Living/Thinking Sustainabily

I’ve always held to the idea that a major component to becoming more sustainable is a change in one’s lifestyle. We have to change our habits to promote better recycling methods and more energy efficient practices (like turning off lights when they’re not needed and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth). Unless we change how we live, no amount of solar panels or water collection facilities can keep up with our current wasteful lifestyle. But how does this relate to design practice in architecture?

“Much of the knowledge necessary for this [ecologically aware] mode of design practice can be gained from disciplines such as environmental planning and landscape ecology, with an emphasis on biodiversity. But this must be supplemented with advances from a host of other fields, from economics to history, from public health to cultural studies and the sciences.”

- Mohsen Mostafavi

I feel that to truly become a more ecologically aware profession we need to go back to the basics and learn from other disciplines. While we can rely on consultants to help us out with some of this, perhaps it should begin with our current education curriculum. We spend so much time in studio and architecture history classes that we get very little time to explore classes in economics or landscape architecture or any of the sciences. The undergraduate curriculum provides a sense of this in that you can take a few electives in other courses but once you move into the higher education levels (i.e. Graduate School) this gets much more difficult to do. So my question is, how do we go about educating young architects about the ideas of sustainability while implementing knowledge that can be gained from other disciplines? Will an increase in information at the entry level find its way upward in the profession to those at the top?