Environ-mental awareness week kicks off

Activists work to raise awareness, involvement

Andrew Sain Staff

Winter isn’t a season when the bulk of students take time to appreciate the environment. Instead, students rush from heated cars to heated homes and back again. However, Environ-mental awareness week, which begins on Jan. 30, is offering workshops, speakers and seminars geared to changing that perspective.

City councillor Jenny Gerbasi has been invited to speak, as has Aiden Enns, a former managing editor of Adbusters magazine. Panel discussions on eco-villages and green building will be held, in addition to a variety of events and workshops around campus.

The event is organized through UMREG, the university’s recycling and environmental organization. Pat Macklem, one of the event’s organizers, said that the week is about reminding students that there is only one planet.

“We’re heading for a disaster,” he said. “It’s one of these epic things, and as we come to the end of oil, and as we come to these places we’ve brought ourselves to with our consumption and our excess . . . I hope that people can see that and not be depressed by it, and [instead] deal with it.”

Macklem said that this week differs from other incarnations of the annual event in that it is taking a more grassroots approach than previous years.

“In past years we’ve brought in big speakers . . . David Suzuki was here this week and I think he’s great, but it’s easy enough to look at one of these people as an icon.”

But, he added, there is more to getting involved than listening to Suzuki.

“It’s about understanding that there are no experts and everyone has a role to play . . . it’s about engaging people and getting them involved in environmentalism on this campus,” Macklem said.

A large component of this year’s event is the variety of workshops that are being held in the UMREG offices at 157 Helen Glass throughout the week. There are workshops on knitting, canning and preserving, cross-country ski waxing, bike building and dumpster diving.

“One of the main problems that exists for the environment is that people in the . . . developed world consume too much stuff . . . this is about reducing consumption, it’s about making it so people have a direct relationship with the things that they’re using in their lives,” said Macklem.

The ‘Environ-mental’ in the name is a reference to the mental environment, he explained.

“[Thinking] about the problems of environmentalism is as much about understanding the damage that a poor environment causes to our . . . mental health and physical health as it is [about] understanding pollution and pesticides.”

Before the grand opening of a bike shop in UMREG on Friday, a bike-building workshop will be held on Thursday, Feb. 2, for people to “talk about bikes, hang out around bikes, and fix bikes,” according to Macklem.

People interested in getting involved with UMREG are encouraged to visit their offices at 157 Helen Glass or phone at 474-9118 for more information.