A Problem for Environmental Pragmatism: Value Pluralism and the Sustainability Principle

In this article, I suggest that the recently emerged perspective of environmental pragmatism encompasses self-contradicting principles. For many years, it was deemed impossible for environmental ethics to formulate justified environmental policy. Environmental pragmatism, and its primary scholar Bryan G. Norton, has promoted a new outlook in that debate by proposing an ideal methodology based upon classic American pragmatism. In this methodology, a community can determine what is morally righteous by (i) conducting open-ended inquiry and (ii) considering all relevant stakeholders in a rational discourse. Environmental pragmatism must therefore accommodate reasonable value pluralism. Moreover, Norton claims that these criteria should be complemented with what I call the ‘sustainability criterion’. However, this principle of righteous decision- making appears inconsistent with the two aforementioned commitments. This article considers why this is the case.

Evaluation of Buildings in Real Conditions of Use as a Sustainability Criterion

The evaluation of buildings in real conditions of use, or post-occupancy evaluation, is the systematic study of buildings with the objective of determining their performance once they are inhabited; it is a process of review and identification of successes and failures in order to improve the conditions of existing buildings and to feed future designs. Nowadays, the construction industry in Colombia does not have feedback processes regarding the operation of a building. The research presented below proposes the HEPO post-occupancy assessment tool, which is oriented to the analysis of buildings in phase of use, in terms of meeting the needs of the inhabitants, the consumption of resources associated to the use, and the conservation of the qualities of the materials in time. In order to verify the effectiveness of the tool, this is validated in five collective height housing projects in the city of Medell´ın, Colombia.

Determining the ballistic characteristics of space penetrator

To model the movement of an aviation penetrator, it is necessary to know the coefficient of the drag and the coefficient of the lift force. The article presents a method of calculating them using the geometric dimensions of the penetrator. The obtained values of the coefficients are compared with those obtained when blowing a penetrator in the aerodynamic tube. By the sustainability criterion is determines the degree of damping of the penetrator. The results of modeling the movement of the penetrator show, that the mathematical model of motion can be used to solve the task of targeting.

Are We Consuming Too Much?

This paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive. We consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness (or insufficiency) of current consumption. One is an intertemporal utility-maximization criterion: actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility. The other is a sustainability criterion, which requires that current consumption be consistent with non-declining living standards over time. We extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change. In applying this formula, we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion: in these regions, genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital.