The Institute for Management and Innovation’s Sustainability Week 2023 kick-off event featured esteemed UofT faculty and was a genuine lovefest for Mother Earth.
The theme for this year’s Sustainability Week was Acknowledge. Align. Act., and the four panelists for the Love + Sustainability event that opened up the week’s events were all in agreement that the time is now to be moved, motivated and mobilize for action.
“We are at this moment in time where we have to come together and make a difference as a collective for the sustainability of human life on our planet,” said Professor Shashi Kant in his opening remarks, introducing the speakers and initiating the talk on love and sustainability.
"In true love, you seek your happiness in the happiness of the subject matter or the object that you love and not vice-versa. Mother Nature provides everything for our survival and happiness, and therefore we have to love our mother nature, which means that we seek our happiness in the happiness of our mother nature. This will require reciprocal relations with the mother nature - we have to do it for our and our future generations’ survival and happiness.”
The Love + Sustainability event with speakers (from left to right) Blake Poland, Andrea Olive, and Shashi Kant.
The speakers from IMI's Love + Sustainability event (from left to right): Professors Blake Poland, Andrea Olive, and Shashi Kant.
The themes of nature and love for sustainability echoed throughout each of the presentations from the panelists that included Professors Andrea Olive, from UTM’s Departments of Geography, Geomatics and Environment (GGE) and Political Science, Blake Poland, from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH, with cross-appointments to the Department of Geography & Planning and OISE at UofT, Stephen Scharper, from UTM’s Department of Anthropology and UofT’s School of the Environment, in addition to Kant, director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management (MScSM) program.