Transitions - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 82

bestowed upon us unless the view as stewards and caretakers of the environment
was taken seriously. Scientifically based progress was one of the major factors
behind the exponential growth of threats to the environment. Environmental
controls grew out of the same science, which is now part of an ethos that builds
environmental values into the design process.
Science is the explanation of the physical world; engineering encompasses
applications of science to achieve results. Thus, what we have learned about
the environment by trial and error has grown incrementally into what is now
standard practice of environmental science and engineering. This heuristically
attained knowledge has come at a great cost in terms of the loss of lives and
diseases associated with mistakes, poor decisions (at least in retrospect), and the
lack of appreciation of environmental effects, but progress is being made all
the same. Environmental awareness is certainly more “mainstream” and less a
polarizing issue than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. There has been a steady
march of advances in environmental science and engineering for several decades,
as evidenced by the increasing number of Ph.D. dissertations and credible scientific
journal articles addressing myriad environmental issues.
The environmental movement is relatively young. The emblematic works of
Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, and others in the 1960s were seen by many as
passing fads. In the 1970s and 1980s, the movement was truly tested. We saw “we
versus them” dramas play out throughout society: jobs versus the environment,
safety versus the environment, contemporary life versus the environment, and
even religion versus the environment. However, these disputes seemed to dissipate
when the facts were fully scrutinized. Surely, a number of businesses did indeed
fail and jobs were lost, but quite often the pollution was merely one of a number
of their inefficiencies.
Decision makers in the private and public sectors have since come to recognize
environmental quality not as an option, but as a design constraint. It is even
recognized by most politicians, no matter their party affiliation, that clean air,
water, land, and food are almost universally accepted expectations of the populace.
This did not eliminate major debates on how to achieve a livable environment,
but set the stage for green design.
How Clean Is Clean?
Even within the environmental professional and scientific communities, we con-
tinue to debate “how clean is clean” ad nauseum . For example, we can present
the same data regarding a contaminated site to two distinguished environmen-
tal engineers. One will recommend active cleanup, such as a pump-and-treat
approach, and the other will recommend a passive approach, such as natural at-
tenuation, wherein the microbes and abiotic environment are allowed to break