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...