Environmental Engineering 9processes and designs. Environmental awareness and concern became an essentially
permanent part of the U.S. public discourse with the passage of the National Environ-
mental Policy Act of 1970. Today, every news magazine, daily newspaper, and radio
and TV station in the United States has staff who cover the environment and publish
regular environmental features. Candidates for national, state, and local elective office
run on environmental platforms. Since passage of the National Environmental Policy
Act, no federal public works project is undertaken without a thorough assessment of
its environmental impact and an exploration of alternatives (as is discussed in the fol-
lowing chapter). Many state and local governments have adopted such requirements as
well, so that virtually all public works projects include such assessments. Engineers are
called on both for project engineering and for assessing the environmental impact of
that engineering. The questions that engineers are called upon to answer have increased
in difficulty and complexity with the development of a national environmental
ethic.
The growing national environmental ethic, coupled (&ortunately) with a gen-
eral lack of scientific understanding, is at the root of public response to reports of
“eco-disasters” like major oil spills or releases of toxic or radioactive material. As a
result, this public response includes a certain amount of unproductive hand-wringing,
occasional hysteria, and laying of blame for the particular disaster. The environmental
engineer is often called on in such situations to design solutions and to prevent future
similar disasters, and is able to respond constructively.
In recent years, and particularly after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear
plant in 1979, the release of methyl isocyanate at the chemical plant in Bhopal, India,
in 1984, and the disastrous nuclear criticality and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant in 1986, general appreciation of the threats to people and ecosystems posed by
toxic or polluting substances has increased markedly. In 1982 the U.S. Environmen-
tal Protection Agency @PA) began to develop a system of “risk-based” standards for
carcinogenic substances. The rationale for risk-based standards is the theory, on which
regulation is based, that there is no threshold for carcinogenesis. The U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission is also considering risk-based standards. As a result of the
consequent increase of public awareness of risk, some members of the public appear
to be unwilling to accept any risk in their immediate environment to which they are
exposed involuntarily. It has become increasingly difficult to find locations for facil-
ities that can be suspected of producing any toxic, hazardous, or polluting effluent:
municipal landfills, radioactive waste sites, sewage treatment plants, or incinerators.
Aesthetically unsuitable developments, and even prisons, mental hospitals, or military
installations, whose lack of desirability is social rather than environmental, are also
difficult to site. Popper (1985) refers to such unwanted facilities as locally undesirable
land uses, or LuLUs.
Local opposition to LULUs is generally focused on the site of the facility and
in particular on the proximity of the site to the residences of the opponents, and can
often be characterized by the phrase “not in my back yard.” Local opponents are often
referred to by the acronym for this phase, NIMBY. The NIMBY phenomenon has also
been used for political advantage, resulting in unsound environmental decisions. The
environmental engineer is cautioned to identify the fine line between real concern about