Questioning Green Growth and Sustainable Development in Undergraduate Engineering

Abstract

This paper explores the tension between entrenched engineering beliefs about technological development and the limits of growth required for a sustainable planet. In a second year required Engineering & Society course, students were asked to use a postsustainability trilemma framework to explain one of three possible approaches to sustainability and analyze it as an ethical or unethical choice: Techno-business-as-usual; Environmental Authoritarianism and Post-Growth. This work-in-progress paper, which is part of a larger project, focuses on an examination of students who selected environmental authoritarianism as their selected approach. Analysis, based on the papers and student interviews, demonstrated both problematic assumptions about environmental authoritarianism, and different relationships between moral foun