Georgia Institute of TechnologyBrook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems
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Letter from the Director
John CrittendenJohn Crittenden

I am very excited about the opportunity I have been given as Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. It is an honor to work with the faculty, staff and students who have worked so hard to build the diverse and robust body of sustainability related resources which has brought Georgia Tech to its current position of renown in this area.

Such a prolonged effort in sustainability makes Georgia Tech an ideal place to elevate the development of solutions to humanity’s greatest challenge to a higher level. We must bring about an anthrosphere, the place where we live, which can provide a good quality of life for all people while operating within the means of nature. We must learn to only use resources that nature provides and generate only wastes that nature can assimilate. The overarching agenda for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems will be to catalyze research efforts to bring about such an anthrosphere.

Virtually every human endeavor will have to be reimagined, redesigned, and retooled. No organization can tackle every problem. We choose to focus on three areas on which we feel we can have the greatest impact:

  • Green Chemistry will provide us with the fuels and feedstocks to supply our industries while not resulting in toxicity, large energy expenditures or deplete our resources or ecosystems.
  • Environmentally Responsible Manufacturing allows us to make things with less waste, less energy, and fewer materials.
  • Urban Infrastructure Systems represent only about 2 to 3 % of the earth’s surface, but 49% of the world’s population and 81% of the US population live in urban areas. We expect to double the current urban infrastructure in the next 35 years, an infrastructure that has taken us 5000 years to create. It is critical that we get the design right.

To focus strictly on technological solutions would be a mistake, however. Urban systems, being complex adaptive systems, cannot be dissembled into their sub-systems, improved one by one, and then put back together and expect an overall improvement. We have largely exhausted the potential efficiencies that can be gained by this reductionist approach. The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems was established to employ whole systems design solutions to our sustainability challenges.

Please explore our website to find out how the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems will catalyze the best of what Georgia Tech has to offer to bring about new knowledge which we so desperately need to create our anthrosphere.