Bryan Norton
Most people who study sustainability focus on emerging technologies that help protect the environment for future generations to enjoy. Georgia Tech School of Public Policy Professor Bryan Norton studies sustainability in terms of social interaction. "I was always interested in the environment," says Norton, who combined this interest with his interest in philosophy when he began investigating communities' multiple definitions of sustainability.
"There is not a single definition of sustainability," he says. "What people really mean by the term sustainability is to ask what they value: Sustain what? I think that's a community-based question."
To discover communities' answers to this question, Norton researches the impact of places, which he distinguishes from locations. "Places are the interaction of a culture with the natural environment," explains Norton, who sees locations as defined by their physical characteristics. "Ultimately, it comes down to people deciding what to sustain in the environment for the future."
He believes that institutions should create public policies that encourage people to "do well by doing good," encouraging people to equate economic welfare or personal goods (doing well) with activities that have a positive social impact (doing good). "What we have are economic markets that create incentives for people to make exchanges," explains Norton, who says that these markets should offer people economic goods in exchange for making decisions with a positive social impact.
To help others make decisions with a positive social impact, Norton, who was a charter member of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board, has served on numerous public policy panels, including the Ecosystem Valuation Forum and The Risk Assessment Forum, for which he co-authored the scientific background papers for the first-ever protocols for Ecological Risk Assessment. He believes the work is necessary to educate future generations so they can make sound public policy decisions.
"Each generation has to take what it gets and then make something for the future," he says. "Sustainability is a process of articulating who we are."