This was borne out of the idea that we need to do a better job at protecting our natural environments; simply exploiting them for economic gain was going to mean the earth’s eventual ruin. John Elkington coined the phrase in 1992 in his book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

We can weigh the economic profits against the environmental and societal costs and truly capture the costs and benefits of the things we do

Lately I have been doing a lot of research around triple bottom line accounting. I’ve noticed that recently we have done a much better job at capturing the environmental costs and benefits and incorporating this into the total cost of new projects.

What about the third pillar? The costs to society? What is there is a benefit to society?

While working on a paper this really struck a chord with me. I was looking at the life cycle cost of a lift at a snow resort when it consumes electricity from the conventional grid compared to when it consumes wind-generated energy. I had focused much of my analysis around the environmental benefits of using wind-generated electricity, the environmental costs of conventional energy and the economic cost to install a turbine and use conventional energy. But I hadn’t thought about the social cost of installing a wind turbine at a ski resort of the social benefits of a snow resort.

With limited time to complete my paper I had to concede and look at the societal costs qualitatively, while evaluating the economic and environmental costs qualitatively. But it really got me thinking about how we neglect these ‘societal’ costs sometimes. Moving forward my personal goal is to think more about the societal costs when I evaluate something, which I think overall we can all do a little more of.

After all to be truly sustainable there must be balance between all three.

What about turning your car off while you’re waiting for the train to pass?

I had the opportunity to live in Switzerland for a summer and I was always amazed at how environmentally conscious the Swiss were. Get to a red light, turn your car off. Get to a rail crossing, turn your car off. No matter what the idling circumstance they always turned their car off. How come Canadian’s can’t adopt the same habits?

Congestion costs Toronto $2.2 BILLION per year

Congestion in Toronto is almost unbearable at times. It is not only the highways that are congested it is the city streets. And much of that congestion leads to idling – where you sit in your car and go no where. Unfortunately it is somewhat unreasonable to turn your car off on the highway, wait ten minutes and then drive again. The idling I’m referring to is when you’re waiting for a friend, picking something up, dropping something off, etc … or waiting for a train!

In Toronto there is a by-law that prohibits idling. If your car is sitting still for more than 3 minutes out of every 60 minutes than you could be charged with idling.

Of course there are those people that believe that idling is necessary. There are individuals who believe that you need to warm your car up for at least 10 minutes on a cold day. Modern technology and modern cars actually only need 30 seconds to warm up. Or the individuals that believe that is uses more gas when you stop and start the car. The reality is that you use more gas when you idle for more than 10 seconds. More on these myths can be found here.

In the end the message really is to turn your car off whenever you can. Perhaps in the future Toronto will have a fourth colour to the traffic lights, so we can turn our vehicles off and turn them back on when it is our time to drive again.

Vanderburg today regressed and went from modern society and talked about life pre-industrial revolution. We learned everything, language, beliefs, politics, economics, culture from our ancestors; what he calls the culture-based connectiveness.

We went all the way back and thought of society in terms of babies. We were asked to think about how they learn. And as most people know, babies are like little sponges. They absorb everything in their surroundings. He described learning through the five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste and touch) and gave us many examples using sight (and as he said how ironic considering Vanderburg is blind). He did say that we learn by focusing. When we are born we can only see blurry images but we see these blurrs that bring us food, give us hugs, keep us clean, etc and we want to focus on seeing them. Therefore we learn to focus our vision to see that individual and as we progress we learn to see different emotions and by focusing, again, we learn to understand them.

As we grow up we learn to focus and to understand, however, as we are learning we are always relating everything new to everything we already understand. Because this is an engineering course he did relate it to a line of best fit or trend line. This relation of everything to everything else is what he calls the metaconscienceness; we have memories that we have access to and they help us to interpret what we are seeing by we cannot draw directly on these memories.

We did not really get into how this relates to technology-based connectiveness, that’s for next week. I can only imagine how are brain-mind map (or the culture-based connectivess) works in conjunction with the technology-based connectivess.

Dr. Vanderburg promptly arrived in class this week and got right into the thick of things. Our class size was about half of last week, but it is a keen group of individuals interested in being part of the sustainable discussion.

His lecture was based on chapter 1 of his book, Living in the Labyrinth of Technology. The focus of the lecture was Connectiveness, from Biology-based to Technology-based over to Culture-based connectiveness. We didn’t really dive into biology-based connectiveness but focused in on the other two.

Technology vs Culture

What does this connectiveness mean?

Let’s start with Technology. All of technology requires a through-put of energy. This in turn requires both direct and indirect inputs. Eventually as you trace the production of a good or service it will cross the biosphere-society boundary and connect us back to our natural environment.  Culture-based connectiveness ties us together through symbolization; the human brain relates everything to everything else.

Prior to the industrial world we were a culture-based society. We learned what our ancestors learned and followed in their footsteps. We followed their religion, their language their belief.

And then Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and everything changed. Agreed I have over-simplified things here a lot but the notion of the technical division of labour changed everything,

We went from a culture-based society to a technology-based society.

We became a society craving higher income and more consumer goods to purchase with our new wealth. Skills became mechanized and simple and people started designing machines to do human jobs. Our society went from depending on what our ancestors had known to challenging the limits of science.

With this desire for new technology came the degradation to our environment. It was around 200 years ago that we began to ‘industrialize’ around that same time, Vanderburg explained, the world average temperature began to rise.

My first class, titled above, is taught by Professor W.H. Vanderburg. His passion’s lie in the study of technology, society, biosphere interactions and its application to the development of preventive approaches for the engineering, management and regulation of modern technology.

The theme that echoed through the introduction of this course was

Although we may all be experts in one area only collectively can we solve the problem of sustainability

Professor Vanderburg highlighted that there are always consequences to our actions (i.e. planing a new subdivision creates congestion, drainage issues, etc) and that if we employ experts in those fields (i.e individuals who specialize in public transportation, waste-water management, renewable fuels, etc) than we can find a sustainable long-term solution to building new subdvisions.