About Talking Sustainability

On Earth Day April 22, 2013, SFU’s Sustainability Office launches the Talking Sustainability Project. Through Talking Sustainability, the SFU Sustainability Office invites SFU community members to join us in a dialogue about the kind of world we want to live in, how the concept of sustainability relates to building this world, and what we need to do to get there.

Through this blog and other community engagement activities we’ll be asking questions like:

1. “How can we thrive today and into the future in a way that preserves the ecological systems we depend on while also ensuring people around the world have an equal opportunity to do the same?” and
2. “How can SFU help build a better world through its unique role as a teaching and learning institution?”
   

We hope SFU community members can help us explore these and other questions and, in doing so, contribute their expertise, opinions, thoughts and ideas to introduce new solutions, conversations and even questions to our dialogue on sustainability.

The Talking Sustainability Project will include:

1. The Talking Sustainability Blog
2. The newly redesigned university Sustainability Portal website run by the Office
3. Sustainability Roadshow

Defining Sustainability

As the term "sustainability" is used with increasing frequency and in many different contexts, its meanings become more ambiguous and potentially confusing. We are very interested in helping to tease out the various strands of meaning being carried by this single, complex term, because we believe that understanding will facilitate change.

We are particularly interested in exploring the fundamental interrelationships among economic, ecological and social sustainability. Experience tells us that the default understanding of sustainability for most people is essentially focused on environmental conservation: sustainability as "green." We want to show the relationship between economic choices and ecological and social outcomes, and vice versa. Trying to understand sustainability as simply an ecological issue will inevitably miss important aspects of the choices we must make.