind you, I have another old high school teacher who recently quoted K. Vonnegut on Facebook, “True terror is to wake up and discover your high school class is running the country.” Mixed messages- but they motivated this blog. Recently, my Environmental Approaches to Geographical Issues course had a mock United Nations Framework Convention on Climatic Change - the class was divided into groups and each was assigned a country to represent in a Conference of Parties to discuss possible mitigation and adaptation policies that were previously set out in a “University of Ottawa Accords 2011”. I’m sure some of you have experienced similar simulations, especially if you are in a political sciencey program of study, but this was my first “debate-style” presentation. I want to congratulate all of the students that took part in the mo...

Absolutely amazing! I just had to talk about these four Kamloops, BC-based youth who have chosen to take the challenge of living waste free for one whole year. Inspirés par le projet Clean Bin (The clean bin project: http://www.cleanbinmovie.com/ ), ils se sont promis de vivre sans magasinage, articles matériels, ni le luxe des emballages jetables. How many of you (at the age of 18) would have thought that living waste-free for a year was possible? Ça ne m’aurait même pas traversé l’esprit à 18 ans! Almost a year ago, Marie-Pierre and I pledged to live waste-free for two months, which was a wonderful learning experience. Je planifie déjà mon prochain défi de vivre sans déchets lors de la compétition RecycloManie 2012 (devrais-je prolongée mon défi à 10-12 semaines?) Anyone interested in joining me? (I am just saying if these four champs can do it for a year; what’s one or two months?) Check out their blog at: http://nottrashyreport.blogspot.com and encourage them to keep going. V...

Photo credit: Marie-Pier Demers Je viens de manger mon tout dernier bonbon d’Halloween. mmm. Trop vieille vous dites? Bien sûr. J’ai franchi, il y a longtemps, l’âge acceptable pour passer l’Halloween. Cependant, il existe un évènement absolument génial qui m’offre la parfaite excuse pour me déguiser et faire du porte à porte chaque 31 octobre. Trick or Eat, ça vous dit quelque chose? Le but de Trick or Eat est de redéfinir l’Halloween pour les plus grands en une collecte de denrées non-périssables pour les banques alimentaires. Des milliers d’étudiants y participent chaque année dans des centaines de villes en Amérique de Nord. Cette fois-ci, au lieu d’aider la Banque Alimentaire de la FÉUO , j’ai décidé d’aider celle de mon quartier. Mon copain, ma sœur, des amis de longue comme de courte date et même un « Couch Surfer » Australien ce sont joint à mon équipe. Sous le pseudonyme de « Dead Samaritains » nous avons fait le tour des rues de Westboro déguisés en zombies sanguinai...

WARNING: about to geek out really hard. Beware. It is already pretty impressive when I get to explain to people what I do here at the Sustainability Office on Campus. I can rave for hours about how great it is to be working in a field that is legitimately connected to my field of study- how applicable what I learn in the classroom is to my some of the projects I am working on here at the office. Beware, I am about to go on one of those tangents… concerning the Sustainable Development Committee (SUDCOM) at the University of Ottawa. The committee is comprised of three faculty, five admin staff, two students, and two community members and its role is to provide advice and insight to uOttawa’s Administrative Committee on matters related to best practices and socially responsible behaviour. This boils down to being a committee of persons who seek to make our campus green. The first meeting took place during reading week and went really well—luckily for myself, being that I had s...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo I love Halloween with a passion. I plan my costume months in advance, coordinate with my boyfriend so that we can make an awesome duet. Last year we dressed up as Cesar and Cleopatra, along with bronzer and sandals (yes, it was cold). This year, we are dressing up as the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. We ransacked our wardrobes and hit the local Value Village and found that awesome costumes could easily be made from scratch: I wore a long red skirt I had made for a costume a few years ago, went all out on the blue eye shadow and heart-shaped lips, taped hearts to my skirt, wore a tiara I had from my birthday party and made a staff with a stick and cardboard hearts. Pretty simple, eh? It took some time to assemble everything, but those pre-made, plastic wrapped costumes just don’t do it for me. Partially because the fabric is really cheap and practically rips looking at it, but also because I’ll only wear the trashy li...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo About 3 years ago the Brige (our waste diversion coordinator) found out that we use about 6,500 disposable coffee mugs on campus every day. If we stacked those mugs end to end, those mugs would be 7 times higher than the Peace Tower of the parliament building. Stacked side to side that would be enough coffee cups to cover ten tennis courts. Now it has been a couple of years since we checked up on the number of disposable coffee mugs used on campus daily but the odds are that this number has gone up. So what's the solution? How can we get people to use fewer disposable mugs? First thing to do is to flip the question on it's head. Why would people want to use a disposable mug? Well it turns out that there are many reasons. For one, all the disposable mugs are branded. That means there is an associated status that goes along with the cup. You know... that really expensive logo that indicates that you are better than all those other doops that...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo       Pour ceux qui n’ont pas encore remarqué, la cafétéria du centre universitaire a maintenant une nouvelle station de recyclage pour les matières résiduelles comportant, composte, tous les plastiques, métal et verre et papier mixte. À première vue, ces quatre divisions semblent assez simples pour le tri des déchets, mais les choses se compliquent quand ont voient que beaucoup de produits vendu par la cafeteria sont servis dans des contenant composés de composés et souvent recouverts d’autres composés… Bref, c’est mêlant et on ne sait pas où mettre tout ça. Solution facile adoptée par certains, la simple et conventionnelle poubelle. Après avoir remarqué que la pluparts des étudiants n’utilisaient pas la station correctement, soit par paresse ou par inadvertance, nous nous sommes dit, bin pourquoi pas les aider. Alors, vêtus de nos suit blanc, nous sommes partis remédier au problème en aidant les gens avec leurs déchets.  La ...

Photo credit: Marie Yassa The day has finally arrived. The mother of all recycling counters is now up and fully operational in the UCU Cafeteria. And if things work out the way they are supposed to, this could be a game changer for recycling on campus. So let me give you a little insight as to how things used to be. The cafeteria use to house about 8 small recycling counters that were scattered around the space. There have been problems for years with contamination, and this was further compounded by the fact that the cafeteria is likely the single largest source of waste production on campus. So what have we done to change the situation and make it better? All the bins are now centralized into one location with a MEGA counter. This helps concentrate our resources, requires fewer materials (bins), makes it easier for staff to clean up, and liberates more space in the caf. The counter has much larger bins that take more waste. This means that there will b...

Photo credit:  http://www.foodincmovie.com/ Aujourd’hui, un de nos participants Katimavik m’a posé une excellente question : ‘Qu’est-ce qui est mieux : de la nourriture biologique (organique) ou locale?’ Dans l’intérêt de ce blog, j’essaierai de donner une réponse hyper-courte et simple. The use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers has a terrible impact on the environment, as well as the health of people working on the farm and of course people consuming the end product. Pesticides have a long list of negative health effects: the organophosphates and carbamates affect the nervous system, others can irritate the skin or eyes, some pesticides could be carcinogens, and others have been found to affect the hormone or endocrine system in the body. Pesticides can also harm local flora and fauna such as bees and birds. Moreover, chemical fertilizers usually make their way into local rivers and lakes, fertilizing blooms of algae that deplete oxygen and create a “dead zone” (no oxy...

A couple of days ago I left an interesting picture up on my Facebook page. You can check out the picture for yourself but it made me and countless others giggle hysterically. Of course that was minutes before I took a leisurely walk through the campus to go get something to eat... Yeah, so what I found was this party poster blasted all over the campus. And to my utter dismay, someone had taken the time to douchingly tape these posters to the trees on campus. Yes, tape.... super thick packing tape. They went around the tree three times. So this makes me think back to a conversation I had with our campus groundskeeper a couple of years ago. Benoit and I had a nice talk about how many trees die on campus because of the negligence of the people around us. Every year there are people that break branches off of trees to pretend that they are wands; or strip the leaves from the trees to keep as souvenirs; or even damage the bark of the trees to hang posters and banners. ...

This post should have been put up last week but I guess I got lazy. So as the story goes, last week I ran into an old friend of mine who posed the simple question, "Should we have an occupy uOttawa protest on campus?" This got me thinking... There are a lot of people much smarter than me out there right now to define what the OCCUPY movement is all about. Well this is my take. In 2008, president Obama took office and there was so much optimism for this that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just based on HOPE. But as the years roll by many people have noticed that not much has changed and it doesn't seem likely that much will change in the near future. As each election passes, the candidates are somehow less and less appealing. In fact, Ontario's recent election drew was a record low turn out. Unlike most people, I don't blame anyone for the low turn out. Some people will make the very real statement that, "there are people dying in other countri...

photo credit: electrictreehouse.com In the same idea as Extreme Couponing, an American reality show where people go completely insane, digging out coupon pamphlets out of recycling bins, collecting them in binders and then hitting the local grocery store for a 4 hour shopping adventure. They bring their children and spouse and come out of there with 6 shopping carts of random stuff (hand sanitizer, shampoo, tissue, canned goods, gatorade) and only pay about 40$. Yay for accessibility! But wait, there are still starving people out there. Oh…right! Hand sanitizer isn’t edible. Now Verizon is offering phones for a penny IF you sign up for a two-year contract. Sorry folks, this offer only works in the United States. Again, yay for accessibility! But also nay for encouraging over-consumerism.  It’s nice to have the latest technology, check emails faster than the speed of light and to telepathically communicate with your gadgets. I may not be a technology crazed person, which...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo While preparing dinner this Sunday October the 16 th , take a minute to think about where that food came from. Were any of your ingredients local? Fair-trade? Did it come from your freezer, ready to be nuked in the microwave? This Sunday is World Food Day, a day to recognize the intricacies of our global food production system and more importantly- your place within it. It seems odd to contemplate where every last ingredient in your meal came from, how it was produced, who grew it, how long it was transported for, and what it cost you, but you should try it. Hell, try for even for half your meal’s worth of ingredients and you would be surprised. Thinking back to the last meal I prepared, vegetarian chilli, it seems impossible to recall off the top of my head where the ingredients were produced. I know that the tomatoes were from Canada, as were the beans…but where on earth was my fake beef, the spices, etc. made? The intentions of World Foo...

Photo credit: Jonathan Rausseo Les sacs réutilisables se voient de plus en plus utilisés dans les supermarchés et dans les magasins de tout genre. Le problème des sacs de plastiques n’est pas totalement réglée mais, la population le comprend et commence à prendre les mesures en conséquence. La prochaine étape ne serait-elle pas les tasses jetables vendues un peu partout. On peut déjà voir la tendance commencer à tourner en faveur des tasses réutilisables comme par exemple, certains kiosques réduisent le prix du café si l’on apporte sa propre tasse. Ou encore, à chaque lundi sur le campus, on offre du café équitable, chocolat chaud, et thé à quiconque apportant une tasse réutilisable. Ce programme existe depuis quelques années et incite les gens à apporter leur propre tasse et à acheter des produits équitables. Cela me semble simple et intéressant mais, on peut voir tout le monde acheter un café Tim Horton ou whatever dans une tasse jetable quand le kiosque a café gratuit se tr...

Photo credit:  http://www.newspapergrl.com Someday I will be reclined in a psychologist’s lounge chair rhyming off coordinates and datums because I will have finally gone crazy from all the mapping projects I get myself into. Sigh, until then I have found myself a new task for maps on campus. Foursquare: a tool that allows users to explore their surroundings and discover new places. If you use Facebook , you may have noticed that you have a few friends that are constantly “checking-in” to random spots including restaurants, clubs, school buildings, etc. Personally, my phone is not legit enough to handle such applications but I can appreciate the GPS technology used by the program and apparently still get assigned the task of taking advantage of the sustainable capabilities of the service. You may recall me ranting this summer about mapping sustainable transportation on campus and my upcoming accessibility mapping projects- this is a continuation of green mapping and invo...