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Session 2561

Sustainable Technology / Development and Challenges to Engineering Education

Richard Barke Georgia Institute of Technology

New ideas may require decades to find mature adoption. The organizations that implement innovations often must undergo painful restructuring before their benefits can be applied in novel and appropriate ways. For the electric dynamo significant productivity gains required as much as forty years, during which old manufacturing systems based on steam and water power had to be discarded and new ways of using electricity in manufacturing were developed (David, 1990).

A lag also appears in the integration of environmental concerns with technological development. Since publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, environmental groups have become political forces, a multitude of environmental laws and regulations have been enacted, and the limits to growth, global warming, and overpopulation have been debated. Yet the relationship between environmental protection and technological change has not matured but remains largely adversarial, with the developers of technology often characterized as willfully negligent about the impacts of their work, treating the environmental and social consequences of technological change as messy, impossible to model, and therefore outside the design considerations of engineers.

Recently the debate about technological development and the environment has been changing. Technological change has not slowed in spite of concerns about its environmental effects and many environmentalists have discarded their calls for an end to development, advocating instead a new type of growth guided by new principles: sustainable development. At the same time, scientists and engineers are recognizing the important relationship between their work and environmental concerns, with sustainable technology emerging as a guiding principle that many hope will permeate engineering.

The objectives of sustainable development and sustainable technology seem to be symbiotic, yet many of the problems of sustainability have their roots in traditional practices of engineering, particularly the short-term maximization of technologically- or market-driven objectives through innovation and increases in the productivity of labor. Engineers have generally practiced and taught under the assumption that engineering solutions are, for them, complete. Concepts such as intergenerational equity, nonmarket public values, and impacts on ecosystems have been treated as exogenous, if at all. If old ways of thinking about engineering

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Barke, R. (2000, June), Sustainable Technology/Development And Challenges To Engineering Education Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8732