IBWSC 2012: Day 1

July 23rd, 2012

So day 1 it is! Today, I met a lot of people from different countries at breakfast and I am relieved that I am starting to make some new friends here because I came here all by myself! We started off the day with a welcome from the UBC at the CIRS building and who knows that is one of the greenest buildings in the world! One of the green facts is that the windows in CIRS building are censor-operated which means that if the natural winds can be used as the building's source of air, the windows will automatically open to allow the air to come! How cool is that?! 

After the opening ceremony, we did the ice breaker in each of our GAT group, where mine is named Bob & Doug McKenzie, legendary comedians of Canada. We did a discussion about socratic seminar based on the speaker that talked about sustainability in UBC campus earlier and we came up with 5 categorized questions such as "Can everywhere be as sustainable as UBC?" and "Is it feasible to reduce carbon emission by 100%?". I think this session gave me a lot about questioning again about this whole sustainability thing, like how do we understand it as a whole in the world, not just regarding the sustainability in the green environment. We also did a group debate where my group debated about technical fix vs value change in the community regarding the sustainability. This opened my eyes to a completely different side of sustainability because now I am faced with problems such as how the value in people about sustainability can be changed throughout the time and such. We also made the stool model about sustainability and things that makes out the sustainability such as economical, social and political factors to name a few. 

Later on the day, I attended the concurrent session titled "Biogas Technology" by Graeme Millen, where we learned about how people and especially farmers are actually trying to make biogas using something that is considered "not important" by the majority of the population, which is cow's poop. I was really inspired how even farmers that live in the suburban areas contributed to making the world a better place by reducing the carbon emission. If they can, why don't us IB students contribute too to make the earth a better place as a duty/responsibility from us to the mother nature. Overall, today is such a good day to start such a conference and I am waiting for more interesting days to come!