Sustainable Geoenvironmental Engineering Practice - Sustainable Practices in Geoenvironmental Engineering - page 469

Land and water resources are the principal physical capital items that constitute the
geoenvironment. Their quality and health are vital issues because they provide the habi-
tat and also the basis for life-support systems for plants, animals, and humans. These
renewable resources have the capacity to maintain their natural quality through natural
processes and/or through renewal and replenishment. A signiicant part of a sustainable
geoenvironment is its land and water resources and sustainability is obtained when all
the resource elements of the various land and water ecosystems are renewed, replenished,
recharged, and restocked—to a level that will continue to meet the needs of those that
depend on these resources. This will only occur when the health and quality of the land
and water resources are protected, maintained, and allowed to lourish. Failure to do so
will lead to a degradation of the quality of these two major capital resources and in turn
will imperil and diminish the capability of these resources to allow the elements and habi-
tants of the land and water ecosystems to renew and replenish themselves.
The primary sustainability concerns relating to industry and urban interactions with
the land environment and its receiving waters are stressor impacts from
• Exploitation and extraction of renewable and nonrenewable resources. Acceptance
of the need for these resources must be accompanied by responsible management of
the many stressor sources associated with the activities of exploitation-extraction
in a manner that minimizes the severity of their impacts on the geoenvironment.
• Destructive actions and noxious discharges from industrial operations and urban
activities.
The severity of the impacts on the geoenvironment from stressors generated by these
activities can be mitigated with proper and smart geoenvironmental engineering manage-
ment, e.g., through engineering schemes and constructed facilities and through protective
and treatment measures. For both sets of engineering disciplines, the primary responsi-
bility is the protection of the geoenvironment and its natural capital through measures
designed to obviate where possible, and/or minimize, relieve, ameliorate, and mitigate
stressor impacts, and to provide and implement remediation technology for impacted sites
and regions.
13.3.1 Sustainability of Renewable Nonliving Natural Resources
There is a further distinction or differentiation needed in discussing renewable natural
resources. One needs to distinguish between natural and developed resources. Differentiation
between renewable natural resources and renewable developed resources is necessary to
distinguish between the renewable natural capital items (water, soil, land, and aquatic
animals, native plants) and restocking and regeneration of man-made capital such as ish
farms and agricultural output from farming. As has been noted previously, just because
a resource is renewable does not make it sustainable. Two necessary, but not suficient,
conditions for sustainability of renewable natural resources are (1) replenishment and
regeneration of the natural capital items in a reasonable time frame either through natural
processes or through sound management practice, and (2) renewed natural resources are
suficient and will continue to be suficient to meet the demands placed on these resources.
Impediments to sustainability are due to (1) rate of recharge or regeneration or replenish-
ment being outpaced by overexploitation of the natural resource and (2) corruption, degra-
dation and/or contamination of the natural resource.