Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of accompanying The Natural Step’s Founder, Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, on a speaking tour around Toronto, which included a keynote presentation at the Canadian Business for Social Responsibility’s 8th Annual Summit. It was an intense series of 9 events in five days, speaking to both businesses and emerging student leaders.

What struck me most were two main things. First, the conversation has changed enormously in five years. Everyone is now talking about sustainability. There is general understanding and agreement that all of the earth’s subsystems—whether you look at forestry, fresh water, topsoil, or biodiversity—are in decline because of unsustainable human activities.

But the second thing that struck me was that we’re still not talking about what we need to do to become sustainable. We’re mostly still talking about eco-efficiency measures—doing less bad—rather than putting full sustainability on the table.

We live on a finite planet and we are systematically poisoning it with our waste, while we destroy its capacity to support us and provide us with resources. Sustainability means we need to stop undermining the planet's capacity to support us. We need to redesign our production processes and the way we run our cities to operate in closed loop systems where we eliminate the concept of waste, where we no longer undermine and destroy natural systems, and where we remove systemic barriers to people meeting their needs and building trust among each other.

As Claude Ouimet—InterfaceFLOR’s Senior Vice-President and General Manager for Canada and Latin America and a member of The Natural Step Canada’s Board of Directors—said so elegantly last week: “First we need to change the way we think, and then we need to change the way we act.” Sustainability requires a new way of thinking about our relationship to the earth and each other. It’s as fundamental a shift as moving from thinking the world is flat to understanding the world is round.

The Natural Step Canada’s mission is to work with existing and emerging leaders to accelerate change toward a sustainable world. We believe we need a new generation of leaders who understand the major rethinking needed to lead us to sustainability and who can inspire us by showing us it is possible. We strive to help them lead us toward a sustainable, just, and prosperous future.

One of our great hopes is the passion and promise of young emerging leaders in universities and colleges in Canada who reject the status quo and are eager to lead change in the workforce and in their communities. Our Emerging Leaders Program provides them with the tools, training, and practical experience needed to be effective sustainability leaders and change agents in their communities and organizations.

If you’d like to lead change in your organization, please contact us to find out more about our services and how we can help take your sustainability journey to the next level. And if you’re in the Ottawa region, we invite you to join us at our very first fundraising event, a Sustainabili-TEA on November 14.

The world is changing, but not fast enough. We need your support: Learn more. Get involved. Lead change. Support the transition to a sustainable world. And help us build a better tomorrow, today.