Engineering the global ecosystem

Abstract

In 1952, Isaac Asimov wrote a vivid tale about human explorers engineering the ecosystem of Mars to make it habitable for humans (Asimov 1952). In science fiction, engineers use terraforming machines to modify the atmosphere, landscape, and hydrology of Mars to create ecosystems that sustain earth-based life-forms. Since that time, rapid advances in population density, combined with ideas concerning engineering and finance, have allowed us to recreate the ecosystem of our home planet. However, our Earth-based ‘‘terraforming’’ efforts have not sufficiently included ecosystem function in our engineering designs and, as a result, a number of negative consequences are occurring. Engineering has had a great history of achievement in designing and building hydrologic structures and actualizing fantastic ideas, such as the Roman aqueducts, the canals of Angkor Wat, or the Bhakra Nangal dam. Engineering over the ages has transitioned from a focus on structural greatness to engineering the manipulation of natural cycles and systems, including the hydrologic cycle. These designs and manipulations typically regard only the immediate application (e.g., flood control, water supply), not the needs of the regional and global ecosystem, and therefore impart unintended consequences as a result of this oversight. In the last 50 years, the world population has more than doubled, from less than 3 billion people to an estimated 6.8 billion people today (United States Census Bureau 2010). Current projections are for the world population to reach nine billion within the next generation. Despite the potential for disaster, arguably the human condition has improved as population density increased. The Human Development Index (HDI), a measurement that incorporates life expectancy, access to education, and standard of living, has risen for all of the 82 UN member states for which there is comparative data between 1980 and 2007 (United Nations Development Programs, 2009). The average increase for states ranked as having low development (scores less than 0.50) in 1980 was almost 140%, with ten out of 21 states moving from the low development to medium development categories. The HDI also increased in countries ranked in 1980 as medium development (120%) and high or very high development (110% of the 1980 values). Other measurements of the human condition, such as access to drinking water, undernourishment, and poverty rates, show trends that indicate the human condition is improving (United Nations 2008; United Nations Environmental Programs 2010). The human condition has been uplifted in large part due to engineering that has transformed our landscape and hydrology on a local, regional, and global scale. W. T. Stringfellow (&) R. Jain Ecological Engineering Research Program, School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of the Pacific, 3601 Pacific Avenue, Stockton, CA 95211, USA e-mail: wstringfellow@pacific.edu