Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
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Introduction
Today in the 21st century, the United States and most of the rest of the world
are environmentally aware societies. The popular press and social media are
ripe with discussions about thinking and acting green, environmental sus-
tainability, climate change, threatened marine mammals, toxic chemicals,
and hazardous waste. Even advertisers in capitalistic societies play to our
environmental awareness by touting the low environmental impact of their
products and the zero-landfill factories that produce them.
However, environmental awareness alone cannot achieve environmental
protection, much less improvement in environmental conditions or correct the
cumulative environmental insults from over a century of human development,
“progress,” and inattention to the environment. Environmental legislation,
regulation, analysis tools, dedicated professionals, activism, and behavioral
changes are some of the components necessary to actually move from simple
environmental awareness to the actual protection of our environment and
remediation of past environmental insults and inattention. This topic focuses
on some of these necessities (environmental legislation, regulation, analysis
tools, and instruction for dedicated professionals), describing how they relate
to environmental impact analysis, achievement of environmental protection,
and society's self-view of environmental awareness and concern.
Our current environmental awareness has not always been the case.
Following World War II, the United States was a country of vast natural
resources with seemingly limitless human resource potential and energy,
and a strong sense of mission and confidence that they could advance their
civilization and society beyond anything imagined in the 19th and early
20th centuries. This attitude and commitment to progress led to a complexity
of civilization and infrastructure never before approached in human history
with little or no consideration of environmental resources. Take as evidence
the nationwide Interstate Highway System, the drastically expanded auto-
mobile industry, the annual production of household appliances at an annual
rate exceeding total production of all commodities prior to the 1930s, vastly
increased domestic military presence, and the extraction and processing of
materials (e.g., metals, forest products, and petroleum) that support these
advances in society and lifestyle.
In reaction to the exponential growth in American civilization, consumer-
ism, and infrastructure during the late 1950s and 1960s, a proactive segment of
the American population became increasingly aware and concerned that these
activities were ignoring and damaging the nation's critical environmental
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