A fictional story about Sustainability

King Williem’s Dilemma

The mayor of Little Town, Ontario, calls me up, and says “Doug, I have a problem. I keep getting these phone calls about the intersection at Main and Bridge, with people complaining how awful it is. I can’t get any other work done. Can you fix the problem?”

As a confident design engineer, I say “Of course. I’ll send my Jr. Engineer over this afternoon with a pair of wire snips, and he’ll make sure you never get those pesky phone calls again.”

“Fuddle-duddling Engineers! NO! I have to get those phone calls so I know what the problems are that need to get fixed. It is the intersection I want fixed.”

“So, do you want me to fix the problem, or do you want me to fix the intersection?”

<Exasperated++ Sigh>”I want you to fix the problem by fixing the intersection”.

And now I’m brought to a fork in the road (as it were). I can either fix the intersection, in which case the problem will show up somewhere else and perhaps in another form. Or I can refuse the work, saying I can’t do what you’re asking. My wife will have very strong words for me for not bringing a paycheck home (again), so ultimately you know I have to say “Absolutely Mr. Mayor. I’m glad we all understand each other”.

I design the intersection improvements, get paid, and my wife doesn’t leave me; the mayor shows how he responded to the needs of the community and gets re-elected, ensuring his paltry 3 digit pension (I did say Little Town); the morning commute is made marginally better, and everyone’s taxes go up a little. The underlying problem of poor land-use planning and a me-first psychology is completely untouched, and it will just as likely show up as a symptom at the next intersection. Well, the people got what they asked for, even if it wasn’t what they needed. If they can’t make good use of it, it’s their own fault.

Goldilocks is a well-established design engineer with a reputation of being able to do good work that seems to meet the Sustainability Metrics that have been developed in the various industries she is involved in.  3 clients come to her:  TerraVicit mining company, the City of Geopolis, and WE-R-GUD architects.

The first has a problem – their canaries keep dying, and government regulations require that if the canary dies, they have to clear out the mine, at a cost of about $20,000 (unproductive workers, paperwork, overtime to meet deliverable, etc).  So they ask Goldilocks for the cheapest way of ensuring their canary doesn’t die.  She provides a fairly simple protocol: feed the birds, swap them out every week, use only young birds, set up a breeding program for durable birds, and pipe them fresh air.  Everyone goes away happy.  Because there was only 1 indicator, she designed for that indicator specifically.

Geopolis has a very well established program to be a Sustainable Community.  They have adopted a set of 64 indicators as their way of ensuring their taxpayers are getting quality of life from their efforts – these include the number of kids graduating high school with an ‘A’, and the number of low birthweight babies.  They ask Goldilocks to design a high speed rail system that can be shown to provide a maximal benefit to the community.   Her latest progress report suggests she should be able to finish the preliminary design work in 2046.  She is currently undertaking the research project that will determine, based on communities in Brussels, Munich, Tokyo, Adelaide, and Buenos Aries, what the impact that terminal location has on high school performance and birth weights.  She then has to make a subjective judgment about whether the data collected in those communities will have any reflection on Geopolis.  Good thing the budget and completion date were both set completely open-ended.

And her third client, the architect, has assembled an ideal set of indicators of building performance and human wellbeing.  They have a total of 7, each of which is relatively simple to gather existing data, to make projections with based on different scenarios, and are sensitive to design changes.  She’s been asked to make sure the design is producing an optimal solution to their problem statement (which is, of course, very well written).  Let’s say for argument’s sake that one of them is net rate of return on investment (which has been weighted for different possible future economic conditions), and another is employee satisfaction (measured in some equally clever way).  She is now tasked with making subjective judgments about how to trade off ROI against employee satisfaction.  Alternative 1 will cost 4% more than alternative 2, but the employee satisfaction will go up ‘a lot’.  How to balance..?  So, of course, since she did this on a day where she was feeling particularly socialist, employee satisfaction won out, and everyone was happy. She’s got a good reputation, after all, and she intends to keep it.