A Sustainability Surge by UBC

In a presentation for the IRES Seminar Series on the 17th November, 2009 I argued the case for strengthening graduate learning by focusing on STRONG sustainability and developing STRONG professionals. I suggested that each of these two more progressive surges could be advanced by building on UBC's ideas for pursuing transformative goals, as laid out in the recently released draft Sustainability Academic Strategy and accompanying the University's latest strategic plan Place and Promise: The UBC Plan. My desire is to stimulate debate on the issues this raises. At the end I suggest some of the questions that might be discussed within IRES, SCARP and CFIS, the units within which I am appointed. Below is a copy of the flier summarizing my presentation and a copy of my slides. I would welcome any suggestions for how we might stimulate discussion of these ideas.

• STRONG Sustainability, STRONG Professionals: Strengthening Graduate Learning
• Flier
• Slideshow
• Slides as pdf

In my presentation I suggested what might be component topics of a core sustainability curriculum and referred to two courses that I teach for examples of two ways in which they could be developed in a 3 credit graduate course:

• Omnibus: Becoming a Good Sustainability Planning Practitioner (Taken by all incoming planning students)
• Planning for Water Resources Management (Taken by graduate and occasional undergraduate students from various programs)

The following day Geoff Atkins, who has been appointed Leader of University Sustainability by UBC President Stephen Toope, gave a presentation in the SCARP Lecture Series entitled Making UBC A Living Laboratory, which is one of the key components of the Sustainability Academic Strategy. It was in the discussion following his presentation that I suggested we should be designing and implementing "A Sustainability Surge by UBC", building on the ideas that he had heard me suggest the previous day during the IRES Seminar.