As a resident of the Sidney Pacific dormitory, I was really inspired during my third year to see that a lot of environmental initiatives were being implemented. It took me some time to realize that this was not an accident, but the result of the dedicated work of a wonderful person, Wendy Gu, last year's Environment Chair of Sidney Pacific. After making a lot of personal changes to “green” my own life (many of which I described in the previous column) I became interested in seeing how I could best impact my community. When I learned that Wendy was stepping down from her position, I decided to become her successor. From my experience so far, I must say that she has set the bar very high and that her shoes are very hard to fill.

The environment is a topic that does not suffer from a shortage of media coverage. Global warming, renewable sources of energy, green jobs – all of these terms are undoubtedly familiar to you. But while you are certainly aware of the major issues, you may feel that you have no role to play in them, nor any contribution to make towards preserving the environment. The purpose of this brief article is to convince you of precisely the opposite. Every action you make in your daily life (well, almost every action) has an effect on the environment, and whether this effect is positive or negative is under your personal control.

But, before we go on, there is a crucial question to ask: so what? It is certainly possible to find examples of equally complex issues which are at least as important to us as members of the global community: poverty, hunger, access to healthcare, minority rights – the list goes on. Certainly, it would be wrong to focus on the environment to the exclusion of all these other areas. These are all interrelated problems, and interrelated problems generally require interrelated solutions. However, environmental issues are, in some sense, the easiest to deal with by incorporating small yet meaningful measures into our daily routines. In my experience, it is a lot harder get a cup of fairly-traded coffee than to bring my own mug when buying said cup of coffee. By educating ourselves about environmental issues, we can find our own ways of making a small difference in our lives, and perhaps inspire others to do likewise.