INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY - Inventing for the Environment - page 366

humans engineer—the Earth?” Though industrial ecology may be able to
help understand what is possible within technological, population, and eco-
nomic constraints, institutions and values must determine the answer to that
question.What could be is a question, at least in part, for industrial ecology;
what should be is one for religion and society. The need for serious theo-
logical, ethical, and moral dialog in this area is emphasized by the problem
that choice at the level of the individual may not be relevant. In fact, the
choice of path might be made by institutions at a relatively high hierarchi-
cal level in the system, or determined by systems dynamics arising from the
interactions of science and technology; natural, institutional, and cultural
systems; and national states in ways which we are not yet capable of mod-
eling or understanding. 37 Thus, for example, no individual seems to be
choosing the “barricade” sustainable world mentioned earlier, yet many
trends (e.g., increasing inequality within and among countries) seem to be
heading in that direction.
This, then, is a significant barrier to any substantial implementation of
Earth Systems Engineering. The moral structure that is required if such
activities are to become widespread is at a very primitive stage of develop-
ment.The social acceptance of the assumption of such power by any exist-
ing institution, private or public, is likely to be minimal for a long
time—and justifiably so, until the necessary competencies are developed.
(As figure 1 illustrates, all three components—institutional, ethical, and
knowledge base—need to evolve to support progress toward sustainability.)
Moreover, it is not apparent where leadership in this dimension will come
from. This does not mean that individual projects cannot go forward, par-
ticularly where they can be done in line with the guiding principles dis-
cussed below and where the perturbation to be addressed is immediate,
difficult to reverse, and extensive in time and space. But it is cautionary:
technologists sometimes assume technical solutions to problems that have
substantial ethical and cultural dimensions, and such solutions often fail. 38
Particularly where, as here, the “ethical infrastructure” is weak, special atten-
tion to the non-technical aspects of such projects is crucial.
PRINCIPLES OF EARTH SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
Just as it was possible to develop principles of industrial ecology applicable
to manufacturing activity (and other bounded economic activities), it is
possible to develop principles of Earth Systems Engineering that form an