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So what will the Sustainability Revolution (2010-2050) be like?
Here is a scenario which Richard Cassels will present to the Society for Sustainability and Environmental Engineering on 24 October 2011 in Brisbane, Australia, entitled “The Sustainability Revolution 2010-2050. Some learning from the Past for Engineers”.
Let’s imagine a visit to the new “Museum of Society, Environment and Sustainability (M.O.S.E.S.), soon after it opens to the public in 2050 A.D. in the new city of Roma, Queensland, Australia.
And in this case, let us also imagine that our audience is a group of engineers.
GUIDED TOUR STARTS: THE WELCOME.
Welcome to Roma, Queensland, Australia on this cool spring day in October 2050, when the today’s temperature is not expected to exceed 35oC.
For the many of you that now live in the super-city that Roma has now become, welcome to your local World Heritage museum. We extend a particular welcome to those of you who came as “climate refugees” from the Mekong and Irrawaddy deltas in 2020. You have helped to make Roma the vibrant community it is today. We know this museum will have particular poignancy for you. To you I say Xin Chao (welcome in Vietnamese) and Min ga la ba (welcome in Burmese].
Welcome also to those of you who have travelled here in the V.F.T. (Very Fast train) from the coastal conurbation of Noasagong- the super city that now stretches from Noosa in the North to Woolloongong in the south, and incorporates the former cities of Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle and Sydney.
Today it is my pleasure to take you on a tour of the exhibits at this new museum. The museum is dedicated to telling the story of the global “Sustainability Revolution” which, as we all now know, took place in the 5 decades between 2000 and 2050 A.D. The Sustainability Revolution is widely seen as the most profound historic change that human society ever undertook, involving as it did the complete “re-industrialisation” of developed societies. (It is now quite humorous to recall that in the first decade of the “noughties”, there were politicians who believed that those calling for the Sustainability Revolution were seeking a “de-industrialisation”, a reversion to –hand knitted jerseys and sandals, as one politician put it!).
M.O.S.E.S. stands for the Museum of Social and Environmental Sustainability. It was opened to the public 10 months ago by Premier Kate Jones, President Greg Combet and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Luv Lok Sun. The Australian and the Queensland Governments and the U.N. are the Museum’s main sponsors.
I would also like to acknowledge the Museum’s principal corporate sponsor, the Clive Palmer Sustainability Foundation. This Foundation was established in 2013 after Clive Palmer’s “Road to Damascus experience” (actually it was on the road to Boulia) when he suddenly “got” sustainability. The only condition of his generous sponsorship was that his much loved bicycle should be on permanent exhibition in the Museum. The Australian Government’s commitment to the museum dates to 2015, when they started planning for end of the coal seam gas boom and seeking new ways to revitalize the inland “drilling communities”. M.O.S.E.S is one of the Government’s new heritage projects that include the now-mothballed industrial sites of Hay and Abbott Points.
THE ORIGINS OF MOSES.
Planning for MOSES actually began in 2011 A.D. This was the year when the author Laurence Smith (2) calculated that if the whole world were to adopt a 2010 US / Australian standard of living, it would be equivalent to the world’s population increasing from nearly 7 billion to 72 billion people. He also argued that if this transition took 40 years until 2050, it would be equivalent to going to 105 billion people. He pointed out that “something has to give”. The trends and habits of people in the developed countries in 2011 were impossible to sustain.
In 2009 Megan Clark (3), C.E.O. of the CSIRO, took the same theme when she pointed out that to feed the worlds‟ population over the next 50 years would require the production of as much food as had been produced in the entire history of human food production. This was at a time when the total area of agricultural soil in the world was being decreased by unsustainable, fossil-fuel based farming practices.
Also in 2011 journalist Ross Gittins (4) commented on a projection that by 2030 the world’s population will have gone from mostly poor to mostly middle class, and that this would bring immense wealth to Australia. Mr. Gittins commented: “Like all projections by economists, this one confidently assumes the natural resources and ecosystem services needed to make this possible will be readily obtained-presumably from another planet. But lets‟ not allow ecological realities to spoil our happy analysis”.
Also at this time Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce was earning praise in Australia for his humorous parody of the carbon price in which he described his difficulties in going to the hardware store to ask for a ton of carbon. It was unlikely that his humour was much appreciated by the inhabitants of Dadaab, then the largest refugee camp the world had ever seen. Thousands of striving people had gathered there, fleeing the devastating result of an unprecedented drought clearly linkable to climate change, and, as usual, intimately intertwined with those other nightmares, state failure, war, famine and disease.
The founders of M.O.S.E.S. therefore decided that humanity was facing a future of almost unimaginable challenges and opportunities, and, regrettably, probably of unimaginable sufferings for some members of the human race. Humanity also faced many totally predictable developments , from unprecedented competition between nations for finite resources, to sea level rise, more extreme climatic events, and barely comprehensible increases in resource demand and waste production, to name only a few. So they founded the museum to record what happened next!
ENGINEERING IN 2011.
As you are all engineers, let us recall the state of engineering in 2011. It can be encapsulated by a conversation I had with a young industrial designer called Felix in 2010.
Felix was in a state of despair. He had just read the book Cradle to Cradle, by William MacDonough and Michael Baumgart (5). Inspired by this, and only too well aware of the many social and environmental issues facing humanity, he wanted to specify that his products, in this case, toasters and electric jugs, were long lasting; that all the components were completely re-usable; that production minimised toxic emissions in the countries of manufacture, that the embedded energy in them was as low as possible, that the extraction of the minerals did not threaten societies or ecosystems (for example in Central Africa) and that no plastic waste would end up in the Great Pacific Gyre, killing off the remaining albatrosses and turtles of the North Pacific in its path.
Felix despaired when his boss told him: “Forget all that „green‟ stuff, we can’t afford it”. What he meant, of course, was that his company would not have to pay for any of those costs, which would be borne by the taxpayers of the future. He even went on to paraphrase Groucho Marx: “What have future generations ever done for us?”!
Felix’s solution was to leave that employer and find a job with an elite sports equipment designer, where environmental credentials were essential and the buyers were willing to pay for it. He called this “the boutique solution”. As with architects who were lucky enough to get commissions to design 6 star green buildings, it solved his personal problem, but not society’s problem.
This was, of course, the era when “Sustainable Engineering” was seen as “alternative”, instead of being mainstream as it now is. Today universities teach courses in the history of unsustainable engineering (also called the Age of the “Techno-engineer”), as cautionary tales for our students. “Forgive, not forget”, they teach.
THE EXHIBITS.
The first thing that may surprise you is that we decided to trace the story of human sustainability back to 2.5 million years ago. We decided that the story had to start then.
The second decision was to organize the exhibits chronologically. So there are 13 chronological galleries, one introductory one (the Principles gallery) and one for temporary exhibitions, making a total of 15 all together.
The chronological galleries are based on the 13 main socio-techno- ecological revolutions of human history[6-9]:
1. The evolution of proto-human, tool making, upright, intelligent apes (2.5 million years ago).
2. The great expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa (from 60,000 BCE).
3. The Agricultural Revolution (from 10,000 BCE).
4. The Urban Revolution (from 4000 BCE).
5. The rise of pre-industrial agrarian empires (from 2000 BCE).
6. The European maritime expansion (from 1450 A.D.).
7. The Age of Scientific Discovery (from 1650 A.D.)
8. The Atlantic Industrial Revolution (from 1750 A.D.).
9. The Modern Age / Age of Oil (from 1920’s).
10. The Nuclear Age / Space Age (from 1950’s).
11. The Digital Revolution and Asian Industrial Revolution (from 1980’s).
12. The Sustainability Revolution/ Green Re-Industrialisation (from 2000).
13. The post-reindustrialisation age (from 2050)-[this gallery is of course called “the Future”).
THE PRINCIPLES GALLERY.
In this gallery we introduce three key principles of sustainability.
The first principle is that a society’s sustainability is a result of four elements, all of which M.O.S.E.S has to address. They are 1. Technology; 2.the environmental dynamics of the period; 3.the society’s organizational ability and 4. the society’s values. We like to remind visitors that in the past sustainability was often seen as issue of “environment” and technology.
So in the exhibitions we tell how a society’s sustainability is the result of the interaction of these four variables. Technology, for example, may be a stimulus, but without an appropriate society and organisation it is meaningless. The ancient Greeks might have invented the steam engine, but they could never have built factories or railways. Felix can design sustainable toasters, but his society made it unaffordable.
The second principle is that of “dynamic synergies” .This is, of course, a systems approach. The great revolutions of human history occurred when there was positive feedback between the four variables. What matters in history is not who invented or thought what first, but when positive feedback loops kicked in. The invention of the motor car is a typical model of how this occurs (10). 1840 saw the invention of differentiated gears, 1845 of rubber tyres, 1860 of the electric spark and gap, 1870 of the principle of compression, 1883 of pneumatic rubber tyres, 1887 of the clutch and gear, 1888 of the petrol engine, 1891 of the friction clutch, until finally in 1895 Selden takes out 6 patents that effectively lead to the motor car.
In this model of change, significant changes occur when the different components coalesce to create “dynamic synergies”.
The third principle we call the “Life Cycles of the Revolutions”. It usually goes like this. Once a socio-environmental breakthrough occurs, there is a period of explosive growth. Quite rapidly, however, this starts hitting some new limits-typically ecological limits, but sometimes other kinds of limit. Once a society hits the new limits, three different outcomes are possible: 1. there is a new transformation or invention that lifts the limit; 2. the society anticipates the limit and stabilises below the new limit; 3. the society overshoots the limit, collapses and then reforms in a modified form. In this last option the society’s environment resources had usually been extensively degraded.
In 2005 a famous geographer, Professor Jared Diamond (11), in his bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, argued that informed societies always have a conscious choice in these matters.
So, with this model in mind, let’s now visit the chronological galleries.
Each gallery follow a pattern: we contrast the achievements of the age with their social or environmental costs, and we identify the critical “synergies”.
LEARNING FROM THE CHRONOLOGICAL GALLERIES.
In the first gallery we see how tool use and tool making evolved hand in hand with a bigger brain, upright posture, intelligence, social organisation and a climatic shift favouring grasslands over forests. This co-evolution enabled humans to spread from Africa to Europe and Asia. This is a classic example of the interrelatedness and interdependence of technology with other social and environmental factors. It also showed us how technology became “hard-wired‟ into the human response to problems (foreshadowing the way that social networking sites were thought to shape human brains in the early 21st. Century (12)).
In Gallery Two we see the second great human expansion out of Africa- that of modern humans. This was made possible by many factors that included the ability to make composite artefacts like boats, houses, baskets and stone-tipped spear. Bill Bryson (13) attributes this to the invention of “string”. So our “string technologist” ancestors were able to colonise Australia, Japan and the Americas for the first time. Other contemporary breakthroughs such as art, religion, burials and the deliberate use of fire for ecological management may have been just as important.
The extinction of the megafauna of the newly conquered lands was one of the consequences of this expansion. While obviously connected with the extraordinary climate changes of the time (the last glaciation and its abrupt termination), we can also clearly see the hand of humans- now the world’s most dangerous predator and newest habitat shaper- in these extinctions.
In this period we can see that humans reached environmental limits and therefore were consciously dealing with “sustainability” issues from this time onwards. For example Joseph Birdsell (14) calculated that once a group of 25 Aboriginal people reached Australia, it would take them only 2,000 years to populate the continent. So for the remaining 48,000 years of their history, they were living at environmental limits.
Given that every human society ever known has some method of population control, even if they do not always discuss it, it is almost certain that by this time every human society had became aware of the need to control their own populations and had developed their own ways of doing this.
We need to rid our minds of the usual picture of humans slowly and heroically evolving until, in the 20th century, they reached carrying capacity and discovered the challenge of long-term sustainability. It is much more likely that the opposite is true: that for most of human history, human societies have been operating at the environmental limits and dealing, more or less successfully, with this challenge.
In Gallery Three we see the explosive human development associated with the “invention” of agriculture. And we see, even 9,000 years ago, the first overexploitation of habitats by cultivators and their herds.
We also note that there have been no major new food crops domesticated since this first agricultural revolution. While productivity has been increased almost inconceivably, the diversity, and hence the resilience, of our food base has consistently been reduced.
We also follow the expansion of these early cultivators out into the Pacific, to Easter Island and New Zealand, noting their catastrophic impacts on island ecosystems, and ultimately on the some of these societies themselves.
Gallery Four documents the Urban Revolution, with its emerging social stratification and administrative complexity. We observe the abandonment of southern Iraq due to salinity caused by over irrigation (15).
In Gallery Five we touch on the great empires of the pre-industrial age, from Rome to China, from the Maya to the ancient Khmer of Angkor Wat. We observe their extraordinary engineering achievements, from the aqueducts, bridges, harbours, roads, temples and concrete domes of ancient Rome to the flawless perfection of the pyramids of Giza, the perfectly fitted stone blocks of the Incas and the huge scale of the Grand canal in China. Also attributable to this era are innovations such as the magnetic compass, the hinged rudder, gun powder, the zero and the alphabet, and all the world’s current, major religions originated in this era.
Thanks to the existence of written records, we now have insights into what these ancient empires understood or failed to understand about sustainability. They were only too familiar with the consequences of failing to adjust to ecological limits. They dreaded what have been called the ‘Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse’- famine, disease, war, state failure and unmanageable environmental change. They experienced the terrible impacts that these horsemen had, noting that once one horseman was unleashed, the others usually followed rapidly. Possibly related to this, the world’s great religions evolved at this time.
There also seems to be a cyclic process in the rise and fall of civilisations, notably when a society ignores the early warning signs of ecological stress.
In Gallery Six we document the extraordinary sea-based expansion of Europeans, particularly into the Americas, from the 15th century. Combining Chinese boat building technologies with “guns, germs and steel” (16), they devastated indigenous populations and initiated the “Columbian Exchange” of foods, diseases and ideas between the Old and New Worlds. The European “Renaissance” was both cultural and scientific. The printing press revolutionised communications.
Gallery Seven sees science, philosophy and discovery combined in the period known variously (and presumptuously) as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and the Age of Scientific Discovery. Eastern Australia is invaded by Europeans. The last great free-living resources of the planet, whales, seals, bison and the temperate forests are ruthlessly exploited.
Gallery Eight features the Atlantic Industrial Revolution. As well as being an age of technical change, it was also one of immense social change as reflected in the lives of personalities such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. If only on the basis of his name, Isambard Kingdom Brunel seems to represent the heroic engineering of the age. This was the time of the explosion of industry and industrial cities, of Bazalgtette‟s London sewerage system (an extraordinary advance in health), the Suez Canal, the U.S. Transcontinental Railway, the Transatlantic Telegraph, the Brooklyn bridge, suspension bridges, underground railways, the telephone and then the wireless. We all know the environmental price we started to pay for this astounding progress.
Gallery Nine deals with the “Modern Age”, or the Age of Oil. Stimulated by the First World War, modern industry was invented in the U.S.A. and Germany. Skyscrapers were mass-produced, the Hover Dam and the Golden Gate bridge were created. Aeroplanes and cars start to feature prominently. In Australia we built Canberra and the Sydney harbour and Story bridges. Environmental disasters included the American Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and the introductions of cane toads and prickly pears in Australia. “Modern” society appeared. And certainly part of the stimulus for this new age was the “First World War” of the first industrial nations.
In Gallery Ten we feature the Nuclear/ Space /Jet Age that also included the “Green Revolution” in crop productivity. Our exhibits include mainframe computers, antibiotics, the birth control pill, a copy of the pioneering environmental publication Silent Spring (17) by Rachel Carson and the famous photo of “Earth Rise” taken by American astronauts on the Moon. Again this burst of social and technical innovation can be partly attributed to the stimulus of the Second World War, raising the frightening possibility that humanity only makes changes as a result of massive wars!
Gallery Eleven, featuring the Digital Revolution and the Chinese Industrial Revolution, sets the scene for the Sustainability Revolution. Nuclear accidents and oil spills unnerved the people. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit sets the agenda but inaction follows. Al Gore highlights the climate crisis, but international action falters badly in Copenhagen in 2009. The Chinese start to build the Three Gorges Dam at terrific environmental and social cost. Queensland started to build its huge coal mining and export infrastructure. Life on the “Fossil Fuel Express” proves highly addictive for those riding its carriages, but not those living track-side. Societies are tempted to continue exploiting ever dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuel deposits, instead of facing up to the challenge of creating new, clean and indefinitely renewable energy sources. Countries like Poland find the very toxic process of extracting shale gas appealing as a solution to their energy security concerns.
In 2011 we were not sure whether the next few decades would witness chaos (“The Great Disruption” (18)) or salvation or a combination of both. So what tipped the balance?
By 2010, thanks to great advances in archaeology, palaeontology and much palaeo-environmental research, we had, for the first time, a reasonably good understanding of our planet’s history and our role in creating the new geological era we now call the ‘Anthropocene’ (19), in recognition of the unmistakable evidence that we had now become the domain force shaping our planet.
Thanks to this mew historical knowledge, we could clearly discern four key trends in human history. First, we had released extraordinary human potential. Our knowledge, our capacities were almost unbelievably advanced (although not everyone shared in this prosperity). Second, we had increased enormously the productivity of those elements of our planetary life support systems we called „resources”. Third, we had developed an amazing capacity to redistribute resources over space and time. Fourth, we had consistently reduced the resilience of our planetary life support systems. With every step forward we had increasingly degraded the planet’s life support systems even more.
This set the scene for the Sustainability Revolution. It was clear that humanity’s task was to “Re-industrialise”, to attempt to retain and improve the gains of progress while changing to clean, sustainable and just ways of living. Ideally this change would also restore many of the planet’s damaged life support systems. It was hoped that this could be achieved without lowering “standards of living”, particularly in the developed world that had become accustomed to continuous improvement in their lifestyles.
The scale of the required industrial reform was frightening to many. Others saw the huge opportunities.
THE SUSTAINABILITY REVOLUTION, 2010 to 2050.
You, like me, lived through the tumultuous decades between 2010 and 2050. Let’s not speak of the unimaginable tragedies we witnessed. Let’s talk instead of the unimaginable progress of the Sustainability Revolution, a transformation so powerful and rapid that by 2050 we declared ourselves genuinely sustainable.
When we think back and try to identify what were the real reasons that the Sustainability Revolution, we should recall the wisdom of Jorgen Randers, a Norwegian academic and co-author of the famous „Limits to Growth‟. In 2008 he argued (20) that human history is so complex that often no-one can accurately distinguish the real drivers of change from their symptoms or side-effects. This can particularly be the case for people who lived through the change. A case in point was the “Arab Spring” of 2011. Officially it was about getting rid of brutal dictators. But in reality many other factors were at play- overpopulation, exhaustion of resources like water, rising global food prices, unemployment, strict attitudes to sex in the more traditional Arab societies leading to the frustration of teenage males who then found meaning and purpose in war, and so on. What was the real cause? Of course the answer, as we know from our systems view of socio-environmental change, is all of them, particularly once they started reinforcing each other.
We now know that in May 2011 the 3rd. Nobel Laureate’s symposium report, The Stockholm Memorandum. Tipping the Scales towards Sustainability (21), gave a remarkably accurate blueprint of the comprehensive way in which society needed to be transformed. But let me tell you what I personally think were the most important drivers of the change that led to the Sustainability Revolution, particularly in Australia. (They are not necessarily in any order of importance, which is of course very hard to distinguish in systemic change).
1. Of course there were the global tragedies of the early noughties, and let us not dwell on them except to note that they did, obviously, drive the desperate demand for industrial reform. In Queensland a turning point was when, after the massive Brisbane River floods of 2012, 2014 and 2016, insurance companies refused to re-insure anyone who rebuilt below flood level. And soon afterwards they refused to insure coastal properties threatened by the sea level rise that was now known to be inevitable.
2. By 2015 the many positive “sustainability” movements reached a critical mass. In 2010 there were literally hundreds of different sustainability initiatives- Green Infrastructure Councils, Green Building Councils, the clean energy and green chemistry initiatives (see below), the Corporate Social Responsibility programs, and sustainable initiatives in everything from transport, urban design and business management to energy creation and technical innovation. Suddenly around 2015 these hitherto disparate energies came together in a burst of synergy.
3. For those pioneering this change, it was a struggle at first, but suddenly it became much easier. A critical turning point was the pricing of carbon by almost all developed nations in 2012. As we know, the USA failed to join the world at this time, following the success of the Tea-Party Republicans in the 2012 election, which lead eventually to the USA being labeled a “rogue state”. Most historians agree that this was the turning point that lead to the now irreversible decline of this once great nation.
4. We now know that the accountants were really responsible for the Sustainability Revolution. When every business had to price carbon, and show their accountants each year what it had cost them, the shame factor set in. CEOs were too embarrassed to show their accountants (and shareholders) how much money they were losing paying carbon fees. They cleaned up their emissions over night!
5. Of course the good news about carbon pricing today is that we may still have a chance of stabilizing global temperature rise to 3oC. Awful as 3 degrees is, it is better than the horrific prospects of 4-6 degrees rises (22).
6. When Australians realised they were losing the “resource wars” to China, the nation rapidly became very interested in previously unpopular initiatives towards international cooperation. The establishment of today’s extensive international resource treaties followed. This occurred even in “Katter Country” (after the famous fiasco where Vietnamese fishing communities flooded in to North Queensland to take advantage of the relaxation of local fishing restrictions!).
7. By 2010 the military planners in virtually every developed nation had identified climate change, ocean acidification and resource competition as the biggest strategic threats to their nations. Politicians could no longer ignore the issues (except those in the U.S.A.).
8. And of course technology played a huge part. The adjustable eco-dams on the Mekong, the eco-sheds that have managed to protect 20% of the Great Barrier Reef, the energy-from- algae farms in the deserts, the closed system water supply in Roma, the solar estates in the Sahara, are all marvelously ingenious. Once carbon pricing came in, there was an astounding flood of new innovation.
9. A key to the “Green Re-industrialisation” was the mandating of “Green (non-toxic) Chemistry” in all industrial processes. Green Chemistry in particular (23) really appealed to everyone-the idea that we COULD re-engineer all our industrial processes to be non-toxic from conception to manufacture to use to re-use. (It can be seen logically as a part of the “biomimicry” movement). The non-toxic, totally re-usable construction materials of the 2050‟s were almost completely unknown in 2010. Cradle to cradle industrial processes (4) were also part of the solution to the challenges of resource consumption and waste that seemed almost insoluble to those living in 2010.
10. By 2015 even economists realised that environmental cost were real costs and that continuous growth was not only physically impossible, but was a cheap and dirty way of avoiding change. This was when the old “growth economics” ended, to be replaced by the new Steady State Economics (24).
11. Incidentally Khazzoom-Brookes were right (25). Energy efficiency, important as it was, only increased energy consumption.
12. The reform of language was also critical. I think a turning point was when schools banned the expression “The” environment. Of course environment cannot be externalized; it is always necessary to specify whose environment is being talked about; humans, consisting principally of water and air themselves, regularly absorb and exchange their “internal” air and water with their surroundings; and every organism has a dynamic relationship with its environment. We are our environment! (26)
13. I also mention the role of the P.O.H.S. committees. As you know, the Occupational Health and Safety Committees of the 2010‟s were renamed the Planetary and Occupational Health and Safety Committees in 2015, after it was realised they were essentially doing the same job.
14. As we know, population growth was already slowing by 2010, as education and affluence spread among women. By 2015-there was almost universal acceptance that small families and declining populations were highly advantageous, particularly in those rich societies like Australia with very heavy environmental footprints (27).
15. A flow-on effect of this was that societies saw their aging populations as assets rather than liabilities. Community life became much more rewarding. The blossoming of street art and shared gardening was a symbol of this.
16. And above all was the awareness in 2010 that humanity was, in terms of its impact on the planet, only at the very beginning of history. As Professor Ross Garnaut (28) said in 2011 of climate-related disasters, “We ain‟t seen nothing yet”. Until then all of humanity had been unconsciously programmed to see themselves as the climax of human change, its historic apogee. It became clear in 2010 that human history was just at the beginning of its impact on the planet. The end of “presentist triumphalism”, the attitude that the present is the triumphant apex of human achievement, was a turning point.
17. And we should not forget the very significant political development, when every major developed nation appointed their first “Minister for 7 Generations”, a minister for the long term future, with the power of veto over development proposals. As we know, they had a very trying time at first as they fronted vested political and business interests who all benefitted from short-termism. But fortunately they are still with us today.
ENGINEERING IN THE SUSTAINBALITY REVOLUTION.
So what did all of this mean for engineers?
The formation of organizations like the Green Infrastructure Council and the Green Building Council enabled engineers to lobby for a better future. Engineers became politically active and their “hard heads” were very influential.
It was carbon pricing that liberated engineers from their purely technical role. Before carbon pricing they were often condemned to work as servants of short term profit and creators of future waste. Once carbon and other environmental undesirables were costed, engineers were empowered to become true planetary problem solvers. It led to so many women joining the profession that now they are more than 50% of all engineers.
While engineers had to learn new skills like full life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis, energy and waste costing, toxicity analysis, they also still relied on the essential traditional skills of their profession, like project management, cost –benefit analysis, time and cost management, the principles of good design, comprehensive technical knowledge of materials and construction methods, people management skills.
Of course all engineering students now received a basic course on the history of engineering and sustainability.
CONCLUSION
Let me conclude with some comments on conservatism. For much of history it has been wise to be cautious about change. But when you are in the Titanic, heading for an iceberg, inaction or delay is the wrong response. As a character in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa says, "If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change” (personal communication from Mary Maher).
POSTSCRIPT.
In 2018 Felix moved out of his boutique employment, back into mainstream industrial design, and since then has been happy and professionally fulfilled.
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