Earth systems engineering management: human behavior, technology and sustainability [An article from: Resources, Conservation & Recycling]

This digital document is a journal article from Resources, Conservation & Recycling, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper describes a framework for collaboration on environmental thinking and management, including three types of multi-disciplinary trading zones and three types of shared expertise. Getting agreement among multiple stakeholders requires the exercise of moral imagination, which involves:*Perceiving one's own mental model of a system, both as it exists (descriptive) and as one would like it to be (normative). *Comparing different mental models across expertises and stakeholder interests. *Generating and evaluating alternatives that would facilitate a transition from descriptive to normative scenarios. This framework is applied to genetically-modified organisms and to the development of an environmentally-intelligent textile. The article concludes with a discussion of Earth Systems Engineering Management (ESEM), which represents a novel, interdisciplinary approach to working with complex, integrated human/natural systems. Increasingly, such systems involve close coupling among environmental, social and technological elements. Such systems are not entirely predictable. ESEM calls for:*Systems thinking that sees the interaction between parts of system and avoids problems like optimizing one part of a system at the expense of the whole. *The use of reversible technologies that can be reconfigured based on results from: *Close monitoring of systems interactions-including dialogue with multiple experts and stakeholders. To succeed, ESEM will have to offer more than a framework for thinking about complex human/natural systems-it will have to adapt or evolve a set of tools that facilitate collaborative monitoring and management.