You can't just blame the crocodile

Abstract

This book contains stories of young people who made a journey into sustainability. It is about engineers from TU Delft and the inspiration they derived from the people they met and the projects they have seen throughout the world. It is about construction, sanitation, mobile networks, entrepreneurship and much more than technology as such. The complexity of solving the problem of sustainability is unprecedented. There is an overdoses of literature, reports, articles, conferences, documentaries and celebrities tumbling over each other in their efforts to do good. Thoughts, inconvenient truths, ideologies, dogmas, reasoning, shock, but also excuses: it is all there when it comes to sustainable development. We are trying to save the environment by trying to convince societies and their governments throughout the world to change their ways. The global environment and humans are now more strongly interdependent than ever before in the history of mankind, however, most of the time in a conflicting way. From this complexity of natural, political, industrial and societal concerns the question of how we will gain intellectual strength and momentum for achieving a sustainable world arises. Of course, this question cannot be fully answered in this book, but we will focus on the role of engineers and technology in this urgent global question. The ability to bring about real change is not just wishful thinking on the part of the engineer, for we have learned that breakthroughs in science and technology have in the past always provided new ways of thinking and solutions to many complex problems. Being a university of technology in the midst of global developments the TU Delft has therefore chosen Sustainable solutions with a focus on Africa as a central theme for the celebrations marking the 165th anniversary of TU Delft in 2007.