Environmental Sustainability at TRU

Welcome to the first edition of Tom’s Sustainability Blog. I have never done a blog before so as much for my sake as yours I will tell you what I am expecting. The blog will cover my current thoughts and impressions and hopefully encourage your responses. It will be informal as a counter point to the more formal information presented in the www.tru.ca/sustain website. It will follow a stream of consciousness pattern….assuming that I am conscious at the time of writing it.

I want to start out by talking about an experience I had at “ Going for the Green” the sustainability golf fun night that we organized with the excellent support of Gerard Hayes (who by the way was only organizing the campus services for the Lillooet evacuees at the same time….I have recommended him to President Kathleen for the Master Multitasker award on her next New Years honours list…but I digress) The Bookstore provided sustainable prizes for everyone ( water bottles, bamboo shirts etc,) and Aramark provide two “hundred mile” dinners for four. It was great fun and everyone got into the spirit of the event with their costumes, abysmal golf shots and hilarious attempts at blind putting. The entire women’s choir showed up from the advancement and alumni office skilfully disguised as construction workers accompanied by Elvis with his guitar shaped water bottle….really you had to be there to believe it!

The highlight for me however was meeting Helen and Harry Skoglund. Harry is 80 years young and Helen is his childhood sweetheart and new bride of a little over a year. They live in Lillooet and were staying with Jim and Diana Skogklund during the evacuation and came with them to the fun night. Helen was on the original Board of Governors of Cariboo College when is started out in a trailer on a reserve and talked about that and later when the college was housed in the basement of the armory. She just glowed with pride as she talked about the decision of the Board to take the risk and install the first computer assisted drafting machine and how she pressed the buttons to start it up for the first time. She obviously still keeps up with what we are doing today and she gave TRU a solid endorsement for maintaining the emphasis on quality and doing things a little differently (no I don’t think she was referring to the golf tournament). As a newcomer to TRU you can imagine what an impact the living history lesson has had on me.

As many of you know I had the good fortune to hire two excellent Co-op students to work with me; Anna-Maria Viaud and Adam Hockin. I had originally planned to hire one but because of the exceptionally high quality of applicants I hired two. They have been running me off my feet so I won’t make that mistake again!! We went together to the World Changing Careers conference at UBC. The conference was organized by a young woman Alysia Garmulewicz who wants to make a difference. There were a wide variety of first class presenters including Raffi (made all of us from Winnipeg and those of us who never will grow up proud!!) and the Chair of the Board of the Suzuki Foundation. The presentations were both informative and thought provoking. One of the messages that came through clearly that we have to get beyond the guilt approach to change (don’t drive a big car, don’t drink bottled water etc) to a more proactive positive approach…something we need to keep in mind as we move forward with activities here at TRU and in the broader community.

Anna-Maria, Adam and I also took the opportunity to visit the Kamloops water treatment plant that is a gold LEED building that most people do not know was co-financed by TRU. It is a pretty impressive place with interesting features including a roof garden.

The three of us have enjoyed great broadly based support from the TRU community as we put together the various components of the environment and sustainability programme. For example, when we decided to order reusable water bottles to give away as part of our strategy to reduce the use of bottled water on campus faculties, departments and clubs joined us and in the end almost 3000 bottles were ordered and have arrived in time to give to incoming students. TRUSU had already ordered their bottles so that total does not include the ones to be given out by the student union.

We have also been approached by a number of programmes and faculties on campus including TRU World, the Adventure Tourism Programme, the Career Education Department, Institutional Planning and Analysis, Student Recruitment and the Deans Offices in Science and Nursing to help them with specific issues or to organize more broadly based sustainability initiatives. I shouldn’t be surprised. My first contact last January was with Doug Smith, Manager of the Print Shop and while I was looking for business cards he gave me a good basic education on the things that we could do to make our paper use more sustainable.

I am sure that I have missed a lot of things that I should have mentioned but I think that is enough for the first blog. I look forward to your