EditorialForty-nine shades of green: ecology and sustainability in the academic formation of engineers
Introduction
Ecological engineering is a relatively recent kind of engineering. Its origins lie not in engineering, but in systems ecology. Howard T. Odum stated in his 1971 book Environment, Power and Society (Odum, 1971, p. 274): ‘The management of nature is ecological engineering, an endeavour with singular aspects supplementary to those of traditional engineering. A partnership with nature is a better phrase.’
Mitsch (1998) quotes earlier work by Odum and his colleagues describing ecological engineering as involving ‘those cases in which the energy supplied by man is small relative to the natural sources, but sufficient to produce large effects in the resulting patterns and processes’ (Odum, 1962). Noting the ‘thousands of years’ during which ecological engineering practice has been developing in China, Mitsch (1998) quotes another description of ecological engineering as ‘… a specially designed system of production processes in which the principles of the species symbiosis and the cycling and regeneration of substances in an ecological system are applied …’ (Ma et al., 1988).
In his review paper, Mitsch (1998) tabulates 18 ‘synonyms, subdisciplines, or fields similar to ecological engineering’. That is one every 2 years on average since Odum in 1962! In order to have a clear discussion on appropriate form and content of a curriculum for ecological engineering, as intended in this paper, some preliminary statements on semantics are desirable.
Section snippets
Semantics
A hierarchy is adopted in this paper for naming subdivisions of professional engineering. Engineering is considered to be a ‘discipline’, like science, or medicine. The main subdivisions of engineering, by historic use civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical are then ‘sub-disciplines’. So might agricultural engineering and mining engineering, for example, be considered to be sub-disciplines.
But this becomes a moot point when aeronautical engineering and automotive engineering are considered, as
Why develop ‘ecological engineering’?
The enhanced public awareness of environmental degradation from the 1960s onward has affected engineering curricula. One obvious effect was the initiation of programs of ‘environmental engineering’ from about 1962 in the USA (ABET, 2002). Many of these grew out of the ‘public health and sanitary engineering’ specialisation of civil engineering. Environmental engineering focussed on waste clean-up and waste management in the built environment.
Another thread in the tapestry of responses to the
What is in ecological engineering?
There is considerable consensus, at least in the eight countries which recognise each other's professional engineering qualifications through the ‘Washington Accord’ (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, USA; see IPENZ (2002)), about the general content of undergraduate engineering degree programs. A grounding in mathematics, computation, physics, chemistry, mechanics and design is usually common to all sub-disciplines. Then the engineering science built on
How to include ecology and sustainability
How the specifically ‘ecological’ and ‘sustainability’ aspects of a curriculum should be included in an ecological engineering program depends on their nature. The fundamentals of biology can be imparted alongside those of physics, chemistry and mechanics, using learning methods appropriate to all. So too could understanding of ecological systems, familiarity with some of the tools of applied ecology, and concepts of self-design be included using familiar learning methods.
Although sustainable
When to include ecological engineering
The previous sections have concentrated on an ‘ecological engineering’ curriculum for an undergraduate degree program. That such programs should be developed was one of the recommendations of a review paper (Mitsch, 1998) considering the development of ecological engineering in the 7 years following the first eponymous textbook in the field (Mitsch and Jørgensen, 1989). But that is not the only possibility.
Matlock et al. (2001), a group of USA agricultural, biosystems, and environmental
Example programs
There are already a number of undergraduate engineering programs which fulfil most of the requirements for ecological engineering practice, but which are not called ‘ecological engineering’. Those mentioned here are restricted to the author's experience, mainly in Australia and New Zealand, but there might well be other examples, particularly in Europe.
The Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Natural Resources Engineering (BE(Hons)(NR)) jointly taught by the University of Canterbury and
Conclusion
Forty years after the environmental enlightenment of the 1960s is an appropriate time to seriously consider ecological engineering in both forms outlined here. Emergence and development of both an ecological engineering sub-discipline, and more ecologically aware engineers of other sub-disciplines, would enhance professional engineering and ecological science in their services to humankind and the rest of nature. For pragmatic reasons, ecological engineering could develop first as a
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