Meet the Oakville Sustainability Initiative Founder 

Hello friends & colleagues,  

When I first began this journey in 2004,  I surrounded myself with people that were much more knowledgeable about what they were doing, and I began asking for advice and taking notes....and then I took more notes until I began to understand what it meant.  Sustainability was about making new kinds of decisions based on a specific set of universal principles. Without them, we do not have a way of measuring our progress. It is in fact, a new way of making decisions about our remaining capital. Natural and Human. Its implications on future generations are enormous and it is this understanding that led to the founding of the Oakville Sustainability Initiative in 2006.  Asking for advice is an extremely powerful principle.   

When we began hosting lectures in Oakville about community sustainability, many people asked me what it was?  How do we achieve it? Some people even said “we don’t know what might happen?”  The truth is that we do not know all the answers—because we have never been there. There isn’t a single industrial society on the planet that is currently truly sustainable.  The questions we all have about “how we build a truly sustainable community, have not been answered yet-- that’s the job-- and that’s what we get to do together. I can’t think of a better way of starting than by first defining what it "is" and then learning from  role models that have begun the task of Strategic Sustainability Planning. 

It was in my vegetable garden that I learned about sustainability and in my business career that I had the opportunity to work with visionary leaders who foresaw a different future.  Visionary leaders understand that in nature, there is no such thing as waste and the closer we can emulate this process, the more successful we will become at everything we do.  In nature, every waste product is a raw material for another species or plant.  We are the only species on earth that produce large amounts of waste that are toxic to others and non-recyclable.  Because of this, we are now the determinants of our own future and the future of all other species.  It is an awesome ethical responsibility, particularly towards future generations. 

I know that life has now come full circle for me.  The greatest gift I know you can give is the gift of learning.  I believe that my own success has come from a love of learning.  My formal education helped shape some of my ideas but it is my informal learning that has changed the trajectory of my life.   I wanted this website to be aesthetically beautiful to reflect the beauty of our surroundings and inspire new role models to innovate and honor their individual callings.  I wanted all of us to dwell in the possibility of true community sustainability.      

We live in a great time, in a great country where opportunities abound if we allow ourselves to imagine the possibilities. But there is a responsibility that comes with that opportunity. The one unlimited resource is the one of human creativity and imagination. That’s what we haven’t tapped yet. There is money, there is science, there are models and examples, but the energy that comes through creativity and changing the way we view our world is limitless. Let us band together and begin a sustainability journey that will change the world.... in our own backyard first . . . for generations to come.

Elaine Hanson