Sustainability Compass

The Sustainability Compass, or Compass for short, is a tool that brings people together around a common understanding of sustainability, and a shared vision for getting there. The Compass is easy to understand. A regular compass helps us map the territory and find our direction. The Sustainability Compass does the same thing for sustainability. It takes the English-language directions — North, East, South, West — and renames them, while keeping the same well-known first letters:

N is for Nature: All of our natural ecological systems and environmental concerns, from ecosystem health and nature conservation, to resource use and waste.

E is for Economy: The human systems that convert nature’s resources into food, shelter, technologies, industries, services, money and jobs.

S is for Society: The institutions, organizations, cultures, norms, and social conditions that make up our collective life as human beings.

W is for Wellbeing: Our individual health, happiness, and quality of life.

Educators can use the Compass to build in a sustainability lens to any topic, issue, lesson, activity or project that they use with their students. Students can use the Compass for note taking, forming questions, analysis and synthesis, and assessment. The Compass is a highly versatile but simple tool that provides a common language to teachers and students to always be thinking about sustainability, what we call having a “sustainability habit of mind.”