Chapter 7 - Social Dimensions of Sustainability and Engineering
Chapter 7 – Social Dimensions of
Sustainability and Engineering
"I believe that we cannot and will not begin to take care of the world until we become whole ourselves" Ehrenfeld [see reference 1]
Introduction
So far the focus of this
module has been on the environmental impacts of human progress, and the
sustainability issued raised by them.
However, it is important to be reminded that an engineer’s duty foremost
is to society, and that engineers can have a part to play in working towards
solutions to social as well as environmental problems. This chapter will firstly outline social
issues firstly related to inequality between nations within the world, and the
associated problems arising from these such as poverty in less economically
developed countries. It will then
explore social issues facing more economically developed countries, before
looking at the links between the two and how globalisation has had a part to
play. Links between climate change,
poverty, globalisation and engineering will then be outlined, before finally
looking at suggestions for how engineering can assist in progressing social
issues towards a more sustainable future.
Dean Hirsch, 2008, the President of World Vision International [see reference 2]
above text sourced from The Open University under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/international-development/international-studies/will-the-poor-be-always-us
Rusty Blazenhoff [see reference 3] Jcandeli [see reference 4]
above image
[left] sourced from The Laughing Squid (Author: JeongMee Yoon) under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License
http://laughingsquid.com/the-pink-blue-project-portraits-of-kids-with-their-pink-blue-objects/
http://faithlikemustard.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/what-does-poverty-look-like/