Thoughts on industrial ecology, emerging technologies, and sustainability science

Abstract

For anyone with an interest in social science, the evolution of the field of industrial ecology (IE) was fascinating not just substantively, but also socially and institutionally. Establishing an IE journal of record, for example, did not just help institutionalize ‘‘industrial ecology’’ as a legitimate field of study. It also necessarily raised a number of important questions. What articles are appropriate for such a journal; more broadly, what are the appropriate boundaries of IE? How does IE relate to other areas of study, such as life cycle assessment and ecological economics, whose boundaries are also somewhat unclear? Is IE primarily an engineering and scientific field, or should it include social science? More basically, perhaps, should IE be valued because it provides greater objective understanding of complicated industrial/environmental systems, or only in as much as it supports environmental (and, subsequently, sustainability) advocacy? Obviously, such questions have important methodological implications: should an IE study use the sort of quantitative, structured methods characteristic of engineering or scientific investigation, or should it rely on the more qualitative, even emotional, forms of analysis characteristic of the social sciences and environmental activism? They also have important social and community dimensions: who should be allowed to be part of the IE community, and consider themselves an industrial ecologist—and, therefore, get to publish in the journals, and attend the conferences, and use the academic infrastructures, and the employment and funding networks, which IE was building? These questions, decades old, still remain difficult for many in IE. These sorts of concerns also swirl around sustainability science, where they are, perhaps, even more vexed. Partially, this is because IE still focuses primarily on environmental issues, which are reasonably amenable to explication and even quantification, while sustainability science takes on the added challenge of working with social and cultural issues. This may appear to be a relatively small step, but it is, in actuality, huge, because many social issues are irreducibly normative. The methodological implications for sustainability science are also profound. For the sorts of issues IE addresses, objective heuristics (e.g., less use of toxics, increased energy efficiency) may often be available; there are, however, no heuristics that are not inevitably normative that can capture the social and cultural implications of most products for society. Moreover, unlike IE, sustainability science must, at some point, grapple with the unpredictability and uncertainty inherent in many of the complex integrated human/built/natural systems that characterize the B. Allenby (&) Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: Braden.Allenby@asu.edu 1 For a longer discussion of these issues, see Allenby (2006).