Sustainability involves a systems approach. By exploring the inputs and outputs of energy and resources, we will ask broad questions: How do we measure production and consumption? How do geographical and socio-economic environments affect these things? How do we go beyond traditional measurements to quantify more comprehensive impacts and life-cycles? Answering these larger questions begins on a smaller, very specific, and personal scale: Where you live, and how you live. By examining and measuring resource use (including electricity, water and sewage, garbage and recycling, energy use, and transportation), we trace inputs and outputs to their source/destination, and begin to unravel and understand the complex web of production, distribution, delivery, and environmental consequences. We will investigate how these metrics change due to location and societal practices, as well as changes created through conservation and public policy. Eventually, it is the aim of this course to also reflect, at cultural and philosophical levels, on our energy/resource usage and underlying causalities thereof. 

Instructor(s)

• R. Ward Allebach