'Sustainability is about well-being for all': Prof Shashi Kant receives Paul W. Fox Award

Professor Shashi Kant is the 2026 recipient of the Paul W. Fox Award at UTM (photo by Nick Iwanyshyn).

Sustainability is a buzzword usually linked to environmental responsibility, but for Shashi Kant it’s about human flourishing more broadly.

Driven by that belief, he not only created the groundbreaking Master of Science in Sustainability Management program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, but also devoted countless hours outside his academic role to help make sustainability a university-wide priority.

In recognition of his distinguished voluntary service to the university over nearly 30 years, the professor of forest resource economics and sustainability management at UTM and Daniels is the 2026 recipient of the Paul W. Fox Award, one of the UTM Alumni Awards of Distinction.

While Kant has received many illustrious honours over the years, including the Order of Ontario, this latest accolade means the most to him.

“The other awards were for my academic achievements,” he says. “This award is closest to my heart because it’s an acknowledgement of how I treat people and the way I’ve influenced their thinking and their lives.”

Kant has had a personal and professional impact on UTM students and colleagues across the university through his research, teaching and community service. But it was in the sustainability management program – which he founded in 2013 at UTM’s Institute for Management & Innovation and directed until 2024 – that he left the biggest mark.

The program reflects his personal values and pioneering professional perspective. He was raised in a small village in India where his father was a landlord and his mother modelled charity in the local community. “She was always nice to people and supported them in difficult situations,” he says.

Kant began his career as a forester in India, where his contact with a local school teacher who used Gandhian non-violence tools to stop deforestation transformed his thinking about human well-being. “It changed my thinking from then on,” he says.

Later, Kant shifted to teaching forest management and says he found his calling in education. After moving to Canada and earning a master’s degree in economics and a doctoral degree in forest economics at U of T, he joined the university’s then faculty of forestry in 1997. (Forestry is now part of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.)

Since then, he’s become an internationally known expert on the economics of sustainable forest management, with a special emphasis on sustainability, human rights and Indigenous approaches.

“To me, sustainability is about well-being for all,” says Kant. “So we need to consider environmental issues, as well as political, social and economic factors together.”

From his earliest days at U of T, he dreamed of starting an interdisciplinary graduate program based on this expanded definition. Once the program launched, Kant would welcome incoming classes with a talk about the interconnection between love and sustainability.

“Sustainability depends on humans finding balance with the external environment, including nature, society and the markets,” he says. “But we also need to balance the internal environment of our hearts and minds by giving and receiving love to each other and the Earth.”

But simply teaching students about sustainability management isn’t enough, Kant says – they must be involved in hands-on sustainability activities on campus as much as possible.

Those activities stem from his own leadership in working groups on sustainability at UTM and grassroots initiatives to make campus operations more sustainable. Students also help lead UTM’s annual Sustainability Week and an international conference – Sustainability: Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice, and Action (STTPA)  – an event Kant first organized in 2019

Since sustainability is an inherently global concept, Kant ensured that the program includes students from diverse backgrounds. A personal donation from him established the Equity and Diversity Award for students from underrepresented groups based on demonstrated financial need.

Reflecting on his recent honour, Kant insists that it recognizes not just him, but his students and colleagues.

“We achieved everything together,” he says. “I lead from behind because if you treat human beings as human beings, they can do wonders.”
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The UTM Alumni Awards of Distinction will be handed out during a ceremony set for Nov. 4.

Story by Megan Easton republished from University of Toronto Mississauga News