Sustainability: The View from a Practitioner's Perspective

This paper summarizes the author's keynote address to a workshop on sustainability and design education held at Harvey Mudd College in May 2009. The remarks draw upon the author's experience applying sustainable design to buildings and communities over the past thirty years of professional engineering practice. Key points include: the need to include 'right brain' concepts into the study of sustainability; the opportunities for increasing sustainable impacts at a community scale (rather than a single building); the need to incorporate holistic 'closed loop' thinking into sustainable design solutions; and the need to provide today's engineering students with tools and concepts that will enable them to expand the application of sustainability.