Margins Magazine - Volume 3 Issue 1

MARGINS
MARGINS
Instead, they regard their responsibility in terms of a soul-seeking, therapeutic cleansing: “March 2019,
I felt burnt out from three years of constant work. UTERN allowed me to heal, find a community, give
myself wholly and wholesomely. It brought all this shit to the forefront because there was home to be
found. UTERN was that home.”
As with any new home, the process of unpacking one’s belongings in an unfamiliar space is undeniably
difficult. Leeza interprets their adjustment to frequent activism as being conscientious of and holding
themselves accountable for previous actions: “A lot of education needs to go into it. Questions like,
‘Do I know whose treaty land I’m on?’... You have to come to a community where you can talk about
it, with folks who understand and validate how you’re feeling. Everyone’s at a different education level
about the environment; some folks are very focused on reusing items like plastic bags which is great.
Another group of folks are focused on the social issues and how they’re affecting our environment, the
livelihood of our people. Together, UTERN bridges all these different components of environmentalism
into one to have a discussion.”
The discussion Leeza describes can be exhausting to moderate in a tri-campus environment, I point out.
Leeza agrees, explaining that frequent online activity – as a result of the global pandemic, COVID-19
– has allowed UTERN to become more advertised to students. “We know that being at UTSC is a
huge barrier; you know, taking the TTC downtown,” they mention. “Now, we have an event where we
have UTSC, St. George [University of Toronto’s downtown campus] and UTM [University of Toronto
Mississauga] students all sitting in a room. When programming, we don’t have to think about just one
demographic; I can meet UTM students and hear about their campus and their groups. I don’t have to
look specifically to the GTA for speakers.”
As expected, COVID-19 is an issue which has proven to pose vital environmental questioning. “What
does a green recovery look like?” Raymond illustrates. “We’ve had those discussions in our first
environmental working group. We’ve had conversations about equity, about environmental racism;
not everyone has access to technology and not everyone has the ability to cope with all of the demands
and barriers that COVID-19 brings.”
The interconnectivity of these problems is shocking, but Leeza assures me that understanding their
complexity can be made easy with one crucial tool; education. “A UTERN team member said to
me recently, ‘Let’s make sure that the funding is legit for George Floyd,’” they explain. “I thought,
yeah, so many people are reposting information mindlessly; let’s take the extra step and let’s be
aware of it. A lot of our team is part of the BIPOC community. We need to show support for the
students paying those Levy fees for us.” They elaborate that, upon further inspection, evidence of
injustice can be found in our own communities: “Once you start comparing all three campuses, it’s
shocking the uneven environmental development you start to see. Little things of lack of water bottle
dispensers and tokenism for Indigenous folks… I ask myself who I’m getting for events. The IDC
Conference, a speaker from First Nations House was like, “You don’t know about Scarborough?
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