Mixing Engineering with Sustainability: A good idea?
Why should engineers even care about sustainability? Because they have a lot of power (no pun intended).
If you look at the inventions of the past 300 years, it is obvious that engineers often are the catalysts of something big. Let's take the steam engine, it was the key "enabling technology" for the industrial revolution. And things started getting really fast from then on. Without trains I wouldn't be able to go to work. Without airplanes I probably would take weeks or months to visit my parents in Asia (they probably wouldn't have met). Without computer chips I wouldn't be writing this blog. Without cell phones I wouldn't be annoyed by the 16-year-olds in the trains who can't get enough of listening to Justin Timberlake on their 1-inch screen with crappy sound quality (we're very, very sorry for that invention... really).
Now on to nuclear technology. Most people will associate it with something bad directly, and almost everyone will have a strong opinion. But nuclear energy is a great example of how one type of technology can be used and misused. Many will think of the atomic bomb. Some will think of nuclear energy. But did you know that you can use nuclear energy for fighting malaria? Did you know that the gamma radiography is a method of using nuclear technology for quality control? Among others, J. Neirynck, a french engineer, wrote in his (a bit provocative) book that there is no good or bad technology, it's how you apply the technology (the book's translation to english would be "The Divine Engineer").
Whereas nuclear technology was a somewhat "focused" problem, today the challenges faced by engineers are getting more complex and interconnected. One good example is climate change, where it's not just "cars are the problem" or "your house is using energy so inefficiently", but it's a whole list of things that need to be done. And while for decades nuclear energy and bombs have been the deciding factor in the DoomsDay Clock, for the first time environmental degradation moved the clock's time closer to midnight; 5 minutes to 12 to be exact (the symbolic meaning of midnight being, uhm, how do you call it, uhm... oh, yeah: THE END OF THE WORLD!!).
So, with the world being at a state as it is, it seems now more than ever we need responsible engineers. So, to paraphrase from the inspiring new economics foundation (creator of the "Happy Planet Index"), we need "engineering as if people and the planet mattered".
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