Environmental Engineering: Training for the Next Round

Abstract

It seems to me that environmental engineering as a discipline has reached something equivalent to its mid-20s. It is past those awkward but somewhat euphoric and booming teenage years. It is past the age of majority and prepatterned education. It has had a few harsh doses of reality that have taken some of the gloss off its “everything is possible” early outlook—something akin to a few rejection letters from the first job or grad school applications, and the realization that some of the people to whom you are pitching your great ideas have already been “there and done that.” Essentially it is at a point where it must take charge of ~and responsibility for! its subsequent livelihood, having grown out from underneath the assured protection and patronage of its parent, Civil Engineering. On a more personal level, the leaders who changed the discipline from sanitary engineering to environmental engineering are retiring from the forefront and the next generation is taking over. In short, Environmental Engineering is at an age where it can reflect on its upbringing and critically evaluate the path it will need to take to meet its future obligations and challenges. The transition from Sanitary Engineering to Environmental Engineering was largely a transition from specialization in the design of water and wastewater treatment to specialization in the cleanup and control of environmental insults. This is not to say that many environmental engineers do not still work predominantly on water/wastewater processes, but that an equal or greater number work on environmental cleanup or control of environmental discharges. Further, the present-day water/wastewater engineers are often preoccupied with removal of aqueous contaminants that are the result of historical or continuing poor chemical management practices, rather than the conventional contaminants of sanitary engineering concern, such as BOD, turbidity, and pathogens. Perhaps this transition is most clearly seen in the variety of pollutants and problems with which an environmental engineer now must be knowledgeable. Beyond the problem of removing the conventional, aqueous pollutants, the graduating environmental engineer will deal with a broad range of issues, including toxic air pollutants, greenhouse gases, pharmaceutically active compounds in water, noise pollution, energy conservation, solid and liquid radioactive wastes, toxic compounds in porous media, recalcitrant synthetics, and complex mixtures of landfill leachates—just to name a few of the current areas of concern. This leads to my first suggestion that the training that well prepared the sanitary engineer may not be the training that will well prepare the environmental engineer. At a minimum the environmental engineer must have a working knowledge of a diversity of media, chemistry, and toxicology far beyond that of the sanitary engineer. From another viewpoint, the next generation of environmental engineer may align themselves more with the traditional sanitary ngineer’s perspective than with that of the environmental engi-