Sustainable Engineering Education: Translating Myth to Mechanism

Abstract

The path towards sustainable engineering education is evident, but not trivial. It requires that engineering professors recognize and be able to communicate the mythic nature of the sustainability discourse, and from there create mechanisms that can be understood by their students that translate the precatory language of sustainability into useful input. Continued expansion of industrial ecology methods to include cultural and social considerations, and practice in reducing complex states to quantitative inputs into engineering methodologies, offers one such route. But the engineering education community will also need to revisit its current structure with a view towards principled reform. In particular, the slow progress towards recognition of the masters as the professional level degree should be accelerated by those interested in being able to teach sustainable engineering, and courses which emphasize the quadruple bottom line context within which much modern engineering must be done will need to be developed. Beyond that, especially given the rapid rates of change of technology systems, and the social, economic and environmental systems coupled to them, explicit lifetime learning structures for engineers, and for engineering professors, need to be developed and institutionalized. Taken as a whole, this suggests that expectations of quick fixes through incremental improvements are too optimistic, and that achieving an educational structure that produces professionals skilled in sustainable engineering will require decades of hard work and continued intellectual exploration.