Event provides opportunity to recognize local efforts
A gala launched last week’s Blueprints for Change sustainability festival. The event provided an opportunity to recognize significant contributions to reducing Concordia’s “ecological footprint.”
Hundreds of students are involved in sustainability at Concordia. They invite speakers, screen films, write articles, conduct research and feed the worms (the vermiculture worms in the big compost facility on the top of the Hall Building). Some of these activities are for academic credit or for pay through work-study programs, but most of the students are passionate volunteers.
The projects they undertook are many and various, but several stand out: Allégo, an effort to cut back single-occupant car use (see page 6), and R4 (Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), a revival of the university’s recycling program. Students as a whole indicated their support for sustainability when they voted to subscribe five cents per credit to Sustainable Concordia (SC).
If SC was entirely made up of students, it might have been sidelined, but its organizers were too smart for that. From the beginning, they recruited faculty and staff, who responded with data and commitment.
Professors from a variety of disciplines are on the SC advisory committee. They have generated research projects for students and given the students valuable encouragement. These include geographer Catherine Moore, economist Frank Muller, engineer Andreas Athienitis and designer P.K. Langshaw (see page 7), among many others. In fact, the entire Department of Geography, Planning and Environment received an award at the reception.
About 60 non-student supporters were thanked by the SC organizers, but several early supporters were given special recognition: Yves Gilbert, of Facilities Management, who readily supplied data on the university’s use of energy and materials (see page 8), and Susan Magor, head of Environmental Health & Safety.
Magor was an early supporter who created the post of Environmental Coordinator in her office, with Vice-President Services Michael Di Grappa’s blessing. It was filled by Melissa Garcia-Lamarca, who now acts as a staff liaison with the student group she helped start. The R4 coordinator is a staff position in the same department, filled by a SC and business alumna Chantal Beaudoin.
The Blueprints for Change sustainability festival took place all last week. It ended with the third annual Money Talks student-organized conference on sustainable business, and included Canada in the Age of Kyoto, a debate on national policy with Nathan Cullen of the NDP, Marcel Lussier of the Bloc Québécois, Francis Scarpaleggia of the Liberal Party and Green Party leader Elizabeth May.