FACES

Interview with Johannes Heeb, IEES president

by Andreas Schönborn, Editor of the EcoEng Newsletter

I consider ecological engineering a framework or a toolbox to implement sustainable development. I am Geographer, and ecological engineering helps me in my daily work in Switzerland and abroad to develop and make projects. According to Capra, years ago, "there is no dancer but the dance". Similarly, we could say "there is no ecological engineer, just ecological engineering".

First of all, ecological engineering should not be used as a top-down engineering concept. The consequent system orientation makes the involvement of all actors or stakeholders of a project necessary - from the very beginning of the project. A good ecological engineering project shall furthermore make consequent use of renewable resources, consider waste a resource and contribute to system stabilization. The target is to solve problems here and now and not shift them in time and space.

The scope of ecological engineering has become broader. IEES was founded by the "natural wastewater-treatment and wetland family". Today, ecological engineering is applied for landscape development (key issue of the New-Zealand conference in November 2001), city development, ecological building and planning, resource and energy management. etc.. The broad scope of ecological engineering is also reflected by the variety of information and articles we find on the IEES Homepage.

Personally, I am very much interested in learning processes and concepts, particularly in organizational and inter-organizational learning. Our society brings together the experiences and knowledge of more than 150 members representing different institutions and cultures form countries all over the world.

Becoming the president of IEES provided me with a platform to contribute the development of an inter-institutional and inter-cultural learning process leading to a much more efficient use of the existing technical and methodical know-how in the field of ecological engineering and sustainable development.

This is also my main personal goal as the president of IEES. We hope to be able to launch in the next months a new internet-based project to improve the access to ecological engineering know-how not only for our members but also for every interested person on this planet.

To answer your second question first: Yes I like the job - the work for IEES does not only bring me into contact with interesting persons from all over the world, but motivates me to rethink my own way of working continuously. Working for IEES is for me not just a job but became part of my personal lifelong learning process.

Now, talking about highlights: The conferences in Sweden, Norway, China, Estonia, India, Nova Scotia and Switzerland were of course outstanding events in the last years. The conferences were in most of the cases the nucleus for follow-ups in form of new projects of new institutions.

This leads me to the next highlights: The start-ups of the Center for Ecological Enrgineering in Tartu (Estonia) and the Beijing Ecological Engineering Center. And last but not least: The IEES-Homepage. EcoEng-online (http://www.iees.ch) shows a high quality of information - thanks a lot Andreas for your tremendous contribution to this IEES-project.

Yes, definitively, specifically via our international conferences, the follow-ups I mentioned, and our homepage which is visited by more than 1’200 persons every month.

I would very much appreciate to transfer my job to a new person within the next two years. After 10 years a new person with new visions should proceed steering the IEES boat.

Everybody who is interested in ecological engineering and in becoming part of a referring world-wide learning and implementation platform should consider becoming member - a further incentive is of course, that all the members get a copy of Elseviers "Ecological Engineering" journal.

We have engineers, scientists, business people, teachers, etc. as our members. The variety of our member’s professions is as large as our number of members - probably not accidentally since persons being willing to look for new and innovative development solutions seldomly fit into a predefined type profile.

At the moment we have about 150 Members.

Sustainable landscape development, stakeholder participation and the role of ecological engineering will be the key issues of the conference. This provides ecological engineering with the great opportunity to show and prove its potential for planning and project implementation, integration of ecological, economical and social aspects.

I got lots of emails in the last months, from friends living in low salary countries asking for help to make it possible for them to participate at the conference. Unfortunately, IEES has no referring funds.

So I was very pleased to get support from Jacky Foo launching an electronical extension for the conference, thus making it at least possible for these people to join the conference via internet. Of course it opens also the possibility to participate without contributing to CO₂-emmissions by flying thousands of kilometers around the world.

Fortunately, I don’t have the capability to look into the future. IEES will probably not be the main player in future world development. My hope is, that in 15 years from now we will be closer to a inter-cultural society knowing that sustainability can only be achieved if the big resource consumers are willing to stand back in order to open a development potential for the poor ones.

Even if ecological engineering will not play the key role, we are able to show that the necessary development concepts and technologies are available, not only 15 years from now but already today.