It represents a significant shift in awareness of what is possible to accomplish by engineers, scientists, educators and researchers alike. The universe we all live in is a universe of consequences, everything we do, each and every of our actions included. It is often said that the more we know, the more there is to know. Not all knowledge is power, though. It is prudent and wise to choose with infinite care and not to waste any time with things that are good for nothing, and actions that lead to disastrous outcomes, unhealthy living, the destruction of the planet and the environment that we and all life absolutely depend on. This reasoning is at the center of the Institute.

This shift in awareness is required and necessary to make a fundamental transition to a sustainable society, as it has become clear that existing problems are impossible to solve utilizing the same frame of mind that created them.

Founded with a private donation given to Dr. Tony Pereira, UCLA ME PhD.

We aim to become a powerful world force for change, and to facilitate the transition to a sustainable society by establishing and nurturing working partnerships, collaborations and relationships with scientists, researchers, educators, organizations, and entities public and private from all around the planet working towards a sustainable present, for human beings and the entire biosphere - air, water, soil, light and biodiversity.

We know the solution and have all the technology we need to solve all the problems humanity still faces today this day of age, well into the 21st century: food, water, shelter, health, sanitation, education, desertification, pollution, global warming. These solutions, rainwater harvesting, heirloom organic farming, terracing and reforestation, compost toilets and the closing of the bio-nutrient cycle, have been known and have been effectively practiced by humanity and ancient cultures for many thousands of years all over the world, in North, Central and South America, in Africa, in Mesopotamia, and in Asia. There is absolutely no excuse not to, and all the reasons moral and ethical to. Contact Us

The time is now.

About 56 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) the Earth experienced an abrupt global warming period with average temperatures rising by 5 to 9°C (9 to 16°F) degrees, lasting for about 200,000 years, causing mass extinctions and major fauna and flora migrations from the tropics to more temperate northern regions, release of massive quantities of frozen methane hydrides stored in the ocean due to the top to bottom warming of the waters, melting of the permafrost, and severe ocean acidification leading to global mass extinctions of benthic foraminifera, thin shelled plankton mostly thriving on ocean floors that release oxygen into the atmosphere and in turn sequester CO2 dissolved from the atmosphere in the ocean water.

It took photosynthetic microbes in the oceans 30-40,000 years to sequester enough CO2 out of the atmosphere and reverse the PETM warming. What is of great significance, is that this PETM global warming was abrupt. In just about 13 years some 3,000 billion tons of CO2 were released, about 6-7 times faster than what we release globally at current CO2 emissions rates, leaving no time for land and ocean species to adapt. In the oceans, the change was fatal due to the increased acidification due to the sequestration of CO2 and formation of carbonic acid in the ocean water that dissolves the shells of corals, small crustaceans, and plankton species.

Of great interest is that this warming and mass extinction period is comparable to what is happening today caused by the out of control anthropogenic emissions of CO2 from the combustion of dirty fossil fuels arising from human activity in industry, farming, transportation, energy generation, housing and buildings. During the PETM, about 3,000 billion tons of CO2 were released to the atmosphere in just 13 years initially due to increased volcanism during the breakup of Pangea, thereafter caused by positive feedbacks from frozen methane and permafrost thaw. Today, the current anthropogenic release of CO2 is about 36 billion tons/yr and increasing, with about 2,000 billion tons of cumulative CO2 released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution that started around 1750.

At the present rate of extinction underway, the 6th mass extinction, up to 140-170,000 species per year are going extinct, or about 400 species gone forever every single day in forests, rivers, lakes, oceans, land, birds, insects, plants and animals. Some estimates are much higher putting that number at 1,000 species extinctions/day, or about 400,000 species extinct/yr, year after year.

Just in Hawaii, a wondrous marvel of evolution and biodiversity, since the arrival of the Europeans in modern times, in less than 500 years, from the about 50,000 species initially found on the islands, about 2,200 remain today, about 4%, all threatned, the rest has forever become extinct.

Our intent is to work together in harmony with all forms of life, and use what Mother Earth has shown and taught us, to attempt to halt anthopogenic CO2 and greenhouse gases (GHG) and greatly shorten the reversal period, thus to minimize the challenges for our descendants, and gain the respect from the current and next generations for what we have done, instead of the opposite.

With this effort, the ISE^SM aims to create a world class organization dedicated to the research, development and implementation of engineering and other solutions required to build a sustainable society. We work together to build and showcase sustainable, climate change resilient cropping systems, aquaculture food production systems, sustainable technologies to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and lock it in the soil while greatly improving soil fertility. We work to directly address the causes of, and find permanent sustainable solutions to eliminate the use of dirty CO2 emitting fossil fuels to halt global warming and arrest climate change.

The ISE^SM aims to be a truly transformative driver for change within the engineering community toward finding sustainable solutions to the world's problems while driving innovation and creating new business value, working with multiple approaches that combine bottoms/up, top/down, employee owned co-op approaches that seek to realize the benefits of both and create a new sustainable economy. Contact Us