REVIEW

Ecological Engineering Education: New Thesis Gives Overview

Review of "Ecological Engineering - An Interdisciplinary Approach for Sustainable Ecosystems - A Field in Development", Diplomarbeit (Diploma Thesis), Institut für Geografie der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Austria), Graz , 2001, 109 pp.

By Andreas Schönborn, Switzerland

The websites are often not comprehensive. Good reviews and overviews are missing. There are synonyms and related, overlapping fields that make an assessment difficult. Moreover, the spirits and attitudes hidden behind the label "ecological engineering" are often not comparable (which is, of course, not a great surprise in such an diverse and integrated field).

In her Diploma thesis, Mrs. Astrid Kirchner, a young geographer from Austria, tries to give an overview about the field of Ecological Engineering as a whole and the state of Ecological Engineering education in the year 2000. It is, of course, a flashlight, since there is a lot of development taking place right now and things may change quite fast in the next few years. The advisors were Prof. Robert Nairn, USA, and Prof. Friedrich Zimmermann, Austria.

The main part of Kirchner's thesis focusses on the identification and brief description of existing or planned Ecological Engineering programs (chapter 9). In chapters 10 and 11 Kirchner then briefly describes case studies in the USA and in Austria and ends her thesis with a conclusion (chapter 12). One of her case studies is published in this newsletter (Mine-land Restoration: Phytoremediation of Heavy-Metal Contaminated Sites - a critical view)

Kirchner has identified 23 schools and institutions, mainly in the US, that offer some kind of Ecological Engineering program or are planning to do so. As information resources, she used the results of a 1999 workshop in Ohio on Ecological Engineering education, a websearch and a survey sent out to 30 individuals in 22 schools (16 questionnaires were returned). The results of this survey (published in the appendixof the thesis) are most interesting, as they show quite clearly how widely the attitudes may differ between proponents of Ecological Engineering.

Kirchner's thesis is a valuable resource for anyone interested to get a degree in Ecological Engineering in the USA. It points out the important schools, looks at their programs and thus provides valuable help for a decision. It gives good examples for case studies. I also appreciate very much her attempt to give an overview over the background, the history and the comparison of the many synonyms and related fields. The results of this attempt are sumarized in a table.

A shortcoming for people from outside the USA is the strong focus on US universities. This is probably due to the location of her US advisor (Prof.Robert Nairn) and the heavy use of the internet, she made. It also seems to be quite difficult to get responses from not English speaking countries. The two Japanese universities did not answer her survey, neither did the German University at Magdeburg.

In general, I would have liked less examples and a more detailed discussion of them. For example, the notable absence of Ecological Economics, Ecological Modelling and Social Science in most of the surveyed curricula is not discussed any further. In at least one case, a restriction of the number of schools would have allowed to avoid a mistake: Swedish Folk Colleges, such as the Stensund Folk College, are not universities. They don't offer academic degrees. Therefore, Stensund should have been excluded from the survey.

Concerning the case studies, I would have preferred a more critical discussion of them. For example, the work of Sherwood C. Reed et al. [1, 2] would have been an interesting contrast to the information found on http://www.livingmachines.com, which is supposedly biased by the commercial interest behind it.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Kirchner's thesis is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the state of ecological engineering education and can only be recommended.

[1] Reed, S.C., Salisbury, J., 1995, A Process Evaluation of the AEES "Living Machine" System in Frederick, MD, Contract Report 68-C2-0102WA3-18, US EPA OWEC, Washington, DC

[2] Reed, S.C., Salisbury, J., Fillmore, L., Bastian, R.K., 1996, An Evaluation of the "Living Machine" Wastewater Treatment Concept, Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Wetland Systems for Water Pollution Control, Vienna

The thesis can be ordered directly from Mrs. Astrid Kirchner (smilingfool2000@hotmail.com).