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Sustainable engineering education in the United States

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  • Education for sustainable development
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Abstract

Sustainable engineering is a conceptual and practical challenge to all engineering disciplines. Although the profession has experience with environmental dimensions of engineering activities that in some cases are quite deep, extending the existing body of practice to sustainable engineering by including social and cultural domains is a significant and non-trivial challenge. Nonetheless, progress is being made, as a recent study undertaken by the Center for Sustainable Engineering in the United States demonstrates.

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Notes

  1. The phrase arises from the famous essay by C. Snow (1959) entitled "The Two Cultures" where he analyzed the cultural differences between the social sciences and the physical sciences.

  2. These numbers were cited in the 2007 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm done by a committee of the US national academies, which were in turn drawn from Chinese and Indian government figures. They have been criticized, in part because the US appears to define engineering graduates differently than either China or India for statistical purposes.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by EPA grant no. X3-83235101-0 and NSF grant no. 0442618.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Brad Allenby

  2. Center for Energy and Environmental Resources, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

    Cynthia Folsom Murphy

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

    David Allen

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

    Cliff Davidson

Authors
  1. Brad Allenby
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  2. Cynthia Folsom Murphy
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  3. David Allen
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  4. Cliff Davidson
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Correspondence to Brad Allenby.

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Allenby, B., Murphy, C.F., Allen, D. et al. Sustainable engineering education in the United States. Sustain Sci 4, 7–15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-009-0065-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-009-0065-5

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