Engineering Within Ecological Constraints (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Overview and Perspectives
Overview and Perspectives
Pages 1-12
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Now that the impact of humans has reached a global scale, there is growing concern about the environmental implications of engineering designs. A new set of constraints has become important to engineers ecological constraints.
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What does it mean to keep human environmental impacts within "acceptable" limits? Four related topics arise frequently during discussion of these broad questions: problem definition, uncertainty, lessons from environmental control efforts, and the difficulty of finding short-term solutions that do not aggravate long-term problems.
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These guidelines can be useful for identifying unsatisfactory circumstances, but it remains to be seen whether they will be elaborated in ways that will make them directly useful to engineers struggling to satisfy particular ecological constraints in the context of particular engineering problems. Available evidence suggests that when ecological constraints are clearly defined, engineers can develop designs or management plans with the potential for meeting them.
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The answer to this question depends on a variety of factors, such as the methods of raw material acquisition, the ecological effects of manufacturing wastes, and the way the radios will be discarded (Allenby, 1994~. When the ecological implications of an engineering design are obscure, it may be most productive to adopt the general approach of "life-cycle analysis" or "design for environment" in which there is a conscious effort to consider systematically the environmental implications of all aspects of engineering designs (Allenby and Richards, 19941.
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notes that neither global warming nor acid rain were major concerns at the 1972 United Nations conference on the environment in Stockholm, even though Arrhenius had warned of global warming 100 years earlier and biologists were aware that massive quantities of sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides were being emitted into the atmosphere. Perhaps some unknowns would be better described as unappreciated knowns or ignored knowns.
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If there are indeed systematic differences in the expectations of engineers and ecologists, disagreements might not depend as much upon the particulars of the case in question as upon differences in fundamental disciplinary perspectives or assumptions, such as the time frames of consideration or expectations regarding future technological developments. Perhaps engineers who are accustomed to choosing design alternatives involving fairly well understood phenomena may naturally tend to focus on risks while ecologists, who are not so accustomed to making precise predictions, are naturally inclined to focus on unknowns and the possibility of unknown unknowns.
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is managed by at least five separate, mechanistically distinct sets of controls, evaporative cooling, metabolic heat generation, regulation of blood flow, insulation, and habitat selection. Endotherms have flourished even though their normal body temperatures are very near their lethal body temperatures.
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The problem of supplying water has been solved for the time being, but the solution has made the water distribution system brittle in the sense that it is sensitive to earthquakes and other disturbances. In addition, adequate present supplies relax immediate constraints on human immigration, which will lead to a larger regional population and concomitantly greater dependence on the water distribution system.
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George Diggs, Alexander Flax, Hugh MacIsaac, Deanna Richards and three anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments on earlier drafts. Credit for any insights should be attributed to the meeting participants.
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Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 14: 1-27. Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy.
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