Message from the Director
October 2011
I am pleased to have the opportunity to continue serving in the Centre. The year has passed quickly and provided me with both many opportunities and challenges, many of which have been shared as we have worked together during the past year. For me, it also has been a time of learning about many aspects of the Centre which were previously unfamiliar and gaining a deeper understanding about the myriad of connections that the Centre includes. It has been wonderful working with the faculty, staff, students, and those with less formal connections to the Centre, in order that we might pursue our goals in teaching, research and university outreach – I look forward to our ongoing work in these areas.
I would like to thank Professor Tony Davis (Geography) for serving as Undergraduate Coordinator and Professor Rick DiFrancesco (also Geography) for serving as Graduate Coordinator during this past year. We have benefitted from their efforts and I am pleased to have been able to work with them. I am also pleased that Karen Ing (Senior Lecturer at the Centre) has agreed to serve as our Undergraduate Coordinator this year. Karen held this position for several years previously and her experience will be a great asset this year.
Students have shown extremely positive response to the programs and courses offered within the Centre, especially with the new courses and programs that we began offering last year. Last year students had the new opportunity to take a Centre course in their first year with our ENV100 Introduction to Environmental Studies course being taught by Professor Stephen Sharper (see Fall 2010 news article). Given both the students’ response to this course and having our new Environ-mental Studies major available, the courses and programs offered by the Centre for Environment are in great demand.
In order to meet this enthusiastic response by our under-graduates, we face challenges in being able to expand our offerings and work to further enhance our quality. We, along with several other cognate departments in the environment and natural resource fields, have been part of a working group in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that has been meeting this summer to determine how to enhance student opportunities in these fields. Our goal is to be able to provide the highest quality programs to our students and we have been working hard to see how to better achieve this goal. Following the great success of Centre’s new programs and courses, we now have the opportunity to further broaden our offerings and help translate our success to additional programs.
We have been actively involved in various initiatives during the year. The Centre for Environment hosted a meeting of the Transborder Research University Networks (TRUN), a consortium of universities in southern Ontario, New York and Michigan, at Hart House to develop a research and graduate student initiative focused on water-related issues, specifically the Great Lakes. The TRUN group has continued developing these ideas with the goal of formalizing their major project in the coming year, including active participation by the Centre. International interest in the Centre remains very strong. We have had various groups interested in the potential to partner in teaching undergraduate students which would offer new opportunities to our students and those from other countries. Visits from international delegations, including two large Chinese delegations during the summer, attest to the strong international interest in the environment and the role that the Centre plays at the U of T. Unfortunately, due to changes being implemented by the Government of Canada, our collaboration with Environment Canada has come to an end (see AIRS page). We are disappointed to lose the contributions provided by
Dr. Brad Bass as he has contributed many opportunities for U of T students.
Funding support by Centre members, alumni, and friends has been appreciated greatly. This spring we were able to award the first recipient of our new Jane Goodall Scholarship, which was developed in partnership between the Centre and the Jane Goodall Institute. The inaugural Alexander B. Leman Memorial Award was also presented in April. This award was established by the Leman family (including his daughter and former CFE Director, Professor Ingrid Leman Stefanovic), friends and colleagues of Alexander Leman. We are very grateful to the members of the University of Toronto Women’s Association (UTWA) for establishing the Jane Joy Memorial Scholarship: Excellence in Environmental Sustainability, thereby recognizing a valued former member of their organization. All funds used to create this scholarship were raised by UTWA members selling roses during the University’s convocation ceremonies, so supporting their sales provides ongoing support to many of our U of T students.
A valued member of the Centre’s Environmental Finance Advisory Committee, Errick “Skip” Willis, passed away this past winter. Skip had been a long-time member of this committee and strong contributor to the Centre’s Professional Development program. In honour of his memory, his family and colleagues have established a memorial fund that will begin by funding a Centre scholarship/bursary related to climate change. We are grateful for the various diverse contributions these individuals have made, as well as those that have been made by others to formally recognize them.
Another valued member of the Environmental Finance Advisory Committee, Dr. Sonia Labatt and her husband Arthur Labatt, were conferred honorary Doctor of Laws U of T degrees this June (see June 2011 news article). Since their establishment of Graduate Fellowships in 1998, over 80 of our graduate students have benefitted from their generosity.
I look forward to another interesting eventful year with you. Please join us for our seminars and other events within the Centre and feel free to contact us if you are interested in becoming more involved.
Donald Jackson
Interim Director, Centre for Environment, 2010-12; and
Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.