What We Mean, Here:

Sustainability is one of those catchall words that, although it has the potential to be very meaningful, can be more harmful than good in the wrong hands. With the environmental movement in full swing, it’s hard to make sense of it all. What’s just ‘green wash’ and what is genuinely part of the change towards a system that works and accounts for more than just the narrow ‘nature first’ take on sustainability?

Out of all this mess, the idea of  ‘localism’ has become increasingly identified as an indicator of the ‘sustainability’ of a given practice or product. In general, localism has to do with local sovereignty or control over local destiny. Having the autonomy to control resources, and limit dependency on distant forces for essentials (and non-essentials) like food, water and clothing.

Localizing the control, production and access of things like food and water makes sense to most people. However, today, LUSU identifies another kind of localism: Local meaning.

So much of the meaning behind the things we say and the ideas we embody come from afar, if not physically far, then at least culturally distant. When it comes to sustainability, where do our ideas about it come from? Are we sure that we’re actually all talking about the same thing? Probably not, and that’s why the word has become such a cliché.

WHAT WE MEAN, HERE is a consensus building program designed to find out what students and faculty at Lakehead University envision as a more sustainable campus, a more sustainable city and a more sustainable world. After having collected this vision and pieced it together, LUSU will use that data to build a longterm strategy for a more sustainable campus.

The First phase of the program will be student and community engagement. This will be primarily achieved through a series of open-houses, surveys and interviews designed to enable us to prioritize our actions based on the needs and interests of our community members.

CLICK HERE to fill out our short, preliminary questionnaire.

The second phase will be to take all of this student and community input and create a long term plan for sustainability that is meaningful, practical and inclusive. The plan will identify strengths and available resources for change as well as the areas for improvement and the barriers to success on all fronts of campus and community sustainability. It will also chart a course towards the vision for a future that was outlined during the initial outreach phase of the program.