Jeff spent last week with people from all over the world. They were in Regina for the Student Sustainability Summit, a gathering of experts in the field of sustainable practices. Have a look at his summary, it’s interesting and uplifting. You can really feel the enthusiasm. He mentioned to me on Tuesday, that they got a tour of the flax house in Craik, among other sites. Several in the delegation were very impressed with how well they were treated (limo for transportation, etc.).
{ 2008 05 22 }
@hotmail.com
![[EFC Blue Ribbon - Free Speech Online]](http://www.efc.ca/images/efcfreet.gif)
stooner | 22-May-08 at 4:08 pm | Permalink
Limos???
Does this qualify as a sustainable activity? God bless the tar sands!
Saskboy | 22-May-08 at 4:22 pm | Permalink
I admit, there is a perverse irony in that. Hybrid cabs would have been a better choice. Rickshaws aren’t really in style in Regina though.
themusicgod1 | 23-May-08 at 12:43 pm | Permalink
stooner: The summit itself was of course not sustainable. Being alive in western society at all requires you to pay taxes and subsidize a government that in and of itself makes your very existence unsustainable. Even if you consume nothing, do nothing, and just refrain from suicide, condemning yourself to slow starvation, you’re living an unsustainable life if you do so within Canada.
The University of Tokyo did do a sustainable summit. In every way possible their conference was sustainable, because that was the goal of their summit. Ours was not. Regina wanted more to actually have a successful summit, a summit where the world could get together and *start* solving it’s problems, rather than having the obviously incorrect belief that we could solve everything at once here in regina, without changing anything about the way the world works.
While I do think that the Regina WSC-SD committee went a little overboard in its opulence, there’s a major difference; the people who went on the limo ride were people who would never get a chance to do so otherwise. We in the western world often do get that chance, even if only once in our lives. There were people who had never even seen an airplane at the conference; being from a western country and saying that they should not even have the opportunity to ride a limo is somewhat hypocritical.
And I wouldn’t be all smug about hybrid cabs(assuming we even have them in the city, I was not aware that we did).
Face it; almost everything about regina is unsustainable. Having a conference where people fly to is unsustainable. But without getting together to knock our heads together, there is no way out, and no way of helping everyone move together out of this rut we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Saskboy | 23-May-08 at 2:28 pm | Permalink
I’ve seen a Prius cab in Regina (I think, anyway). I know Winnipeg has them, but I thought I saw one once at the corner of Sask Dr. and Albert St.
Good points about Canada being unsustainable as it is structured right now. For those same reasons you listed, many of the attacks on Al Gore are bunk, too. In this ‘game’ we’ve set up, the only way to spread the message is to spread the money.