Is It Time to Decenter Humans in Our Discussion of Sustainable Development?

Opinion piece

According to “Our Common Future,” sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations (of humans) to meet their own needs (United Nations, 1987). Sometimes, development is considered through the analogy of a ladder of national economic activity (Sachs, 2005). For example, those nations with the greatest amount of financial capital are imagined to be near the top of the ladder and are referred to as the “most developed” (i.e., many counties in North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim).

In contrast, nations with the least amount of financial capital are imagined to be near the bottom of the ladder and are referred to as “less” or “least developed” (i.e., formerly known as the “Third world” and with many countries found in what often is referenced as the “Global South”) (United Nations, 2021).

Recently, efforts by environmental engineers and scientists to adopt community-engaged research have focused increasingly on addressing inequities—both downstream (i.e., immediate and obvious challenges of services) and upstream (i.e., systematic and inherent bias of policies) (Oerther, 2022; Voth-Gaeddert et al, 2022). These inequities often impact disproportionately the individuals, families, communities, and nations who most experience the challenges of intersectionality (Montoya et al, 2021), and in response, health care professionals (including environmental engineers and scientists) need to better understand financial literacy as part of health literacy (Dion et al, 2021).

But in our quest to achieve sustainable development—while trying to work in partnership with communities in less developed nations (i.e., Bielefeldt et al, 2021)—have environmental engineers and scientists asked the question, “is sustainable development, as conceived in the Anthropocene, the appropriate end goal?”

The Anthropocene is the term informally used to describe the current epoch where human activity is the dominant force acting on the environment. Depending upon when one chooses to mark the historic dawning of the Anthropocene, it is characterized by a variety of human actions and attitudes including extractive capitalism by predominantly white male colonists and a nearly religious adoration of science and technology as savior (Dillard-Wright et al, 2020).

During the Anthropocene, the lived experience of being human is separated from the natural world, and the environment is conceived of as an inexhaustible source of raw material and energy from which to improve health and wellness of a portion of humanity. Through this lens, the Capitalocene occurs concurrent to the Anthropocene as the Anthropos subdue and divide the natural world into private property (Dillard-Wright et al, 2020).

As described in their recent thought-provoking article, Franco et al (2022, p. 4) note that, “improvements in human health and life expectancy have been unequally realized and at the expense of deteriorating natural systems, thereby jeopardizing the wellbeing of present and future generations.” This concept is broadly captured in a graph relating health expenditures per capita to life expectancy at birth, which demonstrates a trend of diminishing returns as more and more resources are poured into less and less effective health care systems (to explore for yourself, please see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure).

Engineers, including sanitary engineers of the past century and environmental engineers of recent time (i.e., Mihelcic et al, 2017), have been central to humanity's reactive approaches of hygiene, food safety standards, sanitation, mass vaccinations, table-top disaster planning, and global surveillance of infections (Franco et al, 2022). In contrast to our current reactionary approach to health systems, the decentering of humans from a place of pre-eminence allows environmental engineers and scientists to enter the Chthulucene (see Pronunciationbook, 2010) and adopt, “…the mandate to first imagine and then to create a postcapitalist health care future, recognizing that we are all in this earthly game together, human, animal, plant, soil, and we all need care and keeping,” (Dillard-Wright et al, 2022, p. 144).

When I was a student of environmental engineering studying at the University of Illinois, I often enjoyed taking (and retaking) an evening lecture course offered by Professor Carl Woese (Goldenfeld and Pace, 2013; Noller, 2013), where he would offer a useful thought exercise. Professor Woese would say something to the effect, “It's clear to me that if you wiped all multi-cellular life-forms off the face of the earth, microbial life might shift a tiny bit; whereas if microbial life were to disappear, that would be it—instant death for the planet.”

The prescience of his observation has become increasingly clear to me across the span of my own career as I have worked to understand the microbes responsible for cleaning our sewage (Saikaly et al, 2005) as well as the microbes responsible for keeping healthy the human gut (Voth-Gaeddert et al, 2019). “No microbes mean no people” was not [emphasis added] the dominant view that I learned in my environmental engineering courses at the University of Illinois, but it was the message I learned from Professor Woese when considering the entirety of evolution of all life on planet Earth.

In our profession, I am pleased to witness our journey toward a holistic and caring approach to planetary health and human welfare (Oerther et al, 2022). The contributions that environmental engineers and scientists are making toward “One Health” (i.e., human, veterinary, and environmental health) (CDC, 2022) as we look to understand the spread of antimicrobial resistance is one example (Pruden et al, 2018). Imagine the benefit if we take this approach one step further and begin either (1) to view microbes as a type of human organ that extends from our gut to the soils and ocean around the world or (2) to view humans as surfaces that are colonized by microbes as a mode of transport and source of nutrition? Such decentering of human pre-eminence provides insights into complex systems.

When (not if) we come to realize that we must decenter humans from our discussion of sustainable development, our profession will make a giant stride to achieving our stated identity, namely, environmental engineering is, “…that branch of engineering concerned with the application of scientific and engineering principles for protection of human populations… protection of environments [emphasis added]… and improvements of environmental quality [emphasis added],” (AAEES, 2009).

In their critique on the overemphasis modern nursing has placed on technological solutions to a human-centric view of the world, Dillard-Wright and coauthors entitled their thought-provoking article, “we have never been nurses,” (Dillard-Wright et al, 2022). Perhaps it is time for our profession to decenter humans in our discussion of sustainable development, and for us to acknowledge, “we have never been environmental engineers.”