The Sierra Youth Coalition, the youth arm of Sierra Club Canada, a national environmental non-profit organization, selected UTM to host this year’s annual National Sustainable Campuses conference. UTM was chosen over Halifax’s Dalhousie University. The conference will run from October 11 to 14.
“We’re starting to have more and more [environmental] projects on campus, so this would be a good time to not only show what our university has but also promote more discussion from other universities to come to our campus and have discussions about these projects,” says Muhammad Qureshi, the conference coordinator and a second-year UTM student.
Maude Barlow will be the keynote speaker at the conference. Barlow is an environmental activist, the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, the recipient of the 2005 Right Livelihood Award, and the author the international bestseller Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
“[For] the conference this year, the theme is ‘The Healthy Campus’,” says Qureshi. “We are partnering with the Credit Valley Conservation forum. Their forum is about health and the environment.”
The theme is as an exposition of how a campus environment affects students’ physical and mental health. The major sponsors of the conference include UTM, VIA Rail, and SYC.
