I attended a Going Greener forum last Thursday by the Council of Ontario Universities. It was inspiring to hear from people like Sandra Odendahl, director of corporate sustainability at Royal Bank of Canada. Here are a few points from her wish list.
- Price externalities (using the environment should not be free); still don’t have a real price on polluting, no price on carbon (still), no price on generating tons of packaging; it has a cost on the environment and someone should pay for it.
- Knowledgeable consumers: people have to make the link between stuff and pollution; everything you buy is going to be in a landfill someday; do you really need more stuff?
- Multidisciplinary education: Take your passion and embed it in your field that you work in; we need everybody to have a basic understand of how their lives impact the environment and it doesn’t matter what field you are in.
Minister of Environment John Wilkinson said that biggest thing that we can do as a government is to embed sustainability into the curriculum in all of our schools. It will be the young people who get us out of this mess we've created.
Here I am with my kids on the Oak Ridges Moraine Trail. Being out in nature engages all of our senses.
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