Welcome to the land of overwhelming sustainability!

Within a few years, sustainable development has been raised to global status on an exponential scale, which has caught major international media headlines by storm and has made it part of the top political agenda at world summits. In fact, thoroughly encompassing industry and economy, the climate and the Earth’s resources are subtly impacting the livelihoods of both the rich and the poor. Here is a concept of a radically new type which mankind, despite its exalted prowess at long solving problems, now finds itself powerless to address suitably even to define with sagacity, insight and perhaps enlightenment. What does the concept of “sustainability” mean?

An encounter of a pernicious kind lurks in the face of man and the planet. Evidence shows an issue addressed by a whole range of hard to tackle complexities for mankind. Not really specific, the unfavorable regions of the world, everywhere and everyday impact each living being globally.

Has mankind ever encountered such a compelling affair? The call of sustainability is general and the sustainability imperative is inescapable and insuppressible. The term “sustainability” is universal and applies everywhere: business, non-governmental organizations, administration, cities, industry, individuals, any living being, etc.

How can we address the concept of sustainability?

Sustainable development is a subject of subjects: embracing many disciplines and at the same time transcending them, spanning man’s activities as well as the planet’s processes. Sustainability relates both to our external environment and to our intrinsic person as well. Being happy and feeling comfortable resorts to our sustainability. Preserving and growing our environment is a sustainable action.

The authors have taken a collection of questions and each chapter answers them. Here is a glimpse of what is to come:

• – What do we mean by “sustainability”?
• – What are the most critical sustainability challenges and factors facing us in this century?
• – What are the underlying mechanisms of our complex systems?
• – How can the fields of physics, natural and social sciences, life sciences, humanities, and technology interact to contribute to better understand these mechanisms and help in defining their solution?
• – How do we balance the needs and desires of current generations with the needs of future generations?
• – In nature and our environment, how do we combine the ambivalences and antagonistic properties to find the best “attractors” and equilibriums to get the best sustainability?

However, the most authentic question is to define how we can implement a sustainable development to improve our human well-being while preserving the resources and assets of our Earth such as: energy, air, water, food, and the survival of the climate and ecosystems. The central tenet of this book is that sustainable development can be done simultaneously by combining different theories, sciences and technologies.

In general, we humans tend not to easily perceive the underpinning critical and core problems; this is arguably because humanity is facing a huge and complex system: the livelihood on planet Earth. The difficulty will not consist of processing the effects of any non-sustainable system but of defining the underlying mechanisms and causes. That is the only viable way to address the present and future challenges of this century.

What strategy, approach and discipline should we follow when faced with a global sustainability issue or challenge? The aim of this book is to explain the various mechanisms behind the concept, to foster our critical thinking and analysis of complex situations and to bring out new paradigms based on the integration of well-known advances in several border sciences and theories. Many examples and application fields will be described to get practical and useful advice, simple ideas and best practices. Throughout the chapters, the authors do not mythically substitute technology for man, yet position technology in synergetic coordination with man, having themselves participated in numerous technological developments over the past half a century within large corporations, such as IBM, which several examples will be drawn from.

This book is structured into two volumes and seeds a number of previously disparate basic roots, each hopefully having a profound say on the subject matter of sustainability, when actually put in conjunction with others. Most of the shared scientific elements are already proven and some are not fully uncovered yet. The view is to lighten the unknown spaces so that a new consciousness may emerge that takes in all the seeds and can support, by design, novel futures having that one desired property: to be sustainable. In terms of C-K theory, it aims that the things which were deemed impossible or unthinkable only a few years ago may come of age by design for the sustained benefit of our livelihood everywhere on the Planet Earth.

For the sake of commodity, this book focuses on the technologies underpinning sustainability, while the second book [MAS 15] wraps up the findings by unifying them and addresses organizational issues by providing the keys to operationalize a more global sustainability. In this volume, the search for models, and then the study of nature and life principles, originates and precedes the quest for the mechanisms of sustainability, forming a collection of “novel technologies” underpinning the operations of sustainable worlds. Technology is taken in its etymological sense of a miscellany of methods, processes, or techniques – more generally knowledge – that can be used for an objective: the making of a sustainable society. It aims at mobilizing the knowledge pertaining to such an objective. Perhaps that knowledge will someday be embedded in some kind of automata or computing device.

About the authors

To make a long story short, it was January 2010 when the authors, having already co-authored two previous books on linking decision-making and complexity sciences, embarked in discussions on “building adaptive and sustainable worlds” and began to discuss underpinning principles, models and possible approaches. After several attempts, the multilevel model from nano to macro was embodied and the keys to cross them emerged, which revisited many well-entrenched notions such as time, space, entropy, aging, survival and consciousness.

For Pierre Massotte (Higher Doctorate), this was the extension of career-long complexity projects piloting from IBM’s Montpellier plant in Southern France before being in charge of competitivity of Development laboratories and Manufacturing plants at IBM Europe. Pierre arguably led the biggest ever team on complexity issues locally and remotely, which peaked at one time at about 120 staff in places like IBM Europe, Pougkheepsie, NY, Yorktown Heights, NY, and later at ARMINES (R&D of Ecole des Mines). As one example, he was studying chaos and fractal factories in the real world of large computers manufacturing, hardware and software development, and complex organization re-engineering, at a time when nobody could imagine the possible links either between chaos and electronics, cooperation, competition and game theory, quantum physics and production control, or even between sustainability and entropy.

Dr. Patrick Corsi had his formative years right from Silicon Valley within IBM’s Research and Office Products Divisions since 1979 and then at the La Gaude plant near Nice in France. By quitting the company in 1984 with one idea in mind – the whole computing world going personal and IBM not listening too well – he pursued advanced artificial intelligence R&D projects while managing technology transfer from a start-up in Paris, then within the THOMSON (now Thales) Group, finally within the European Commission in Brussels. Today, he is specialized in designing breakthrough futures for firms and institutions, being an Associate Practitioner at Mines ParisTech.

Acknowledgments

We, the authors, are indebted to IBM Corp. for having walked the path of a unique company, a forerunner in complexity projects and a determined player in its way of deeply training and managing people. Pierre is also indebted to the School of Mines in Ales for participating in the reenginering of the education system, and technology transfer to Industry. The methodology orientation they deeply immersed themselves in, as well as the values which underpinned the moves, are probably the two special ingredients which enabled us to slowly produce this book. We also express our sincere and enduring thanks to the countless knowledgeable people we encountered along the way.