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A Pluralistic Understanding of Sustainable Engineering Science

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A Pluralistic Understanding of Sustainable Engineering Science Thomas P. Seager Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment Arizona State University Donora PA, 1948
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A Pluralistic Understanding of Sustainable

Engineering Science

Thomas P. Seager

Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment

Arizona State University

Donora PA, 1948

Cuyahoga River

Cleveland OH

1952 & 1969

Love Canal

NY, 1978

Sustainability is an

essentially contested concept.

dogmatism (“My answer is right and all others are wrong”),

scepticism (“All answers are equally true (or false); everyone has a right to

his own truth”), and eclecticism (“Each meaning gives a partial view so the

more meanings the better”)

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a

concept (e.g., "fairness"), but not on the best realization thereof.[4]

(wikipedia.org)

Sustainability is the ethical concept that things should be

better in the future than they are now.

Sustainability

requires

making value-

laden choices.

FRAGILE ROBUST ANTI-FRAGILE?

Number of disasters

each year increasing.

Financial losses from

these disasters also

increasing each year.

Google Ngram “resilience”

As defined in this report, resilience is the

ability to prepare and plan

for, absorb, recover from and more

successfully adapt to adverse events.

Enhanced resilience allows better

anticipation of disasters and better

planning to reduce disaster losses—rather

than waiting for an event to occur and

paying for it afterward.

Inherent in building the culture of resilience

is the ability to incorporate scientific

information, data, and observing systems

to ensure the availability of reliable

information, decision support tools, and

data sources to decision makers.

Google Ngram: “risk_NOUN, risk_VERB”

In 1983 the „Red Book‟ envisioned research, risk assessment, and

risk management as separate activities, with a one-way flow of

information from research through assessment to management.

This 2009 report from the NRC

emphasizes integration of risk

analysis research with scoping and

problem formulation

In 2009, the Science & Decisions book

envisioned an expanded scope of relevant

information and a less linear flow.

However, Science & Decisions

structures only risk-analytic aspects of

risk management, not decision

analytic. Information feedback loops

from decision-makers are still

inadequate to effective implement a

research strategy.

Note that in the VOI box at

left, information flows in, but never

flows out. Consequently, research

strategy is never fully informed by

decision priorities.

Resilience is better

understood as a series

of interacting processes

than a property of state.

More like a verb, and

less like a noun.

new system stresses are

incorporated into current

understanding.

foresee possibilities

response taken

after information

from sensing and

anticipation are

incorporated into

understanding.

Learning is the process

by which new

knowledge

is created and

maintained by

observation of past

actions

from fail-safe to safe-fail

from reduction to incompleteness

from definition to ambiguity

from specification to emergence

from reliability to recovery

from centralized to distributed

from probabilistic to possibilistic


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