A seminar delivered to the Ecological Science and Engineering graduate program at Purdue University in Oct 2013, this set of slides shows the evolution of environmental thinking that resulted in sustainability, and presages the next wave called "resilience."

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

2. Cuyahoga River
Cleveland OH
1952 & 1969

3. Love Canal
NY, 1978

7. 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)

9. Sustainability is the ethical concept that things should be
better in the future than they are now.

12. Sustainability
requires
making valueladen choices.

14. FRAGILE
ROBUST
?
ANTI-FRAGILE

15. Number of disasters
each year increasing.
Financial losses from
these disasters also
increasing each year.

18. Google Ngram “resilience”

20. 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.

22. Google Ngram: “risk_NOUN, risk_VERB”

24. 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.

27. This 2009 report from the NRC
emphasizes integration of risk
analysis research with scoping and
problem formulation

28. In 2009, the Science & Decisions book
envisioned an expanded scope of relevant
information and a less linear flow.

29. 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.

30. new system stresses are
incorporated into current
understanding.
foresee possibilities
Resilience is better
understood as a series
of interacting processes
than a property of state.
More like a verb, and
less like a noun.
Learning is the process
by which new
knowledge
is created and
maintained by
observation of past
actions
response taken
after information
from sensing and
anticipation are
incorporated into
understanding.

32. from fail-safe to safe-fail
from reduction to incompleteness
from definition to ambiguity
from reliability to recovery
from centralized to distributed
from probabilistic to possibilistic
from specification to emergence