Sustainability: Thick or Thin?

As you look ahead for ways to expand your project management skills and knowledge, put learning about sustainability at the top of your list. First of all, you need to figure out where you and your organization stand on questions of sustainability. These days, organizations like to make big claims about their commitment to preserving natural resources, but in reality, their efforts often amount to little more than earnest public relations campaigns. In fact, they have no real interest in overturning the dominant paradigm, which sees the natural world solely as a supply of resources for human use.

To come to terms with your ideas on sustainability, you need to understand your personal definition of the kind of value you want to create as an engineer. In his book The New Capitalist Manifesto, Umair Haque introduced the idea of thin and thick value. Thin value is consumerist (think McMansions and Hummers); often generated "through harm to or at the expense of people, communities, or society"; unsustainable because it is created with no regard to the environment; and, according to Haque, ultimately meaningless because "it often fails to make people, communities, and society durably better off in the ways that matter to them most". By contrast, thick value is everything thin value is not. It is sustainable and meaningful over the long term, helping support communities and preserving the environment while allowing a business to generate a profit. Haque points to companies like Wal-Mart, Nike, and Starbucks as examples of thick-value enterprises.

But let's assume you and your organization share a very real commitment to sustainability. You still need to figure out the limits of your commitment in the face of financial realities. As a way of assessing individual or organizational approaches to sustainability, Robert O. Vos reinterpreted Haque's ideas, defining thin and thick versions of sustainability. Thin sustainability views financial capital and natural capital (that is, natural resources) as equally important. It seeks "to ensure that the overall value of natural and financial capital must be undiminished for future generations, even if the mix of the two is allowed to change". It assumes that "economic growth is highly desirable and has infinite potential; growth is assumed to occur due to the capacity of technology, through human ingenuity, to make more with less and…to make substitutes for destroyed natural capital". In other words, thin sustainability is buoyed by a faith in the power of technology to make up for the damage humans inflict on the environment.

Thick sustainability takes a harder line, viewing any diminution of natural capital as unacceptable. Thick versions of sustainability look to redefine "how we measure economic growth; they may look to see reductions in growth rate or even reductions in the size of the economy. To mitigate this definition, thicker versions of sustainability often differentiate between growth and development. The focus here is on new ways of measuring the quality of life or of products, rather than as monetary values of economic output".

So where do you stand on the thin/thick spectrum? And how about your organization? As you work to develop your personal project management maturity, you'll need to think long and hard about these questions. To learn more, you can start by reading Becoming Part of the Solution: The Engineers Guide to Sustainable Development, by Bill Wallace. He encourages engineers to radically transform the way they work:

Instead of finding ways to extract resources faster, we can be inventing and applying new technologies that use less material and energy. Instead of finding ways to sell more products, we can help clients get more service per unit of product. We can find ways to use natural systems to serve our needs for lighting, heating, and cooling. We can design buildings and other structures for flexibility in use, reuse, and recyclability, thereby reducing life cycle costs.

Pursuing this course will bring about new engineering challenges, challenges that will force us to work smarter and call upon a broad set of skills and resources. These are the sorts of challenges that can attract young people into engineering, showing them how they can apply what they learn to make a difference in the world instead of following old and discouraging pathways.


Communicating Your Vision of Sustainability

The ability to communicate effectively is essential in every part of an engineer's job. But it is especially important in sustainable endeavors, which typically require a great deal of interaction between an organization and the general public. Such projects often hinge on the ability to get a wide array of stakeholders on board. Job one, then, is explaining exactly how your project will help society and protect the environment.

Michael Mucha, Chief Engineer and Director for the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District, and the current Chair for ASCE's Committee on Sustainability, points out that Envision, a sustainability rating system for civil infrastructure, factors communication into its calculations:

Whereas LEED is a sustainability rating system for habitable, vertical infrastructure. Envision is a rating system for horizontal, non-habitable infrastructure, like roads, wetlands restorations, airports, and water treatment facilities. It's a way to evaluate how sustainable a project is. One measure for the Envision rating is how well you communicate with the public about the project. That illustrates the importance of communication in sustainable engineering.