Environmental Engineering: Engineering and Environmental Legislation

One of the most important aspects of engineering is the natural environment. From this environment comes all our natural resources which provide the building blocks for most of the materials we use in engineering construction.

Recently among many sectors of society there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of the environment. However, there is still an attitude amongst many that exploitation of resources is necessary. A recent article by Nath et al. (2005) says that “moral and ethical education is needed to achieve global environmental sustainability by changing people's attitude to nature and the environment.” It is interesting that such an article would state the need for “moral and ethical” education. It appears to be obvious to both Christians and non-Christians that the environment was not given to us for gross exploitation. This idea of environmental management and protection has been shown recently at an international level in a number of ways. The development of the ISO 14000 Environmental Management Standards help organisations minimise negative environmental effects their operations may have. There have also been a number of international watch groups set up to provide research into effective ways of managing certain aspects of the environment. At the national level there has been a lot of work done in the area of environmental sustainability. A key piece of legislation, namely the Resource Management Act 1991, has largely shaped how people can use New Zealand's natural environment. For a Christian engineer there is a lot to be thankful to God for in terms of upholding God's creation as being good and worthy of our best stewardship efforts. Many of the laws today are helpful in providing care for creation and can be a good basis to argue from for the sustainable use of resources. A Christian engineer therefore should seek to uphold these laws in practise. This is not necessarily an easy achievement as much of the law is difficult to interpret and extra effort may be required to understand how the law can be applied. For this reason Christians should make an effort to get involved in activities like the resource consent submission processes, public meetings on parts of the local environment, and local government town planning. Taking an interest at the community level will help develop thinking processes that will be beneficial when faced with hard decisions in the engineering workplace.