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 New Degree Programs at The University of Georgia focus on a growing need
Integrating the many systems that make up society with sustainable design, Environmental Engineering at UGA brings the nature of design into focus.
By Alan Flurry
The living environment encompasses many systems – an economy, a transportation system, civil infrastructure, a political system, and of course the people who live in a particular place. This composite of disparate systems is overlapping and should be symbiotic, not strictly competitive. In a competitive environment, the interests of one system are placed in conflict with one or more others and is the genesis of the notion of protection, of one system from another, and more often than not results in a zero-sum mentality on the part of entities that should have common interests.
Integrating the systems of our built environments so that they can be sustainable and function as a larger whole is the challenge facing society in the 21st century. Optimizing the integrity of the systems and the safety of the people that live within them is an engineering challenge that will not be solved by engineers alone. It will involve economics, aesthetics, politics, engineering design, as well as the fundamentals of systems ecology. In these challenges of today, we see the traits that must be present in tomorrow’s engineers.
“Our engineers have to be able to design with a sense of the interdependence within the world they occupy,” says UGA Engineering professor David K. Gattie, one of the architects of the new degree program in environmental engineering. With solid programs already established in engineering, the Institute of Ecology, the School of Environment & Design and specialty expertise within the School of law, the University of Georgia stands poised to make valuable contributions going forward in the field of environmental engineering.
The field has existed as such since the 1960’s, primarily as a conjunct to other traditional engineering disciplines such as civil, mechanical and structural. Traditionally, environmental engineers have designed drinking water systems, waste water systems and storm water systems, among others. Add to this a modicum of assessment expertise, concentrated on impacts and abatement, and the picture of the modern environmental engineer is basically complete. But the portrait is appearing woefully inadequate for the many types of design required for healthy and sustainable urban ecosystems. “The prevailing environmental engineering adage has been to concentrate, collect, treat, and dispose: there’s a dearth of livingness to it,” Gattie explains.
An urban ecosystem does not consist of water as the lone commodity of ecological interest; there is the air and climatology, but also a confluence of economic stakeholders that conspire independently toward goals that often conflict. And here is where environmental engineering must expand toward integrating these overlapping systems, instead of an over-reliance on protecting them as isolated entities. But is this systems perspective a novel turn in the road that will require new threads of basic research? Yes and no.
Systems Theory dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century, though most of its thinkers and adherents are obscure names today. Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was a Viennese biologist who founded the interdisciplinary field of general systems theory with William Ross Ashby and others in the 1950’s. Based on principles from ontology, philosophy of science, physics, biology and engineering, systems theory focuses on the organization and interdependence of relationships and presents methods for understanding dynamic behavior of complex systems. Many of the original ecologists were purveyors of systems theory, including one of UGA’s most renowned faculty members, the late Eugene Odom, hailed as the father of modern ecology. Regents’ Professor Bernard C. Patten, whose work adheres to systems ecology precepts as they were originally developed, is the strongest connection from this work to the present at UGA. Thus, much of the theorizing exists as systems principles.
The UGA Environmental Engineering degrees will develop a research and undergraduate curriculum along these fundamental principles.
The leading-edge repercussions of this new UGA Environmental Engineering program cannot be overstated. A curriculum built around integration and higher level entities is not one typically associated with engineering programs, which makes the fit to UGA even more appropriate. Gattie again: “It will be an education of the stakeholders, from the day they walk into the department. Developing the principles of how separate entities are dependent on one another will lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of disparity and mutual benefits within a system.” The belief is that a sustained emphasis on critical, higher level thinking is key to solving problems in complex environments like large urban ecosystems. “There are serious issues to deal with there, that transcend air and water; urban heat islands, microclimatology, public transportation, political and economic considerations,” Gattie explains, as the case constructs itself for why such a multi-faceted engineering program needs a liberal arts environment and vice-versa.
Shift in Engineering Education
Designed engineered systems don’t happen by luck or accident, but result from a commitment to developing a template for design that recognizes the constraints of integrated systems. People want to make the places they live and work better and improve the economy of these locales; this is why optimization is part of the design world. Educating students in the mindset of developing the further constraints to manage disparate systems is the key to the future of environmental design. Building a depth of understanding about how actors in a system affect one another, students will grow accustomed to the ambiguities while they achieve a cumulative design expertise.
“Solutions for sustainable development will not always be subject to the crisp laws we’ve always fallen back on,” Gattie concludes. In disparate, unequal settings, management becomes the order of the day; design is fundamental, but when the systems do not break down along crisp lines, management becomes essential. “Management is decision-making, and decision-making in complex systems is not a simple thing,” Gattie adds.
If this sounds like a new kind of engineering dressed up as a new kind of engineering education, it should. The new program was designed to reflect many of the changing paradigms that are being grappled with at new plateaus of engineering instruction and research. And the acknowledgement of the limits of a single-discipline oriented approach holds greater promise at UGA, where launching a new, multidisciplinary engineering program is much more of a reality. Engineering education hasn’t changed significantly in 100 years, even though complex systems might not be as submissive to traditional engineering sciences. Statics, fluids, and dynamics all remain crucial to the world of design, yet as living entities are introduced, these sciences approach the limits of their applicability. The laws don’t exist that easily govern complex systems and acknowledging that engineering applications are no longer just black and white but a product of the vagaries of overlap and integration is a first step toward harmonious design within these systems. What better institution to bring the many forces of society to bear on design? Environmental engineering at UGA, preparing to redefine the nature of design. §
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