Mark Seasons, Interim Dean for the Faculty of Environment, is now offering transparency through weekly blog updates.
“In an effort to keep everyone informed of the activities originating from my office I’m posting weekly updates at http://environment.uwaterloo.ca/deansupdate.”
Enjoy.
Starbucks is one of those brands that get a lot of attention for what they do and what they don’t do. Here is a taste of what you might read about them in this regard:
Put down that grande non-fat caramel macchiato or whatever Starbucks concoction you’re drinking. Turns out the coffee giant has a nasty history of being anti-barista, anti-union, and thus anti-Employee Free Choice Act as well. – The Huffington Post
(Image from Adbusters – not the University of Waterloo.)
Now they are making their entrée at the University of Waterloo, securing space in the ‘to-be-completed-March 31, 2011’ and highly anticipated LEED Platinum Faculty of Environment Building #3.
Some questions have been asked.
Meetings have been held.
The minutes from a November 11, 2010 meeting attended by Mark Seasons (Interim Dean, Faculty of Environment), Lee Elkas (Director of Food Services), Jonathan Pinto (Masters Student, School of Planning) and Vanessa Minke-Martin (Vice President, Operations of Environment Students Society) are now available for you to read. Enjoy.
The below interview is copied in full from the UW Daily Bulletin, September 8, 2010. (This is indeed a central starting point to all students interested in what’s going on at the university.)
“I’ve got to keep things moving forward,” says Mark Seasons, though he doesn’t know how long he’ll be in his current leadership position as dean of the Faculty of Environment.
He was named “interim dean” as of July 1, when Deep Saini cut his five-year deanship short to move to a senior position at the University of Toronto. Seasons, who had previously been associate dean (undergraduate studies), will be in the dean’s office until a search for a longer-term dean is completed.
![[Seasons]](https://i0.wp.com/www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/images/2010/0701seasons.jpg)
“I’m really enjoying it, for some reason,” he said in a conversation last week in his office in Environment 1 — a short walk down the hall from the project that dominates the dean’s attention these days, the half-finished Environment 3 building.
“We have to be on time,” Seasons (right) says about the construction project, which is powered by federal stimulus funding that disappears, pumpkin-like, if projects aren’t finished by March 31.
“I have no question it will be done,” he quickly adds, moving to the point about EV3 that he finds really important: its anticipated “platinum” rating from the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design certification system. The building will feature solar power, energy conservation (including insulation), “grey water” and rainwater recycling systems, and high-efficiency lighting.
All these things come at a price, but one that Seasons says is worth paying, for long-term savings and also for what the building will say about Waterloo and the Environment faculty to future students, potential faculty members and the rest of the university. “We are leading by example,” he declares.
He jokes that ENV, which used to be the smallest faculty in the university, has grown to the point that it’s now the fifth largest. (There are six faculties; applied health sciences is now in sixth place.) And he says it has much to offer to the rest of the university, as its central concerns, such as water and energy, “are hot geopolitical topics” these days.
Yes, researchers and students in other fields may touch on relevant subject matter (the university has “environmental science” and “environmental engineering” programs based in other faculties). But it’s specifically the Faculty of Environment that connects the technical knowledge to action — “behavioural change and policy change, the ‘now what’ and ‘so what’,” he says. “No other faculty on the campus does quite that, I think. You’ve got to make a compelling business case for the environment, or people won’t change behaviour. It’s not just tree-hugging — it’s far more pragmatic.”
That leads to some of the new programs that ENV has introduced, largely under Saini’s leadership, including environment-and-business, already the biggest program in the faculty. (The first class of students in the e-and-b master’s program, taught largely online, has just had its first two-week “block course” on campus, an experience Seasons says was a big success.) It’s run by the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, created “to pull together things that were complementary, but that were drifting” or didn’t have a clear academic home.
In all the academic programs, “we’re trying to create a pragmatic idealist,” says the dean. He mentions a curriculum review that would involve putting together a package of core courses to make sure students from all programs are exposed to environmental ethics, decision-making skills and other overarching skills.
“My position,” he says as the fall term gets going, “is to move the agenda forward that Deep had — but I’m also here with some ideas of my own.” Some of those ideas come from his background as a professional planner, whose last job before he came to Waterloo in 1988 was with the National Capital Commission in Ottawa.
In Waterloo, he’s had some involvement in advising governments at the municipal and regional levels, on issues such as downtown revitalization and the “desperate” condition of car-dependent suburbs. Experience in government agencies gives him a certain view of administration, he says, observing that the job of a dean “is a manager’s job, it’s not an academic job”.
Within the faculty, he’s pleased to find “a really really good administrative team” and “a basic culture that’s intact across the building”, so that faculty members feel “really useful — not rent by ideology at all. This is a really interdisciplinary crowd here; that makes it fun.”
But the interim deanship is “a serious position to be in, and one that I don’t take lightly at all” even though the appointment is for only a few months, he says. “I can’t be a lame-duck interim — I’ve got to keep things moving forward.”
Congratulations on joining one of Canada’s leading and most innovative planning programs. Your Association of Graduate Planners (AGP) is thrilled to introduce you to the University of Waterloo’s graduate planning program. We are confident that your experience within the Faculty of Environment will be both enjoyable and enriching and we are committed to making it the best experience possible.
The AGP is your representative student body, the student voice that interacts on behalf of graduate planners with the U of W planning administration, OPPI, and CIP; works on funding opportunities to support student life; and last, but not least, organizes events and activities for planning students to kick back, get to know one another, and have a good time.
First we would like to get you prepared for “Master’s Frosh Week” starting September 7th, 2010. The AGP and the Environmental Graduate Student Association will be holding important introductory sessions, socials, TA workshop and your mandatory milestone component during this week.
We would also like to introduce to you some exciting events that will be occurring in 2010/2011. Most importantly, the AGP led a successful bid to host the Canadian Association of Planning Students (CAPS) annual conference, here at the University of Waterloo in February 2011. The theme for this year’s conference is “Resilience: Planning for Dynamic Futures.” The three day conference brings together planning students from across the country; creating an opportunity for students to showcase their research, learn about modern planning issues and opportunities from leading professionals in the field, and mingle with hundreds of fellow planning students. This is truly an exciting opportunity for the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo to shine, and we need your help to make this event a great and lasting success.
There will be many opportunities for you to become involved this year from joining the AGP Executive to volunteering at and in preparing the CAPS conference. Check out the CAPS website (http://caps-aceau.org/) for conference developments and take a look at the AGP website (https://uwagp.wordpress.com/) to “meet” the AGP executive, find out what is new in the world of Waterloo planning.
On behalf of the AGP, we would to once congratulate you on your decision to attend the University of Waterloo, and we welcome you to the School of Planning Community. Please contact either of us if you have any questions at all. We look forward to meeting you in the September. See you at the Grad House!
On behalf of your AGP Executive,
Warm regards,
Kathryn Randle & Brad Bradford
2010 Co-Presidents
Executive Council
Association of Graduate Planners
University of Waterloo
In the name of growth, expansion and efficiency, big change has a way of finding big solutions.
The Faculty of Environment is growing. The growing pains are hoped to ease by the construction of a 3rd building (EV3). But in the shuffling it appears that perhaps the Map Library might have to seek exile in the Dana Porter Library.
In one way, this is a rational choice of centralizing library activities and utilizing productive space (i.e. less space for students and basic research within the Faculty, replaced with activities by the Centre for Teaching Excellence and the Centre of Knowledge Integration). Researchers are not losing access to the resources, as the move will merely get rid of its users enjoying the amenities within the Faculty.
Questions arises
Responding to Growth
Responding to Growth at student, faculty, university, neighbourhood, city, regional, national or international levels – be it institutions, malls, apartment buildings, height and density targets, population moves or natural resource extractions – is a choice, at least until it affects you directly. Planners have a tendency to be interested in planning-related decisions, and planner’s engagement has more than once been argued to be what is needed to bring about an educated, engaged and productive community.
This, our friends, is a chance to form an opinion and have a say, because planners of tomorrow will not be the ones to only plan and not engage themselves. You may as well start getting involved now, sooner rather than later. Likely, doing good planning requires the ability to personally and communally foster energy and motivation to nourish a life of active engagement. This is indeed the stand the AGP takes, as we increasingly feel committed to involve ourselves and our organization in planning matters internationally (Haiti), nationally (CIP’s Planning for the Future, and the Conservative’s scrapping of the Long Form), and locally (relocating the Map Library).
So, what do you think? Let us know by posting comments or sending emails…
Like so many others who attended a most enjoyable Charity Ball arranged by the Association of Graduate Planners (AGP) and the Environmental Graduate Student Association (EGSA) at Tyrone Restaurant and Ultralounge Uptown Waterloo March 10th, 2010, I received a ‘thank you’ letter from Habitat for Humanity the other day.
The disastrous January 12 earthquake in Haiti displaced or made homeless an estimated 1.2 million people. Our Charity Ball raised $2,970 in support of Habitat for Humanity’s continued efforts in the rebuilding of Haiti.
Charity Ball organizing involves students organizing, delegating responsibility and collaborating to set out a vision, securing the venue, marketing, scheduling the itinerary, ticket sales, inquiring and collecting donations and hosting at the night of.
Moreover, it requires a community of social interaction, individual passion and local supporting institutions and businesses – the easily underestimated power of generosity.
To all who participated: we wish to express a heartfelt “thank you”, and we hope arranging the Charity Ball will be a continued tradition for the AGP and the EGSA at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment for years to come.
Bus Pass
Seems like there were enough votes in support of including a bus pass for graduate students in the tuition fee, like the current situation for the undergraduate students. This will begin next semester (May 1st), so no need to hold on to bus tickets for much longer.
Charity Ball
Good times in store (Wednesday March 10) for Faculty of Environment graduate students, faculty and staff with social antennas. Something to enjoy in the heat of completing projects and papers and all the good stuff soon due.
Take the social out of planning, and you must wonder why plan at all, right?!
Association of Graduate Planners (AGP): University of Waterloo 