New course explores global impact of engineering decisions Design choices can affect the world environment

Photo by Jenny Gerow

Braden Allenby

By Charlotte Crystal

“Would you be willing to drive a species to extinction to save a human life?”

The question, posed by Braden Allenby, galvanized class discussion:

“Whose life?”

“Which species?”

“Should it matter?”

Questions like those recently fueled the thinking of students enrolled in Earth Systems Engineering and Management, a new undergraduate course at the University.

The course, believed to be the first of its kind, explores the effect that engineering decisions and designs can have on the global environment. Simple things — the design of new products, the siting of housing developments, the management of national parks — all can have unintended consequences. So, instructors are leading students to broaden their scope of analysis when figuring the costs of a plan of action.

Matthew Mehalik

“We need to treat environmental issues not as overhead costs, but as strategic planning issues – as individuals, as companies and as a society,” said Allenby, AT&T’s vice president of health, environment and safety and one of the country’s leading experts in industrial ecology.

Allenby came up with the concept for the course, which he is team-teaching with Matthew Mehalik, a post-doc with the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Division of Technology, Culture and Communication, and Michael Gorman, TCC chair. TCC is offering the pilot course, which is cross-listed by the Department of Environmental Sciences.

“Some environmental problems occur on such a broad scale that no single group has a handle on them,” Mehalik said. “And the trade-offs aren’t always clear. This course is designed to encourage students to take a multidimensional approach to complex problems, considering not only their environmental aspects, but also what is feasible from an engineering standpoint, and what the costs are, both economically and socially.”

Michael Gorman

More than just encouraging an interdisciplinary view of environmental systems, the course strives to influence the thinking of students who one day will be corporate scientists, engineers and managers involved in the design of new products and processes.

“By thinking about environmental, social and economic issues in innovative ways at the design stage, firms can avoid adverse impacts later,” said guest lecturer Andrea Larson, an associate professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration whose teaching and research focus on entrepreneurship and innovation.

“We want students to reflect on their moral obligation to society and to be responsible for their decisions,” said Patricia Werhane, Darden’s Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics, who also is a guest lecturer for the class. “We want them to realize that something may be legal, but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do.”

Andrea Larson

Other guest lecturers include Linda Blum, research associate professor of environmental science; David Rejeski, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Foresight and Governance Project; and Gary Tabor, an associate with the Wilburforce Foundation a private, philanthropic foundation that funds environmental issues in the western U.S. and western Canada.

The multidisciplinary course has signed up 24 undergraduates, half from environmental sciences and half from engineering — primarily civil, environmental and chemical engineering majors. AT&T is supporting the course with a $50,000 gift to the Engineering School’s TCC division.

The course combines the case-study method, common at top business schools such as Darden, and a systems-analysis approach, common in engineering, which should enable students to come to grips with the complex nature of actual environmental problems, Mehalik said. Research projects will include studies of:

Patricia Werhane

•Overfishing of the Atlantic by large commercial fishing fleets

•Difficulties involved with a plan for creating an international park that extends from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming through Yukon National Park in the Yukon Territory, Canada

•Pitfalls of a proposed plan to restore the Everglades after nearly a century of housing development, construction of levees and drainage of swampy areas.

“We are learning about current environmental problems, using the tools we have to analyze them, and we expect to hit a wall,” Mehalik said. “That should lead us to realize how incredibly complex these problems are and how much easier it would have been to avoid them in the first place. We also want to understand the extent to which our social and cultural systems are intertwined with the problems and how they influence the shape of solutions.”