SUSTAINABILITY AND ENGINEERING FUTURES

A Book Review

By Leopold P. Mureithi

THE concept of sustainable development was introduced by the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) of 1987. It defined this as growth that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (paragraph 27). Engineering is generally understood to be the designing, building and maintenance of structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.

In keeping with these two ontologies, sustainability engineering involves the embedding of social, environmental, and economic considerations into in meeting human needs. A further illumination of the range of sustainability dimensions is given by Thomas Flüeler, David Goldblatt, Jürg Minsch and Daniel Spreng. In their book Meeting global energy challenges: Towards an agenda for social-science research, they state that the focus should be “not only the triad of ecological, economic and social but also temporal, spatial, technical, political and ethical” (p. 95).

The epistemological aspects of this integrated approach are taken care of by numerous books, articles and other resources. Here we examine a few pertinent works. An apt salvo is given by Erik van der Vleuten, Ruth Oldenziel and Mila Davids in their book Engineering the Future, Understanding the Past: A Social History of Technology by posing two questions:

How can we solve social challenges, while avoiding new nightmares in an unknown future? …. We know that society, enterprise, and user dynamics are all crucial in such processes. But how can we include these dynamics in technological decision-making and design? And who should lead that effort? (p. 17).

The transformative leadership role is best played by sustainability futures education whose mandate is to impart knowledge “to build better futures without lapsing into nightmares….engineering ethics and education that aimed to prepare engineers for acting on behalf of others” (p. 18). Among the corpus of knowledge for teaching sustainability engineering is Engineering a Better Future: Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences, and Innovation edited by Eswaran Subrahmanian, Toluwalogo Odumosu and Jeffrey Y. Tsao. Acknowledging that engineering is a “social enterprise” (p. v), its scope includes designing the desired societal future (pp. 39-60), dealing with the future (pp.197-200), and integrating engineering and social sciences (pp. 1-19); in addition to “education for sustainability” (p. 2), and “the art of research (pp. 162-186).

At the conceptual and design stage, “visionary scenarios are also created to explore how technology could improve current practice….[to] develop functional

requirements and an interactive architecture” (p. 34). Scenario approach is emphasised in many instances in volume. This way, possible and probable futures can be considered and a preferred future teased out for reification: “designing the future we want” (p. xxv). I would classify this book as foundational.

An applied text is Sustainable Development in Practice: Case Studies for Engineers and Scientists edited by Adisa Azapagic and Slobodan Perdan which covers topics ranging from the concept, measurement and assessment of sustainability (pp. 3-55), case studies of mining, energy, solid waste, sanitation, transport (pp. 83-509). This could supplement the more abstract writings on sustainability engineering.

The books highlighted here, among others, could be utilized in any engineering discipline: aeronautical, built environment, chemical, civil works, electrical installation infrastructure, mechanical, mechatronic, robotic, and related fields. An acid test for successful application of these activities in a sustainable manner is the triple bottom line (TBL), a metric coined by John Elkington in 1994 to measure performance in terms of profitability, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental sustainability. One might add that this metric is applied sans frontiers - that is at all levels: micro, meso, macro, and even planetary. In engineering, like in any other praxis, the overriding principle should be humane: do no harm, a promise attributed to Dr. Thomas Inman (1820-1876).