Hello;

My name is Douglas Nuttall, and I am a broad spectrum Civil Engineer with experience in Land Development, Transportation, and Water Resources. I have been studying Sustainability Engineering since 1996, and these pages are my ruminations about what I have learned. I welcome discussion with all perspectives in my search to understand the biggest possible topic in the deepest way I can.

After a fairly serious car accident hospitalized me for a while and taught me about mortality, I started studying how to ‘fix’ Engineering, as a way of leaving a legacy. As a profession, we address short-term, local problems with short-term, local solutions. As the world accelerates and shrinks, ‘local’ becomes the other side of the world, and ‘short-term’ becomes instantaneous.  This is a problem, since we’re creating impacts in places where we can’t see them, for people who have nothing to do with our project. We can use Preventative Engineering to increase the signal to noise ratio of the wanted to unwanted effects, but that approach doesn’t tell us what the ‘wanted’ effects are to be.

This blog is an effort to show the path to Engineering for Sustainability that I’ve found, and continue to search for.

The blog posts are pretty much stream-of-consciousness, while the pages in the pull down menu at the top are meant to be read left to right, top to bottom – the papers are more academic, and the other pages are more ‘Easy Reading’.  When I get an idea fully fleshed out, I’ll take it out of the blog posts, and put it into the right place in the pages in the pull-downs.  Let me know if you’d want to see more (or less) links and references.  I welcome comments.