Using principals observed in nature and spectacular engineering, Icarus achieved human-powered controlled flight, although it did end badly for him.
The aristocracy of Europe observed the indicator ‘smoke rises’ to guide their design for hot air balloons. They built the smokiest fires possible to achieve short, and often fatal, periods of uncontrolled flight.
The Wright Brothers found a balance between lift, thrust, weight, and drag to design a machine that could provide powered, controlled, human flight through a process of ‘Engineering for Flight’.
NASA uses ‘Aeronautical Engineering’ to find the rate equations that provide the relationships between lift, thrust, drag, and weight for every design choice, so that a specific performance envelope can be met in a near-optimal manner. Human-powered, controlled flight has again been achieved by the Gossamer Albatross (and they did nail their landing).
Like the path from observation of nature through to using rate equations in flight, Sustainability Engineering is progressing toward approaches that will produce more optimal solutions. People lived with Sustainable lifestyles and technologies for most of our history. Then they drifted away from that, until they discovered the potential downside of ignoring the Earth’s limits. The earliest adopters of Sustainability used indicators observed from nature. Now with the Triple Bottom Line , we seek a balance between the competing aspects of a Sustainable Community, so that we are currently on par with the flights at Kitty Hawk.
This article, and next couple following, will explore the definitions and relationships associated with Sustainability Engineering so that we can determine the rate equations that relate the aspects of Sustainability that engineers can influence, such that we can achieve near-optimal solutions to some of the most complex problems our profession has ever faced.
There are an unmanageable number of different definitions of ‘Sustainable’, with some conflicting, some focused on human behavior alone, and others are not useful from an engineering perspective. Determining the first principals that would lead to an approach of Sustainability Engineering will require using a set of objectives as a test to winnow down to appropriate self-consistent definitions. Based on the weaknesses observed in different approaches that seem less than ideal for this purpose, I propose that any approach to Engineering for Sustainability must be:
• objective, using units of measure instead of indicators.
• repeatable, so that anyone using the same data has the ability to produce the same results.
• sensitive to, but independent of: culture, climate, labour and resource availability, technology, scale of community, and/or an undefined future.
• universal, able to be applied to any discipline of engineering.
• complete, able to address the engineering aspects, while still allowing for human psychology and behavior aspects to be addressed by other professionals.
Previous authors have discussed the length and breadth of the First Principals of Sustainability, so I won’t take up time justifying them here. Instead, I’m just listing the specific ones I used to build up my Second Principals.
First Principals
• People use their time to meet their wants and needs, and this is the basis of the wealth of communities [1].
• Sustainability is about intergenerational and inter-regional equity [2].
• Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of today without compromising the ability for people to meet their needs in the future [3].
• Development is the process of increasing the quality of life of a community between two points in time [4].
• Engineers maximize utility while minimizing cost to the client [5].
• Daly’s Rules [6]:
- We must use renewable resources slower than they renew
- We must use non-renewable resources slower than they can be replaced with renewable alternatives
- We must produce wastes slower than the environment can absorb them or render them harmless
• Needs are universal and invariant, and the wealth of the community comes from having needs met [7].
• Human Development is the process of giving people more freedom and opportunities to live lives they value [8].
• Capacity of a community comes from the ecosystem that it manages, and is dependent on the production of biological materials used by the human economy, and the absorption of wastes generated by the community . Units = global Hectares/capita (gHa/ca) [9]
These first principals, while not inconsistent, cannot automatically be used to develop the units of measure to be used in Sustainability Engineering, nor are the relationships between the different aspects of Sustainability immediately obvious. The following definitions were developed to complete the descriptions above to ensure the units of each were clear.
Second Principals, or derived definitions
• Sustainability Engineering is, in general, the process of maximizing the social benefit within a community while minimizing the negative ecological impacts.
• People use their time to meet their wants and perceived needs directly, or use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their wants and perceived needs indirectly.
• Engineers build infrastructure. Infrastructure is an investment of time and resources with an expectation of a return on that investment in the form of time and/or resources into the future.
• Technological Development is the creation or enhancement of systems of infrastructure with the expectation of an improvement in the Potential Quality of Life of a community.
• Human Development actualizes the Potential Quality of Life by removing the obstructions within the self, family, or community that prevent people from meeting their needs effectively, by expanding the range of real opportunities and choices.
• Potential Quality of Life is the time available within a community for activities other than those required to meet needs. Units = minutes/day/capita (min/d/ca).
• Needs are aspects of Human Nature. Needs can be viewed, at a minimum, as physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social. Examples would include rest, nutrition, love, governance, etc. In many cases, not meeting needs will have impacts in multiple ‘directions’ at once. Needs are met by activities that prevent the degradation of the individual, family or community. The tools and infrastructure associated with needs (or wants) would be the means to meet the needs, rather than needs themselves.
• Wants are everything that are not Needs, and they may or may not be met as part of the process of meeting needs. They are unbounded, and unlimited by imagination, but finite in execution in that there is only 24 hours per day per person for all activities that meet needs and wants.
• On any scale smaller than ‘planetary’, a community must be able to meet its needs with the resources it manages in perpetuity, and the labour it has available.
• Locally Used BioCapacity (LUBC) is the lesser of the BioCapacity of the community and the Ecological Footprint of the community, summed over each biome individually.
From the above definitions, Sustainability Engineering can be defined as:
Sustainability Engineering is creating or enhancing the systems of infrastructure so that there is an expectation of a return on that investment into the future, when considering only the resources available in perpetuity to the community and the time required to meet needs within the community.
In the next article, I will go on to show how time and resources relate to each other, so that the rate equation as it applies to Sustainable Development can be derived, and then near-optimal solutions for the Potential Quality of Life can be determined.
With this definition, we will be able to do more than Engineering for Sustainable Development, and head towards Sustainability Engineering. We will be able to go from the Wright Flyer II, to the Red Baron, in just a few years.
- Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776)
- Planning for a Sustainable Future (Projet de société, 1995)
- Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987)
- Measuring Sustainable Development (Joint UNECE/OECD Eurostat Working Group on Statistics for Sustainable Development, 2008)
- My understanding from ENGG 101
- Toward some operational principles of sustainable development (Daly, 1990)
- Human Scale Development (Max-Neef, et al., 1991)
- United Nations Development Program (website 2014)
- Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Wackernagel, M. and Rees, W., 1998)