Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
operational basis for industrial ecology at this scale. These reflect not only
the study of industrial ecology to date but also previous experience with
large systems engineering projects (for example, large civil engineering
activities such as hydrologic projects and the Boston Central Artery/Tun-
nel project, and complex technological systems such as the space shuttle
program in the United States, global air transport control and safety pro-
grams, and nuclear power systems in many countries).These principles are
both common-sense and daunting: they can be thought of as means by
which the highly complex systems studies by industrial ecology can then
be managed.They are clearly a work in progress.
1. Earth Systems Engineering must explicitly accept high levels of uncer-
tainty and lack of knowledge as endogenous to the engineering function,
rather than thinking of engineering as an effort to create a system certain.
The traditional engineering mental model of centralized control of know-
able systems is dysfunctional when applied to the complex, unpredictable
(and quite possibly chaotic) systems involved in these cases, which involve
coupled biological, physical, and traditional engineered systems, with con-
trol and feedback mechanisms widely distributed along many temporal and
spatial scales. Rather than attempting to dominate a system—as is, for exam-
ple, the case when a building or a chemical manufacturing complex is con-
structed—the Earth Systems Engineer will have to see herself or himself as
an integral component of the system itself, closely coupled with its evolu-
tion and subject to many of its dynamics on an immediate feedback basis.
2. Whenever possible, engineered changes should be incremental and
reversible, rather than fundamental and irreversible. Thus, for example, fer-
tilizing oceanic planktonic populations with iron should begin (if at all)
with small target plots, heavily monitored to determine whether the effects
are as predicted, and what the unanticipated effects are. Conversely, a major
problem with projects such as the proposed dam across the mouth of the
Mediterranean, is that it is a large, single, relatively irreversible, engineered
intervention in a complex physical system (ocean circulation). There is no
room for the continuous learning and feedback that incremental engineer-
ing interventions support. In all cases, scale-up should allow for the fact
that, especially in complex systems, discontinuities and emergent character-
istics are the rule, not the exception, as scales change.
3. Continual learning at the personal and institutional level must be built
into the Earth Systems Engineering process.This learning process is messy
Search WWH ::




Custom Search