GUEST EDITORIAL
Social Implications of Pursuing Sustainability
W
hat happens when engineers start taking sustainability seriously? We devoted several scorching days in Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A., to this question in May 2009 at the IEEE-SSIT International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS’09), and the papers in this Special Issue reflect some of that work. The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology teamed up with the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Sustainable Systems and Technology to organize this event, subtitled “Social Implications of Sustainable Development.” The impetus came partly from the top – the IEEE president sought advice about how to engage constructively – but in fact many of us in SSIT were already thinking about these topics and seized the opportunity. The sustainability space is crowded but has embarrassing empty patches. Academics have thoroughly parsed the ethics of intergenerational equity but society has not internalized new norms. Corporations talk about the triple bottom line of economic, environmental, and social progress but, as environmental award winner BP demonstrates, actual progress is halting. Individuals say they want to be green consumers but not enough of us behave that way. Even experts can’t always discern which alternative is more sustainable. Sustainability advocates often adopt an anti-technology perspective because unpleasant surprises accompany so many new products. Thus we come to the most important gap in the sustainability discourse. We cannot solve problems such as climate change and toxification only by changing con-
CLINTON J. ANDREWS
sumer behavior. We also need to invent and deploy new energy sources, materials, processes, and products – but first we need to rehabilitate the technical fix. How can we channel the creative efforts of engineers toward more sustainable solutions, while also ensuring that we anticipate and avoid the worst unintended consequences? Such innovations have a systemic context that causes some impacts to emerge in unexpected and often very distant places. Given our tightly interconnected world, achieving sustainability is very much a systems problem. The authors included in this special issue examine several aspects of the sustainable systems problem. Robbins summarizes current concerns from a technological pessimist’s point of view. Mattick, Williams, and Allenby place current concerns in historical context and find greater optimism. Oram frames the ethical questions facing designers. Dempere shows how to influence future designers by incorporating sustainability concerns into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Matsuura, Shiroyama, and Suzuki demonstrate how to bring a wider set of perspectives to the development of public policies for stimulating technological innovation. Matsumoto, Nakamura, and Takenaka clarify how producers and consumers interact to determine the viability of more sustainable, secondary product markets. As a group, these papers help us to think through the social implications of pursuing sustainable systems and technology, but it is up to you to carry the conversation forward. Please share your thoughts using the IEEE-SSIT on-line Forum available through ieeessit.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2010.938109
Clinton J. Andrews is at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. Email:
[email protected]. IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE
|
FALL 2010
1932-4529/10/$26.00©2010IEEE
|
13
