Join us for the 5th annual UTM Sustainability Week! Sustainability Week will be held this year from Monday March 18th to Friday March 22nd, 2024, in partnership with UTMSU, the UTM Sustainability Office, and the MScSM Student Executive Council (MSEC).
This year, the theme for the week will be "Bridging the Gap", as we collectively acknowledge there is a climate crisis and we all have a part to play, be it academic discipline, lived experience, and everything in between. The purpose of this week is to create impact and encourage collaboration on campus towards a more sustainable community both on campus and beyond.
Saturday, March 16th
IBA Presents: Show Me the Green Case Competition
10:30am-5:00pm, MN Grand Hall
Join the Innovative Business Association and participate in UTM's largest sustainability-focused case competition and win big prizes!
1st Place: $1000
2nd Place:$500
3rd Place: $250
Tackle real-world challenges and craft innovative solutions. To register click here
Monday, March 18th
UTM Sustainability Office Presents: Climate Positive Plan Workshop
12:00-2:00pm, UTM Room
the UTM Sustainability Office is inviting you to kick-off Sustainability Week with the Climate Positive Plan Workshop. At this event, you can expect to learn more about UTM’s ambitious climate goals, and how you can take part in achieving them.
To register, click here. Please RSVP by Monday, March 11th.
Sustainability Ambassadors Present: Trash Talk Doc Screening and Rob Greenfield TedTalk
4:00-6:00pm, KN112 (Drop In!)
Join us for an eye-opening experience as we delve into the world of waste management with our Sustainability Ambassadors. Our event features two compelling documentaries: "Trash Talk: Shift Series" and "I wore all my trash for 30 days" by renowned activists and filmmakers. Discover the journey of our waste from disposal to innovative solutions, and witness firsthand the impact of individual actions on our environment. Engage in thought-provoking discussions and activities aimed at inspiring positive change towards a more sustainable future. Don't miss this opportunity to deepen your understanding and commitment to environmental stewardship. Join us for an enlightening evening of education and empowerment!
UTM NDP: Establishing a Youth Climate Corps Watch Party
7:00-9:00pm, Vic Johnson Arena
As we face one of the driest and warmest winters on record, we are growing increasingly worried about what will likely be another hot and smokey summer. Canadian youth are long overdue for a program that would get them directly involved in the fight against climate change. That's why we're hosting a multi-party town hall to discuss the future of Youth in the country and how we win a Youth Climate Corps.
Join us in person at the Vic Johnston Community Center or online to hear from MPs from numerous parties.
· MP Laurel Collins (Host), NDP, Victoria
· Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton—Griesbach
· Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands
· Kristina Michaud, Bloc Québecois, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia
· Adam van Koeverden, Liberal, Milton
Please RSVP at: https://actionnetwork.org/events/utm-ndp-climate-corps-town-hall?clear_id=true
To tune in to the townhall virtually, please visit: https://www.goodgreenjobsforall.ca/march18event
Tuesday, March 19th
Let's Get Together Tech Collect
10:00am-2:00pm, Student Centre
Let’s Get Together is a not-for-profit organization in the GTA that through their tech collect drive will collect old technology and e-waste material to be refurbished or safely recycled and then circulated back into the community. They will be accepting: Laptops, desktops and monitors, consumer electronics, handheld devices, printers and peripherals, batteries, home and business phones, televisions, microwave ovens, and household items that are 35lbs or less.
Also, come and learn about how you can refurbish old technology to help re-circulate old technology back into the community.
If you would like to drop off equipment or schedule a pickup, please contact michelle.atkinson@utoronto.ca.
African Students' Association and UTMSU Congo Outreach and Technological Sustainability
10:00am-2:00pm, Student Centre
Global dependence on minerals, including Coltan and Cobalt, have contributed significantly to the genocide in the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). The mining industry in the DRC, which is essential to numerous tech-based companies including Apple, Dell, Samsung, Sony, and Tesla for the production of technological products, is noted for its many human rights abuses. According to a report published by Amnesty International, the expansion of the mining industry has resulted in mass ‘forced evictions of entire communities” as well as widespread sexual abuse, arson, and beating, in addition to other “grevious human rights abuses.” The African Students’ Association (ASA) in collaboration with the UTM Students’ Union (UTMSU), will have an outreach table to spread awareness of the contribution of mining and mineral extraction to human rights abuses and exploitation in the DRC, and how technological sustainability is crucial.
CECCS Presents: Transdisciplinary Knowledge and Co-Production Workshop (online)
3:00-4:30pm
Engaged scholarship that involves partnership with non-academic stakeholders and addresses real world and complex challenges of sustainability and climate change requires a different approach to building knowledge and facilitating action. The Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS), in partnership with the SDGs@UofT Institutional Strategic Initiative (ISI) is hosting a Transdisciplinary Knowledge Co-Production (TDCP) Workshop for early-career researchers, post-doctoral fellows and PhD students at U of T. Join us in this online workshop to learn more about the concept of TDCP research and get your questions answered.
To register, click here.
Wednesday, March 20th
UTMSU Presents: Free Breakfast Wednesday featuring Sustainability Ambassadors Waste Stream
10:00am until supplies last, Student Centre
Join UTMSU as they set out to challenge food insecurity on campus and reinforce well-being and self-care by implementing our free breakfasts on Wednesday's. Stop by, eat breakfast, and learn about waste!
UTM Hospitality Presents: UTM Fair Trade Market
11:00am-3:00pm, MN Grand Hall (Drop In!)
Think farmer’s market… but make it ALL local, Canadian, Fair Trade certified, and beyond just sustainable. We did it back in 2020 and it was a huge hit, so please come and join us and meet people, learn, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself… on us!
When
- March 20th, 2024
- 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
Come between meetings, on your lunch hour, or for the whole event!
Bring your friends – get a coffee and a snack
Win prizes
Where
- The Grand Hall (MN)
What is it?
- A bunch of LOCAL sustainably-minded & Fair Trade certified companies coming together in a Farmer’s Market-style event!
- Come eat, drink, support, learn, chat, support, laugh & have fun!
Fair Trade Market: Learn more here
Sustainability Week: Learn more here
What you can expect
- Connect with the brands, try out their products, and support through purchase if you’d like!
- There will be giveaways and awesome prizes
- Make sure you’re following @UTMHospitality and #UTMFairTrade for all the info
Check out our first Fair Trade Market!
UTM Collaborative Digital Research Space Presents: Rest, Renewal, Death: Some Discourses of Sustainability
1:00-2:00pm, MN3230 and via Zoom (Hybrid)
This Research Spotlight will bring together scholars working at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, and ecocriticism to explore some of the different ways they are thinking about “sustainability,” broadly construed.
Kate Neville will present work drawn from her current project, Going to Seed, a collection of essays that explores questions of idleness, considering the labor both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. Building on her recent work on the concept of ‘slow justice’ as a way to understand the invisible, less tangible, positive consequences of environmental movements, Going to Seed investigates the possibilities of slowness rather than the acceleration that often defines our responses to urgent environmental change, pressing social injustice, and ever-advancing technologies and global connections. Taking seeds as a starting point, this project asks: what might we learn about work, sustainability, and relationships on this beleaguered planet if we slowed down, stepped back, and held off?
Melissa Gniadek will build on this focus on seeds by talking about trees from her perspective as a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature. Her talk is drawn from a larger project that focuses on the energies of trees and wood products in Herman Melville’s writings in order to think about land and oceans together in the context of environmental and sustainability discourses. Melville has been at the heart of conversations about nineteenth-century energies and petrocultures through readings of his most famous novel, Moby-Dick, and its focus on whaling. This project argues that arborcultures are just as critical. After all, whaling and other forms of global extraction were only possible because of the wood used to build ships. Using examples from Melville’s writing and our ongoing environmental crisis, this brief talk will argue for the need to think about the arboreal and the oceanic worlds together, then and now.
Jess Elkhaim will then discuss what she calls the eco-colonization of the corpse. The North American funeral industry is reporting an increase in demand for “green burials”: eco-friendly methods of dealing with dead bodies to reduce the environmental impact of embalming chemicals, cremation emissions and cemetery spaces. Questioning how we care for human remains in a time of climate crisis is ultimately a conversation about sustainability and futurity. Interestingly, our modern practices of preparing and disposing of the dead emerged in the nineteenth century and were influenced by the environmental consciousness of the time as well as concerns with preservation. These practices not only made death aesthetically pleasing but fueled an affirmative, transcendentalist view of corpses through whom, as Walt Whitman exclaims, one could divine that “there really is no death” and “all goes onward and outward, and nothing collapses.” Embalming technologies preserved the illusion that matter is deathless until the body could be buried in a so-called rural cemetery, a space designed to reflect on death in relation to nature. However, the degradation of Indigenous death by the rural cemetery movement and early American literature deeply problematized this kinship between corpse and earth. Land rights issues and social inequities make caring for the dead, let alone in environmentally consciousness ways, a privilege of the few. Nineteenth-century texts can therefore help us assess the politics of ecological discussions today, and how relationships to the dead body shape our environmental imagination.
Together, this series of 10 minute talks will encourage conversation about sustainability in historical contexts and also connect those contexts to our present and future.
To register, please visit: https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/cdrs/cdrs-research-spotlight-rest-renewal-death-some-discourses-sustainability
Thursday, March 21st
MSEC Presents: UTM Sustainability Fair
10:30am-2:30pm, CCT Atrium (Drop in!)
Sustainability with NDP MP Candidate Julia Kole
4:10-5:30pm, MN6128
Friday, March 22nd
Stitch in Time Pop-Up Shop!
10:00am-4:00pm, Student Centre
Stitch in Time is a Black and Brown owned vintage shop, focused on locally sourcing each item by hand. We see the importance of educating ourselves on how and what we consume when it comes to the fashion industry. We deliberately take a sustainable approach to running our shop by saving clothes from textile recycling warehouses. At Stitch in Time, we love finding pieces from different decades, understanding the cultural history of clothes, and appreciating their natural aging process; something that can't be replicated by current manufacturers. All second-hand pieces have a story to tell and provide a sense of nostalgia that can be found at Stitch in Time.
Regenesis, SAGE, and Plant-Based UofT Present: Upcycling Workshop
10:00am-12:00pm KN2213
Learn how to mend, take care of, and upcycle garments to have a more sustainable closet!
To register, please click here.
Light, plant-based refreshments will be served.
Global Sustainable Foods Panel and Workshop
12:00-2:00pm, KN L1220
Come join Global Sustainable Foods as we explore what it’s like to be a farmer in Ontario. Local farmers Ryan from Ryan’s Market Garden and Jessey Njau from Zawadi Farm will take us through what it’s like to be a small-scale farmer in Ontario, how they got their start in farming, and provide insight on challenges they face in the agricultural sector. Attendees also have the opportunity to grow their green thumb with our planting workshop led by Ryan, where they’ll learn the best way to plant seeds for long-term success.
Refreshments will be served.
To register, please click here.