RIT Symposium Conclusions

May 28, 2008 by Brian Butler | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist, Overview

Environmental managers are evolving to become sustainability managers.

Their analytic perspective needs to move from a risk/hazard mentality to resilience/sustainability mentality.

Current Strategies for Resilience
Business
• Contingency Planning
• Supply Chain Diversity
• Supply Chain Ownership
Environmental
• Source Reduction
• Personal Protection
• Remediation

What is needed is capability to change, adapt, and be flexible to market place, regulatory, and environmental conditions.

We need to move from our current linear system of resource use and production to a network that mimics a natural ecosystem.

 “Industrial symbiosis” is a network in which regional companies can use each other’s material and energy wastes and share resources to achieve higher efficiencies in resource use.

 An “eco-industrial park” is a similar but perhaps broader network concept focusing more on benefiting the communities.

Both build resiliency because the components each become part of the interdependent network and recognize the robustness of maintaining the relationships.

Environmental managers can benefit from the strategy in a variety of ways and it also provides opportunities to simultaneously benefit the business end of the operation.

You can view the symposium powerpoint HERE.

Topic for Discussion

April 24, 2008 by John Morelli and | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist, General

Our moderator for this topic has indicated his preference for a discussion relating to the difference between “resiliency” in engineering and ecosystems, so I think it would be good to work around this. Considering Greg’s questions:
- How does industrial ecology fit with the values of environmental management?
- What are the changing elements related to industrial ecology [...]

Vital Perspectives for Environmental Managers

by John Morelli and AYOUB MOHAMED | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Tom Seager, has just provided this important, hopeful, and encouraging discussion that expands and enriches this topic. Thanks, Tom.
One of the difficulties in environmental management is that the EM is often perceived within the organization as an overhead cost to be minimized, rather than a valuable resource to be maximized. Corporate decision makers engage EM [...]

Discussion Objectives and Intended Outcomes

April 22, 2008 by GREGORY HILTON , NEIL MILLER , Frances and | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

In an attempt to firm up specific discussion objectives and intended outcomes for this discussion topic. I have listed topic questions for the
participants to review and comment on. Please feel free to add and inquire to any of these topic questions.
Importance of Industrial Ecology to the Environmental Manager
1. What are the values that are at [...]

Industrial Ecology: From Theory To Practice

April 18, 2008 by GREGORY HILTON and NEIL MILLER | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Industrial Ecology: From theory To Practice by Steven W. Peck
The author of this article describes the concept of “Dematerializing the Economy” and a path of transformation from Industrial Infrastructure to Eco Industrial Infrastructure. The point where using pollution prevention and sustainable technologies is preferred to remediation and abatement technologies. Several examples of developing industrial ecosystems [...]

Resilience, Adaptability, and Transformability in Social-ecological Systems

April 17, 2008 by GREGORY HILTON | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

I found this article to be relevant to our discussion.
Copyright © 2004 by the author(s). Published here under licence by The Resilience Alliance. Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5 Perspective

Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability [...]

Concepts and Approaches - Jelinski

April 14, 2008 by NEIL MILLER | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Jelinski, L. W.; Gradel, T. E.; Laudise, R. A.; McCall, D. W.; and Patel, C. K. L. Industrial ecology: Concepts and approaches. Introduction to colloquium, entitled, “Industrial Ecology”, National Academy of Sciences, May 1991.
This was an introduction to a Colloquium on the subject of Industrial Ecology (attached) and the need to educate people to become leaders [...]

Definitions of Industrial Ecology

by NEIL MILLER | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

I have mentioned this paper in a previous post, but I believe it is a great resource for the discussion topic.
Here are some selected definitions of Industrial Ecology, which should be able to give someone a good idea of what this topic is all about. The main paper describes the background of industrial ecology, defines [...]

Geoengineering

April 7, 2008 by Frances , NEIL MILLER and GREGORY HILTON | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Braden Allenby, worked at AT&T at the time, is kind of the “father” of industrial ecology. He and T.E. Graedel wrote the first textbook on the topic. Over time though, Allenby’s ideas of what an environmental manager should do evolved into a concept that moved beyond management systems or pollution prevention technologies and [...]

Merger of Environmental and Ecological Sciences

April 4, 2008 by NEIL MILLER , John Morelli and Frances | Filed under: 1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Hello, my name is Neil Miller and I would like to contribute to this EM discussion topic and will be attending the Environmental Management Workshop. I would like to move forward in the discussion and talk about the two paradigms that are associated between the merger of both the environmental and ecological sciences.
“With the [...]

1-The EM as an Industrial Ecologist

Engineering Resilience versus Ecological Resilience
By C. S. HOLLING*

ECOSYSTEM STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

Ecological science has been shaped largely by the biological sciences. Environmental science, on the other hand, has been shaped largely by the physical sciences and engineering. With the beginning of interdisciplinary efforts between the two fields, some of the fundamental differences between them are generating conflicts caused more by misunderstanding of basic concepts than by any difference in social purposes or methods. Those differences are most vivid in that part of ecology called ecosystem science, for it is there that it is obvious that both the biota and the physical environment interact such that not only does the environment shape the biota but the biota transforms the environment. The accumulated body of empirical evidence concerning natural, disturbed, and managed ecosystems identifies key features of ecosystem structure and function (Holling et al., 1995) that probably are not included in many engineers’ image of ecology:

- Ecological change is not continuous and gradual . . .

- Spatial attributes are not uniform or scale invariant . . .

- Ecosystems do not have single equilibria with functions controlled to remain near them . . .
- Policies and management that apply fixed rules for achieving constant yields (such as constant carrying capacity of cattle or wildlife or constant sustainable yield of fish, wood, or water), independent of scale, lead to systems that gradually lose resilience and suddenly break down in the face of disturbances that previously could be absorbed (Holling, 1986) . . .

Ecosystems are moving targets, with multiple potential futures that are uncertain and unpredictable. Therefore management has to be flexible, adaptive, and experimental at scales compatible with the scales of critical ecosystem functions (Walters, 1986). The features described above are the consequence of the stability properties of natural systems.

Questions we might want to ask and answer here might include:

- What are the characteristic differences between these two paradigms?

- If we intend to design systems to mimic the processes in the natural world, how do we integrate these uncertain, unpredictable, and dynamic characteristics into our approaches and our designs?

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