Imagine that you are sitting around a table full of very passionate, very smart people who you have probably never met before. As a group, you are tasked with visualizing an abstract and inevitably controversial concept and are encouraged to draw on the table in order to do so. Dinner is served — sounds like a business retreat mixed with a kid-friendly chain restaurant, right?
In fact, the event described above was the inaugural evening of a student-organized dialogue series called Lenses of Sustainability. The brainchild of Owen Sondergeld and Sarah Barnes, two upper-year undergraduate students at UBC, the event series is the result of years of planning, dreaming and strategizing and is also supported with help from Lucas Worsdell and Becky Price. Their aim is to foster a sense of community at UBC by engaging a diverse audience of students, faculty, staff and community members in meaningful dialogue around important social and environmental issues. On the evening of October 7, the hot topic was local food and its relationship to sustainability.
The structure of the event was unlike that of any other campus affair I’d ever been to. UBC’s students, faculty and staff are lucky to be able to experience the regularity with which world-class speakers, presentations and talks are hosted at the university. Alhough these are often wonderful opportunities to hear about new ideas and inspiring research, events often follow the format of a lecture with a limited amount of time for questions and answers at the end. As a result, conversation between participants tends to be restricted to discussion between or before and after different portions of the event.
Lenses of Sustainability, however, has something different up their proverbial sleeve. As a dialogue series, the focus of the evening is to encourage discourse that privileges both intellectual and emotional outlooks on the issue at hand as well as that which allows each person to speak and listen from their own perspective. It was obvious that much thought had gone into the logistics in order to create this delicate atmosphere. From a beautiful selection of teas to a Mason jar full of fortune-cookie-like prompting questions, the tables were set with everything the participants needed to feel at ease and on track. With the addition of a designated “break out leader” for each table and a mandated shake-up of the default seating arrangement of friends grouped together, the participants were poised to delve into broad, complex questions and work through them just enough outside of their comfort zones that they couldn’t fall back on their usual social dynamics and patterns.
Although the atmosphere was carefully set, the organizers did not shy away from the fact that the evening would be inevitably threaded through with conflict. With a room full of people passionate about different ways of approaching the issue of sustainability and necessary change, how could it not be? Attendees were encouraged make this a productive process by both speaking and listening — the aim was to practice navigating complex issues together. In addition to the group activities, three speakers from the campus community were invited to give their perspectives on sustainability and local food: Professor Rickey Yada, the dean of the Land and Food Systems faculty; Lloyd Bernhardt, the CEO of Ethical Bean Coffee; and Carrie James, a graduate student in the faculty of Land and Food Systems studying the impact of undergraduate fieldwork.
Several thematic strands were plucked repeatedly, both in conversation and in the speaker presentations: the importance of regulations, transparency and access to information with regards to the relationship between consumers, producers, companies and scientists; the merits and downfalls of genetically-modified, fair trade, organic and ethical food movements; the passion inherent in peoples’ relationships to food whether through the labour of love that is entailed in food production and preparation; their desire to know more about it and to hold their consumption to a high ethical standard or even the simple pleasure of enjoying a meal. All of this was reinforced and demonstrated by delicious food conscientiously made by Railtown Catering.
The event and the ideas it raised live on in my mind, reminding me to pay attention to all the ways in which concepts and concerns around food and sustainability intersect. I was inspired, challenged and reinvigorated by this new way of giving life to important ideas through change as a campus community. I would strongly recommend taking the opportunity to attend one of the next two events in the series.
Lenses of Sustainability is hosting two more free events during the 2015-2016 academic year:
- Happiness: November 4 at the Student Nest
- Sense of Place: January 20 at the UBC Longhouse
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