Taylor Made: Keeping clams

In the front lobby of Everitt Lab hang three plaques devoted to William L. Everitt, who served as department head of what was then the Electrical Engineering Department at Illinois back in the ‘40s and then subsequently as the Dean of the College of Engineering for 20 years. One plaque is dedicated to a selection of his more famous quotes, such as the buoyant statement, “I am an optimist rather than a pessimist. The pessimists may be right in the long run, but we optimists have more fun on the trip.” Everitt quoted the definition of engineering as the following: “To economically use the resources and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind.”

In this era in which “green” living is seeing a resurgence, it falls on us all to incorporate sustainable practices into our daily lives and labors. This is not a new idea; the very definition of engineering calls for sustainable practice. Thus, I will argue that the cliché “every little bit counts” deserves more credit than it often receives. In randomly picking up pennies off the ground over the past two years, I have collected $4.90—enough to buy a fudge brownie sundae at Jarling’s if you don’t include the tax. In contrast, if every student currently enrolled in the College of Engineering each kindly gifted me one dollar, I’d have nearly $11,000. Scale is everything, and just as a single penny seems inconsequential, it can be hard to see the impact of any one individual on the world stage. Only by having enough perspective to see the influence of one penny as a powerful unit of a much larger body are we able to understand how much the impact of an individual can scale. And unlike Schrodinger’s cat, our impact is no less certain whether or not we actually see it in our own lives.

One way that you can start to measure the impact you’re making on the earth is to evaluate the impact you make on your own life, and to experiment with the ways in which simple tweaks create measurable change over time. For example, running one 60-watt lamp constantly would cost you roughly 11 cents per day (using Ameren’s non-summer rates, taxes not included). This equates to 40 dollars and change for the year. If you’re living in a house with several lamps left on all the time, you’re now looking at hundreds of dollars per year; I won’t get into the complementary carbon footprint cost other than to note that it is widely considered to have the more consequential impact on larger scales. You can imagine how strategically using (and shutting off) more heavy-duty appliances will add up over time. Our days are so fluid that it’s hard to reconcile what these savings would look like in reality; you probably wouldn’t notice a difference in your budget from turning off excess lights. Yet this does not negate the fact that you could unplug one lamp and pay $40 less over the course of the year.

In making sustainable tweaks to your own routine, you might keep a few more clams for yourself after a long day of toiling beneath the sun, so to speak. And if your own demand decreases, you might also leave a few more buried in the sand. Engineers are not meant to be bystanders. I believe we all have a responsibility to apply our knowledge and skills to the best of our ability, and to take command of the awareness that a grasp of the forces of nature inherently brings.

Post script: And in light of the developments with this new virus, it seems even more fitting to consider sustainable practice. We are all called to manage our resources, lest we cause a shortage more earthshaking than that of toilet paper.

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