A group of mostly undergraduate students gathered last Friday for the University Community Environment Forum. With the slogan “Great minds for a greener future,” the half-day conference covered academic programs, campus groups and current environmental issues.

“The goal was to bring out as many students as possible, especially first and second year students, to introduce them to some of the different groups that are working on environmental issues at U of T,” said Bryan Purcell, president of the University of Toronto Environmental Resource Network (UTERN), and an organizer of the forum.

A short talk by Aubrey Iwaniw, environmental affairs officer at U of T’s Mississauga campus, especially caught the audience’s interest. The Erindale campus is currently undergoing an environmental transformation-from constructing environmentally friendly buildings, to providing a free bike share program, from using green cleaning products, to planting trees on campus. Iwaniw acknowledged that being a smaller community has helped UTM organize itself more effectively.

“It’s a smaller campus, a closer knit community. We have administrators that are all working towards a common goal of greening the campus,” she said. UTM has won several awards for its environmental action, including the Credit Valley Stewardship Award of Distinction and the Mississauga Board of Trade 2004 Environmental Excellence Award.

“It’s just a culture shift.”

On making that same cultural shift downtown, she offered some simple advice: “Organize. I mean, everyone’s got their own student groups that are split up doing their own initiatives, just like the city of Toronto has groups that are doing their own thing. So having meetings with different groups, or having one group like UTERN that represents all of them is the best way to go.”

The audience had grown to about 50 for the last part of the conference, a panel discussion on some campus environmental issues. The panelists, campus environmentalists Pamela Robinson, Jake Irwin and Catherine Riggal, discussed the importance of green construction and renovation, and the need to foster environmental literacy and waste reduction.

The forum had several sponsors, including the Division of the Environment, the Institute for Environmental Studies, the Department of Geography, UTERN, SAC, the new U of T Sustainability Office and the Environmental Protection Advisory Committee (EPAC).

Over the course of the day, many people mentioned what they see as an explosion of environmental activity on campus over the last few years.

“I have noticed that there has been an increasing interest in environmental issues on campus,” said Bryan Purcell. “There’s been more activity, more people interested, and now, with the creation of UTERN and the environmental levy, we have more funding than we’ve had in the past to do projects. So a lot of tools are in place; we just need to be utilizing them.”

UTERN distributes roughly $23,000 to student-led environmental projects every year from funding generated by a $0.50 levy paid by all U of T students.