What is Sustainability?

As an institution of higher learning, Western has tremendous intellectual capacity and potential to help address the world's social and environmental challenges in meaningful ways through our teaching, research and sustainable operational practices. Collectively and as individuals, all students, faculty and staff members at Western have important roles to play in advancing sustainability through research, teaching and operations of the University.

The Canadian Consortium on Sustainable Development research defines sustainability as: "a process of reconciling three imperatives: (1) the ecological imperative to live within global biophysical carrying capacity and maintain biodiversity; (2) the social imperative to ensure the development of democratic systems of governance in order to effectively propagate and sustain the values by which people wish to live; and (3) the economic imperative to ensure that the basic needs are met worldwide. And equitable access to resources - ecological, economic and social - is fundamental to its implementation."

This figure conceptualises sustainability as a series of nests. The economic system is nested within society which in turn is nested within the ecosystem. In this figure, social and economic activity are limited by, and dependent on, the ecosystem. As the economist Herman Daly has asked, "what use is a sawmill without a forest?"

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