Abstract
Dear EES readership,
“If engineers who have an obligation to protect the public health act entirely on the basis of their business interest, I fear for the sustainability of our profession and its role in serving society by providing water facilities that serve to promote the public health,” wrote the late Daniel Okun, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan professor of environmental engineering in “Problems in the Pursuit of Safe Water,” in the 1999 Proceedings of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Research Conference (Okun, 1999). At that time, he felt that “the business of engineering had superseded the profession of engineering.” This observation was made after participating in a public debate for a potable water supply project where a practicing engineer's main reason for supporting the controversial project was that if he did not do it, a next firm would. Professor Okun's engagement in a debate on the project organized by the League of Women Voters, and mention of a young professor at UNC-Asheville who debated with him against the project's engineering representatives, strike me as significant today. After attending talks and workshops on community-engaged work at both the AEESP and American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) conferences this summer, I wonder why Professor Okun's public engagement activities seem more the anomaly than the norm today.
At a distinguished panel at ASEE this year, Community Engagement Ethics—First Steps in a Conversation with Affected Communities, five community leaders spoke about their experiences with engineers and/or engineering projects. Lena Young Green, founder of the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association and a longtime community activist working for equitable and safe transportation in Tampa, stressed that “Community people will get up and do whatever they determine has to be done to improve their communities. We may not have the money, we may not have education, we may not have research, but we see a problem and we will do it. We depend on you as engineers to be able to help and guide us. We depend on you as the teachers and instructors.” Panelists said that most engineers and engineering faculty with whom they work do not live within their neighborhoods, and offered that as one reason why many of the stories they shared placed the engineer in a category separate from the community. All five panelists were underrepresented minorities in the United States; three were black women.
Earlier this summer, I started a twitter thread to identify black women faculty in environmental engineering. Thanks to input from members of AEESP, this list now stands at 22. It just so happens that I recently participated in ChocDocs, an ASEE preconference workshop held on June 14, 2019, in Tampa, Florida. Led by Professor Stephanie Adams from Old Dominion University, it promoted “Intergenerational Mentoring Among African American Women in the Engineering Academy.” Self-care, something that should strike a chord among all of us in AEESP, stood out as critical for us to practice daily. After listening to the shared experiences of those in the room, associate dean Bevlee Watford from Virginia Tech sighed and remarked that so many of the structural challenges seemed to be the same for black women in academia as when she started almost three decades ago. She, Professor Adams, and I are three black women leaders of our professional organizations; they as past and current president of ASEE, respectively, and I as current president of AEESP. From the belly of the urban communities that surround many of our campuses to the classrooms where we train the next generation of engineers, the need for human interconnectivity is clear.
Rewinding a month to Monday, May 13th hints at the urgency for that interconnectivity to members of AEESP and how some of them are already making it happen. Lupita Montoya, assistant professor of civil, environmental, and architectural engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Matthew Verbyla, assistant professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering at San Diego State University, cochaired an all-day AEESP preconference workshop, “Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Increasing Diversity and Community Participation to Achieve Environmental and Social Justice.” We workshopped and witnessed presentations from a diverse group of junior faculty, postdocs, students, and community members from Flint, Michigan. Three data-rich presentations grounded us and guided our attention to the need to broaden participation of underrepresented minority groups in our field, many of whom are being trained at the undergraduate level by Hispanic-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities. One group activity on “business as usual” versus “ideal” factors for success in academia demonstrated high valuation of societal impact and meaningful community-engaged partnerships for research and education and noted that these were not ranked highly under current tenure and promotion evaluations. The energy and determination in the room to create the ideal scenario today aligns well with what's needed for us to meet future challenges in our field.
The well-conceptualized and executed AEESP Research and Education Conference at Arizona State University (ASU) featured a plenary where National Science Foundation (NSF) program director Dr. Karl Rockne presented the “Grand Challenges for Environmental Engineering in the 21st Century” based on the 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report (NASEM, 2018). He highlighted NSF funding opportunities (e.g., Navigating the New Arctic) and Big Ideas, such as Growing Convergence Research, for us to consider. Past AEESP president Professor Peter Vikesland from Virginia Tech thought the NASEM report reflected the ideas gathered from three AEESP cosponsored workshops and recommended that we read the workshop report and presentations if more details are needed (https://aeesp.org/nsf-aeesp-grand-challenges-workshops). As a contributor to the NASEM report, past AEESP secretary Professor Kimberly Jones from Howard University implored us to, “remain engaged with our academic institutions, professional associations, and funding agencies as we work to prepare our future engineers to solve these problems. We must ensure that our AEESP community understands the important role of interdisciplinary research, systems analysis, and diversity in pursuing solutions to environmental challenges.”
The NASEM report says that for the field to address a new future, “environmental engineers need to examine the challenges and the alternative solutions using community input and considering short- and long-term consequences across local, regional, and global scales,” the common threads of training being life cycle assessment and systems thinking, and genuine community-engaged work and interdisciplinary collaborations (NASEM, 2018). Back in 1967, according to an article in the AEESP conference proceedings on the role of social sciences in environmental engineering, conceptualization of environmental engineering training had chemistry, biology, social science, engineering systems, and planning as the core curriculum, and members of our organization rejected integration with the social sciences because of logistics (Logan et al., 1967). According to the article, members of our organization pondered “what effect the environmental engineer has had on public attitudes toward pollution, in contrast with the effect the citizens' alarm about the state of the environment has had on engineering activities.” The environmental engineering division of ASEE comes to mind as an additional resource for us to engage on training needs for our field, and I hope our AEESP education committee builds that relationship more.
During his address at the AEESP awards ceremony at ASU, our next president, Professor Karl Linden of the University of Colorado Boulder, shared that in 2020 he wants to see us honor the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the most impactful ways. Hopefully, we use his call to interconnect us to our past, to each other, to the environment, and to people with environmental justice challenges who “will get up and do whatever they determine has to be done to improve their communities.” Luckily, Charles Haas, department head, L.D. Betz, professor of environmental engineering, civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel University, and David Freedman, professor and chair of environmental engineering and earth sciences at Clemson University, independently reached out to us with their archives of our conference proceedings, some passed on from Profs. Wesley O. Pipes at Drexel and Bob Baillod at Michigan Tech. These are currently housed on the AEESP website under conference proceedings, and they are a resource for insight into the fields of environmental engineering and sciences from the EPA's inception.
Professor Linden also stressed his commitment to building an inclusive AEESP community that recognizes and celebrates the diverse members' experiences, and that forges stronger international partnerships. As the seventh woman (out of 56) and first black woman to be president of AEESP, I am cognizant of the voice and experience that I add to this space and have focused specifically on broadening participation, particularly in the context of the United States. An audience member at the ASEE community workshop revealed that her institution enrolled a high number of international students, many from China, and suggested that it would be beneficial for those students to learn from the African American communities surrounding the university campus. She was speaking of the University of Virginia where in 2017 racial clashes during a white supremacist march led to one civilian death and numerous persons injured. A commission on the university's link to slavery (University of Virginia, 2018) acknowledged the deep and long integration and recognized an urgent need to change the university's approach to better work with the communities upon whose backs its' wealth was earned and for whom structural racism emerges in practices and policies that land us with environmental justice challenges that plague our infrastructure and our work.
As engineering and science educators, we can each look around us, whether in the United States or elsewhere, to better comprehend the historical, socioeconomic, and political context in which we operate daily. With our students, we must question ourselves on whether we are truly creating the sustainable communities we often speak of in our publications and whether we are supporting equitable and just societies. In 1967, our organization was male and white and our field was not ready to integrate deeply with social sciences (Logan et al., 1967). Approximately half a decade later, data from the United States show that our undergraduates and graduates are ∼50% women, and now our grand environmental engineering challenges urges us to integrate deeply with social sciences. I truly believe that as an organization we are fit to take up this charge, and through commitments to meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015), we have windows of opportunity to learn from and with colleagues and communities from around the world.