Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The point is that we must be careful that this “advocacy science” or, in
its worst form, “junk science” does not find its way into green engineering.
There is a canon that is common in most engineering codes that tells us
that we need to be “faithful agents.” This, coupled with an expectation of
competency, requires us to be faithful to the first principles of science. In a
way, pressures from clients and political or ideological correctness could tempt
the next generation of engineers to try to “repeal Newton's laws” in the
interest of certain influential groups! This is not to say that engineers will have
the luxury to ignore the wishes of such groups, but since we are the ones with
our careers riding on these decisions, we must clearly state when an approach is
scientifically unjustifiable. We must be good listeners, but also honest arbiters.
Unfortunately, many scientific bases for decisions are not nearly as clear as
Newton's laws. They are far removed from first principles. For example, we
know how fluids move through conduits (with thanks to Bernoulli, Navier,
Stokes, et al.), but other factors come into play when we estimate how a
contaminant moves through very small vessels (e.g., intercellular transport).
The combination of synergies and antagonisms at the molecular and cellular
scales makes for uncertainty. Combining this with uncertainties about the
effects of enzymes and other catalysts in the cell and even greater uncertainties
and possible errors are propagated. So the engineer operating at the mesoscale
(e.g., a wastewater treatment plant) can be fairly confident about the application
of first principles of contaminant transport, but the biomechanical engineer
looking at the same contaminant at the nanoscale is not as confident. That
is where junk science sometimes is able to raise its ugly head. In the void of
certainty (e.g., at the molecular scale), some untenable arguments are made
about what does or does not happen. This is the stuff of infomercials. The
new engineer had better be prepared for some off-the-wall ideas of how the
world works. New hypotheses for causes of cancer, or even etiologies of cancer
cells, will be put forward. Most of these will be completely unjustifiable by
physical and biological principles, but they will appear sufficiently plausible to
the unscientific.
The challenge of the green engineer will be to sort through this morass
without becoming closed-minded. After all, many scientific breakthroughs
were considered crazy when proposed (recalling Copernicus, Einstein, Bohr,
and Hawking, to name a few). But even more really were wrong and upon
scientific scrutiny, were unsupportable.
From an integrated, green viewpoint, a design must incorporate an appre-
ciation for the interrelationships of the abiotic (nonliving) and biotic (living)
environments. We may have not known it, but we have been taking advantage of
the concept of
trophic state
for much of our history. Organisms, including humans,
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