Quo vadis global environmental sustainability? A proposal for the environmental education of engineering students

Byline: Bhaskar Nath, Krassimira Kazashka-Hristozova In this paper, the inextricable link between sustainable development and sustainability of the natural environment is pointed out and a heuristic for developing a unique operational definition of sustainable development is proposed. It is argued that if the international community is at all serious about achieving even a modest degree of global environmental sustainability and global sustainable development, determined efforts must be made to reduce consumption by the affluent; that science and technology, however advanced, can only help the process of global sustainable development in a limited way but cannot deliver it; and that moral and ethical education is needed to achieve global environmental sustainability by changing people's attitude to nature and the environment from one of gross exploitation as at present to that of genuine concern and respect. To this end, a generic outline syllabus, including essential elements of moral philosophy, is proposed for the environmental education of undergraduate engineering students.