IEES - Editorial

Editorial

Dear friends of Ecological Engineering, dear IEES members,

the field of Ecological Engineering is moving out of its niche and becoming mainstream.

This is a claim! But many things indicate that it is true. Statements like US-president Obama's pledge to "to double US production of alternative energy in three years". It is becoming obvious that we are running out of fossil oil. Several universities in Europe are getting on the tracks and are developing Ecological Engineering curricula, among them my own school at Waedenswil, Switzerland.

The current interest among students issues like organic waste and wastewater recycling technologies, in alternative energy and the like is overwhelming. Lots of people are beginning to see a professional career in these fields for themselves. The financial crisis may be boosting it.

Personally I am looking back on 10 years of editing this website and the EcoEng-Newsletter. In this area, too, change is tangible. Finally, the IEES website now runs on new, flexible and up-to-date content management system. This offers a range of new opportunities:

articles can be added from every computer connected to the internet at any time during the year
section editors can manage parts of the website in parallel, disregarding time or place
IEES members can actively contribute articles and links after Login and...
... they can post job offers by themselves for free (if you are a member and interested in this, please contact me)

One consequence of this is that the new IEES-newsletter (for continuity reasons I named it No. 14) no longer looks like the older ones. It is really an electronic "letter" that points to the collection of articles and short notes that have been added to the IEES website in the past couple of months.

In this issue you will find information about:

the alarming water situation in El Salvador (a review by Maeggi Hieber)
activities on capacity development for Ecological Sanitation in India (by Katharina Conradin)
pointers to 4 upcoming conferences, in particular the "International Symposium on Sustainable Ecosystems " in Ghana
two student assessments of real-world projects testing criteria for good ecological engineering

Please also take note of the upcoming e-facilitation online training (May 25 to June 19, 2009). It may be of interest to all active in international collaboration to learn how to facilitate distributed groups via the internet. There are still a few open places in this course.

So much for today. I am sending my best regards from Switzerland

Andreas Schoenborn
IEES News-editor
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Last Updated ( Friday, 24 April 2009 )