Engineering & Sustainable Development: Can we get there from here?

This presentation will explore the sometimes conflicting role that engineers play with regards to sustainability. By examining the rhetoric that engineers use to describe engineering work and how engineers are expected to address sustainability, we will identify some of the inherent conflicts and challenges that the profession of engineering must overcome. The presentation will also discuss potential changes to the engineering education curriculum that might help shift questions related to sustainability from the purely technical realm to something much broader that includes issues of ethics and social justice