When it comes to reducing waste on campus, Amelia Clarke said it’s about the small changes students make in their lives.
“Paper is an easy one,” she told a group of 50 students last week. “We’re buying paper and stocking paper anyway. All that you have to do is just buy another kind. Just by shifting the type of paper used, you can have a huge ecological impact.”
Clarke is the former president of the Sierra Club of Canada, an organization that aims to protect the earth’s eco-systems.
She said sustainability requires more than these simple material shifts.
“Recycling is only the first step. You need to create a committee that will work with senior that will adopt mandatory policies, and implement sustainability measures in a more systematic way.”
When it comes down to it, Clark said, the most important thing is to promote the eco-campus as a vision and inspiration.
“Students should expect that. They should expect recycling; expect that the paper being used by their university is an ecological choice. It’s time to start demanding this of the university. You’re the stakeholder here.”
Clarke told the in an interview following her talk that students need to confront unsustainable behaviour at Queen’s.
“It’s a campus-by-campus, person-by-person scenario,” Clarke said. “But there always needs to be student initiative in there, especially with the more controversial issues, and there generally is.
“There are great faculty out there, great istrations promoting this. But students have a huge role to play. … The students have the ability to change things.”
Clarke founded the Sierra Youth Coalition in 1996, the youth arm of the Canadian organization. She studied forestry production and management at Mount Allison University, and is now a PhD candidate at McGill University.
When she was an undergraduate student, she initiated a recycling program at Mount Allison with other students because there was no program.
Clarke said university campuses still have a way to go in their quests to become environmentally sustainable.
“Nobody’s doing enough. We pull out who’s doing the best job, but on a whole we still have a long way to go. But you’ve got to hold up the best practices, to show as an example.”
In her presentation, Clarke applauded the implementation of a universal bus at Queen’s as a means of reducing car pollution.
She said the Integrated Learning Centre (ILC) is also a step in the right direction.
“It’s an amazing building. It doesn’t get the PR it deserves.”
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