My Path to Envisioning a Sustainable World

Before 2016, I was in a technical and engineering career-focused bubble. I was working as a structural engineer designing residential and commercial projects in Austin, Texas. The process was to take the architect's vision and build the foundations and structure to support what they had created. The architect was the artist, the visionary, the innovator. I was the scientist, the technical support, the calculating engineer that brought their artistic vision to life. I never once thought about the ecological impact of the projects I worked on. Why should I? My job is to calculate, test, design, and model structural systems. Let the creatives worry about our world and our future generations. To my scientific mind, those issues seemed distant and far off. 

In 2016, I started working for a construction product company that made their money off of using words like "innovative" and "sustainable." I soon found myself at sales presentations parroting the same "innovative" and" sustainable" jargon with little awareness as to what those words meant. I was using "fluffy" words that resonated with the audience in the hopes of selling a product to the construction industry. 

I was good at it. I am good at it. I love people, and I love communications, so engineering sales became a natural fit for my personality. Suddenly, I was the creator. I was the visionary, and my job was to sell you my company's vision. Keep in mind, I am a trained and licensed professional engineer. I am a critical thinker, a calculator, a strategist. I am technical, so I want ALL the information. I have never been particularly good at taking things at face value, and I prefer to do my own research and verify the information that I am provided. The devil is always in the details. 

So, I started researching our products, our environmental footprint, and our practices. I started looking at our raw materials, our supply chain, and our end of life or decommissioning. What I found was an industry that wanted to make a difference but came up short. And not just that industry, I saw this pattern repeated across the entire A/E/C environment. I saw a huge opportunity to improve our practices, to be better stewards of our environment. I caught the sustainability bug big time. 

Since then, I have spent years building and growing my Sustainable Development muscles. I have visited countless websites, read numerous articles, and attended trainings, but only one resource has provided clear and concise directions on how to reach my sustainability goals. 

The Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure is where I decided to start my journey towards becoming a Sustainable Development Professional. I began by learning about the Envision™ framework and testing to receive my ENV SP credential. 

Envision™ is the product of a collaboration between Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), which was founded by three national engineering associations: the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), and American Public Works Association (APWA), and the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. With these well-known organizations supporting Envision, I felt confident in adopting these tenets as a basis for my Sustainable Development profession.

What I like most about the Envision sustainable infrastructure rating system is that it's comprehensive. The framework is comprised of 60 criteria that encompass the full range of environmental, social, and economic impacts that should be assessed to determine how a project has incorporated sustainability. These 60 sustainability criteria, called 'credits,' are arranged in five categories: Quality of Life, Leadership, Resource Allocation, Natural World, and Climate and Risk. 

The Envision sustainable infrastructure rating system helps infrastructure owners and designers meet sustainability goals and address projects' lifecycle economic, social, and environmental aspects. This tool can be used to guide decisions about the investment of scarce resources and to address community and environmental priorities on all types of civil infrastructure.

Thanks to Envision, we now have the opportunity to design and build infrastructure systems in a way that will promote sustainability and resilience far more effectively than has been done in the past.

The future generations of consumers, citizens, government agencies, and engineers are going to demand infrastructure Resilience AND Sustainability in the coming decades. 

We can either get on board or get left behind.

It is time to Sustain It or Explain It.

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