2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering operates globally as a dominant ecosociotechnical system, producing and legitimizing knowledge and power through epistemologies, design logics, and material practices that increasingly abstract human activity from ecological and relational feedback. This paper argues that contemporary engineering education reproduces extractive, human-centered paradigms by privileging technical efficacy and capitalist imperatives over transdisciplinary knowledge and holistic reflection, structurally delaying ethical consideration until harm has already occurred. Drawing on evolutionary, ecological, historical, and philosophical perspectives, this analysis traces how engineering's coevolutionary entwinement with love and its relational–ethical capacities — empathy, compassion, care, and ethical reasoning — has been progressively severed through Cartesian dualism, industrial capitalism, and the institutionalization of technological power.
To address this rupture, the paper proposes an evoecolontology framework — defined as the ontological and epistemic reorientation of engineering toward relational, coevolutionary, and ecological principles grounded in love's relationality — positioning love and its relational–ethical capacities not as peripheral values but as evolutionary and ecological conditions that co-emerged alongside technological ones as constitutive human traits. This framework calls for a radical restructuring of engineering curricula and pedagogy, centering ecological consciousness and transdisciplinary knowledge as foundational, repositioning engineering education toward ecological stewardship, ethical refusal in design, and more-than-human futures.