ES&T
GUEST EDITORIAL Design for sustainability and survivability In the U.S. in 1972, we consumed roughly 115 pounds per person per day of virgin raw materials to sustain our life-styles. This figure is expected to grow substantially by the year 2000. Meanwhile developing countries that increasingly hold the "resource cards" upon which we grow more dependent with each passing year, consume but a tiny fraction of the earth's resource base. Economic processes whereby we convert resources into a high material standard of living are basically entropie in the sense that we extract high quality (low entropy), nonrenewable resources from nature and diffuse them in extraction, production, consumption, and disposal into irretrievable waste products (high entropy) in the air, water, and land. Developing countries seek to emulate our model—to aim toward our 115 pounds per capita per day as the model of the "good life." Or should we say "goods life"? As we in the U.S. feel threatened by our growing import dependency, we prepare and arm ourselves to protect "our interests" with military muscle. Gross disparities between "developed" and "developing" countries are the seeds of future holocausts unless we find ways to develop models less consumptive than contemporary ones—models with a dimension of justice and ethical stewardship for the resources and ecology of earth. We in the developed world have a moral responsibility to create new modes of sustaining ourselves and to be better models for developing countries to emulate. Some models of sustainability and survivability in the technical-economic domain include technology and systems designed to be less energy consumptive; to use less material; to have greater durability, reduced wear, less corrosion etc.; to be more easily repairable; to be more easily adapted for alternative use after primary design use has been fulfilled; to be more easily remanufacturable; and to be more easily and efficiently recycled to basic materials. Why is it so difficult for the above design criteria to become dominant ones in our contemporary period of great change? The answer lies in part in the inertias of our political-economic-ethical ideologies. Dominant philosophies associated with root values in our 0013-936X/82/0916-0317A$01.25/0
society were taken from 17th-, 18th-and 19th-century thinkers and writers such as John Locke ( 1632-1704), who gave us a political philosophy of liberty; Adam Smith (1723-1790), a laissez faire economic philosophy; and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a utilitarian ethical philosophy. These men were excited and influenced by the emerging science and technology of their day. Their views were critical reactions against the entrenched institutions and vested interests of the old feudal society that was breaking up around them. Their world was one of small world populations. Enterprises were small and not deeply interconnected. Resources in the new world seemed limitless. Ecological consequences of technological applications could be ignored because the scale and magnitude of implementation was small, and nature's resiliency was not seriously disturbed. None of their realities correspond with ours at the end of the 20th century. And yet the values we took from them still course strongly through our national veins. John Locke, in his book "The Second Treatise of Government" (1690) in a discussion of property, said that a man's labor belongs to him, and that whatever a man took from nature and mixed with his labor became his property. However, he also said that this is fine and good ". . . at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others." We now live in a world where there is not enough and as good left in common for others. Thus we need to seek more sustainable and survivable modes of existence.
© 1982 American Chemical Society
Chuck Overby is a professor in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. A special interest of his lies in the area of "Engineering and Public Policy." Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 16, No. 6, 1982
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