IBWSC 2012: Day 3

July 25th, 2012

Moving on to day 3! As the days passed, I realized just how many things I have learned for the past few days and it has been an honor for me to receive the scholarship and attend all of the sessions here. Today, we started the day by listening to Severn Cullis-Suzuki, the famous environmentalist that gave her first speech at 12 years old at the UN Conference in Brazil in 1992. I am amazed at how she is very passionate and confident on what she believes in. We watched her legendary 1992's speech video and I was really moved that she, at an age even younger than I am now, can be very assuring and convincing even though all of her audience are important delegates from all over the world.

I actually have seen her video numerous times at my school for a speech competition just a couple of months ago, but I haven't seen even high school students that have the confident and firm voice that she had. She didn't just tell the delegates the problems faced by our earth and the population, but actually critiqued them in such a way that even many people do not have the courage to. At one point of her speech here in UBC, she said that the most powerful tool to change something is our voice, which is actually true as without voicing our opinions and fighting for the right thing, that change would never happen if we don't start it by ourselves. She said that the right future that we wanted must be measuring what matters, getting the price right and fair trade, which I agreed completely as to create balance in our life. At the end of her speech, she said that to make changes in the world, we are the ones that have to do it ourselves, not the politician or the government that are considered as "unreliable" in this world. Sure, I heard this very often, but hearing this from a strong passionate women that stands right on her belief made the words very memorable and inspiring for us to start the change by ourselves.

Just after her speech, I had a concurrent session called "Organizational DNA" in which we discussed about how organizational work ethics can arise problems for the environment. The speaker spoke about how Suncor Oil had major problems in one of its plants because of their culture of not practicing the right procedures and protocols. It is funny that to think of it, Suncor is a very large company that is so open about its imperfections and negative impacts on the environment, so what are the smaller oil companies like then? Do they have a much bigger problem and a much bigger negative impact to the environment? That scares me out since now what all that people think about is getting money with the least money, so don't you think that all the irresponsible oil companies are destructing the world even more with its vicious operations?

In this session, we came up with solutions for Suncor to be more ethical as to not damage the environment furthermore by dividing the solutions into formal and informal. Basically, the formal solutions are to train, innovate, develop and integrate all of its resources to be efficient yet ethically and environmentally friendly and informal solutions are to appraise and communicate with the workers more to create a value change between them to work on a more healthier, more ethical way. I think this session is very useful for my future as it does not only work for big companies, but it can also certainly be useful in smaller organizations that I may work in or with in the future.

In related topic, we had Quinn Runkle, a 4th year student at UBC that is active in promoting sustainability throughout the campus and all of her entire life, as a speaker right after our lunch. Just from the start of her session, I got the impression that she really stands out for the cause that she believes in, even since she is little which is a very brave thing to do knowing that just 10 years ago, no one even the adults really care or give attention to such cause that she believes in. What motivate me to be just like her the most is when she said that don't be scared to take the first step to make the change, even children ages 8, 9 and 10 can make a difference no matter how small or big it is. This makes me think to myself that at the age of 17, I haven't accomplished anything as big as she had and I am motivated by hearing how she organized many campaigns around UBC about sustainability when no one else dared to do such thing.

Later on in the evening, we enjoyed the performance from Kutapira, a local band with such a unique kind of music that we even danced along to them the entire time! Sadly they are not famous enough worldwide, which I think is a big shame seeing how they can incorporate many rare music instruments and get people to dance along with their songs. But having seen and enjoyed their performance, I believed that they will make it one day and bring people closer together by playing their music.