Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
however, it is important to note that the study of industrial ecology alone
is not sufficient to support the achievement of the vision of sustainable
development, which is heavily normative. Rather, progress toward any
desirable sustainable world requires concurrent evolution in ethics and
institutions. In part, this is because any global sustainable state relies on
political, cultural, and religious systems for its definition and achievement.
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Industrial ecology, on the other hand, is an objective field of study, relying
on traditional scientific, engineering, and other disciplinary research for its
development; it provides scientific and technological understanding, but,
standing alone, it cannot define what is at bottom a values decision about
what kind of world we as humans desire.
The third level, the industrial ecology infrastructure, is society's response
to this question: “Assuming that private and public firms and consumers
can be encouraged to behave in environmentally appropriate ways, what
must the state and society in general provide so that they may do so?” It
thus includes developing and implementing the legal, economic, and other
incentive systems by which desirable behavior can be promoted, as well as
the methodologies, tools, data, and information resources necessary to
define and support such behavior. One example might be the development
of legal structures that promote environmentally appropriate behavior;
another might be the development and diffusion throughout the global
economy of environmentally preferable technologies. Examples of such
policies might be environmentally sensitive government procurement reg-
ulations, military specifications, and military standards; the removal of envi-
ronmentally and economically inefficient subsidies for virgin (as opposed to
recycled) materials; and the removal of energy, transport, agricultural, fish-
ery, and forestry subsidies, which distort production in those sectors in envi-
ronmentally inappropriate ways.
Unlike the first three levels, the fourth level, application to practice, is
concerned primarily with implementation. While the specific activities
undertaken will be different for different firms, different consumers, differ-
ent economic sectors, and different elements of the public, it will for all of
them represent the level of immediate action, based on industrial ecology
principles as currently understood and translated into policy. While still
nascent, such implementation efforts represent important experimentation
activities, and there is a dialog between this level, which plays with indus-
trial ecology principles and theories, and the more theoretical higher levels
of the industrial ecology framework.
