World Water Day at StFX
March 18, 2026 3:50 PM
The world is running out of sustainable resources, and we often forget about the most basic of those: water. Canada Water Week, which began last Tuesday and continues until World Water Day on this coming Tuesday, aims to celebrate this precious commodity and raise awareness of its scarcity.
“Water is the lifeblood of the earth, it’s a tangible idea that we can locate,” says Matt Chisolm, a sustainability officer at StFX. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to identify with climate change and environmental degradation of the biosphere. But you look at water and water quality, and it is visible and important to all of us.”
Since the formation of the Sustainability at StFX committee this past year, a much higher level of concern has been raised about sustainability issues on campus.
With Canada Water Week closely followed by Sustainability Week, which starts the day after World Water Day, the focus of the committee for the two weeks is of course sustainability issues surrounding water and food.
In addition to this, the Interdisciplinary Studies in Aquatic Resources Student Society is currently focusing their efforts on making StFX the 12th Canadian university to ban bottled water.
“I’ve been talking with [Chisolm], and we are pushing our campaign to overlap with sustainability week and World Water Day,” says Tim Hayman, a fourth year biology and aquatic resources student spearheading the initiative.
Hayman and fellow members of the Aquatic Resources Society have been on the main floor of the SUB since Monday with a petition that students can sign to support the ban of bottled water on the StFX campus.
The society plans to take the petition to Sean Riley on World Water Day to show the students’ support of their initiative in hopes that he, too, will support it.
“If the university says we’re selling bottled water, they do it,” says Hayman. “It’s between the administration and Pepsi, and the contract between the two.”
“Bottled water has become one of Pepsi’s major markets, and they are selling more of that then they are of their other products. And it’s the cheapest thing they can produce. It costs them essentially nothing. It’s like they found a way to take Pepsi, take everything out of it, and still sell it to people.”
The petition to make StFX bottled water-free will be available to sign in the SUB and online, through the Facebook group ‘Make StFX Bottle Water Free’, until Tuesday morning. “Schools like Acadia are not completely water bottle free, but they have done a lot on campus,” states Hayman.
“It’s been really inspiring to see what they’ve been doing there. They’ve had a lot of success.”
Tomorrow, in NH 151 at 2:15 p.m., there will be a showing of the documentary, Tapped, to further educate students on the effects of the bottled water industry.
“Our whole goal in all this is to ultimately show that there is a will among the students to make a change and a commitment to move forward on this," explains Hayman. “That’s what StFX is about. It’s a school where we’re very forward, and being conscious of what’s going on in the world around us. And we would like to show that we can get something started that could culminate in something very positive.”
