In his classes as a planning student at UWaterloo, Nicolas Smith had often heard about the necessity of planning for sustainability, but it wasn’t until he attended the 2013 United Nations Warsaw Climate Change Conference that he saw why.
Where the city of Waterloo “is proactive in terms of how climate change could affect our community so that hopefully we will be resilient and prepared for changes that will happen,” many other people, especially those in coastal nations, were unable to afford to plan for the necessary adaptation.
“Climate change provides us with an incentive to change our activities and habits so we are more in tune with nature,” Smith says. “It’s also an opportunity to create better ways to live, especially for coastal cities.”
Smith, who was already a St. Paul’s resident and who had heard about GreenHouse even before he came to UWaterloo, decided that GreenHouse would be a great incubator for him to think about his ideas and to develop a plan to deal with them. He applied and was accepted at GreenHouse for Fall 2014 and stayed on for the winter term.
“GreenHouse is helpful for people who have a solid plan of what they want to do, for those with no idea at all and everyone in between,” he says. “I had a lot of ideas — and I still think about pursuing some of those — but one of the many ways GreenHouse has helped me was in thinking about and choosing which of my ideas were the most impactful and groundbreaking. I’m putting my efforts into climate change adaptation as a result.”
While Smith is continuing to develop his ideas and is beginning to consult with both experts and those impacted directly by climate change, he’s also engaging with people at St. Paul’s and on campus. “Living on campus might seem like a more costly option, but being part of GreenHouse has allowed me to be part of an interactive community with so many opportunities to engage with people that I wouldn’t have elsewhere. GreenHouse has also helped me start up a group on campus (Climate Students) to help engage students on campus around issues about climate change.”
Smith says he wondered whether the GreenHouse program would be repetitive for someone staying for multiple terms but instead has seen how GreenHouse is constantly evolving with new and different opportunities, viewpoints and perspectives. He has appreciated learning about entrepreneurship and hopes one day to work for himself in the field of climate change. For now, though, between his classes, co-op terms and living-learning experiences at GreenHouse, he is “working on how to make this possible.”
Like many GreenHouse students who are passionate about social entrepreneurship, Smith has mixed feelings about his field of interest. “I’m concerned about how our world is changing, but I’m also hopeful and optimistic about the opportunities to help make positive changes in the world.”
- by Susan Fish