(139a) Time for a Paradigm Shift: Toward an Engineering that Accounts for People and the Planet

Engineering has made tremendous contributions to enhancing human well-being, but it has also contributed to the degradation of ecosystems that are essential for sustaining our well-being. For the last few centuries, engineering has developed with a paradigm that ignores the role of ecosystems and the behavior of people. With this paradigm, engineering aims to dominate nature, and considers ecosystems to be an infinite source and sink. Engineering also usually assumes that improvements in technological efficiency will translate into societal benefits. It does not consider the fact that efficiency may encourage consumption that may nullify the societal benefits of greater efficiency. This talk will argue that the current paradigm of engineering is a barrier to its sustainability. Therefore, for engineering to make positive contributions to sustainable development, its paradigm needs to shift toward explicitly accounting for the role of people and the planet. Rather than trying to dominate nature, engineering needs to learn from it, account for its role, and respect its limits. Rather than assuming full adoption and proper use of technologies, engineering needs to consider how the behavior of individuals and markets will determine the overall impact of the technology. Such a paradigm shift requires expansion of the engineering boundary to include ecological and economic systems. Sustainable engineering brings together industrial ecology, sustainability science, and systems engineering, and is well-suited to meeting this challenge. Recent work is showing how this paradigm shift can result in innovative solutions that can often improve profit, environmental quality, and human well-being. It presents many challenges and opportunities to chemical engineers for transdisciplinary work toward sustainable development.