Environmental Engineering FOURTH EDITION

Assessing Environmental Impact 29

may also be increases in the crime rate, the need for police officers on the street, the

need for fire protection, etc. Study of such “boom town” phenomena has led to the

inclusion of these assessments in any environmental assessment.

The business of preparing EISs, EAs, and FONSIs is truly a growth business

worldwide. Besides becoming a cornerstone of environmental regulation in the United

States and Europe, the environmental assessment process is now found throughout the

world. In Brazil, for example, the siting and design of submarine wastewater outfalls

are among the activities that require an EIA according to Brazilian legislation (Jordao

and Leitao 1990). While acting to protect the environment, such roles and procedure

have acted to slow development while creating the ever-expanding job market for those

qualified to conduct and report within the environmental assessment systems of many

countries.

Ethical Considerations

Aproperly done environmental impact assessment is independent of any ethical system
and is value-free. However, ethical questions can arise in formulating a record of
decision based on an environmental assessment. Some of these questions are:

Is it ethical to limit resource extraction, with its concomitant environmental damage,
by raising the resource price and thereby limiting its use to those who can afford it?
Is it ethical to eliminate jobs in an area in order to protect the environment for a
future generation?
Conversely, is it ethical to use up a resource so that future generations do not have
it at all?
Given limited financial resources, is it ethical to spend millions mitigating a
high-consequence impact that is extremely unlikely to occur (a low-probability,
high-consequence event)?
Is it ethical to destroy a watershed by providing logging jobs for 50 years?
Conversely, is it ethical to close down a lumber mill, eliminating jobs for an entire
small community, in order to save an old-growth forest?

The engineer should remember that none of these considerations are part of envi-
ronmental assessment, nor are they addressed by NEPA. Addressing them may be part
of a record of decision, and is the responsibility of the decision makers.

CONCLUSION

Engineers are required to develop, analyze, and compare a range of solutions to any
given environmental pollution problem. This range of alternatives must be viewed in
terms of their respective environmental impacts and economic assessments. A nagging
question exists throughout any such viewing: Can individuals really measure, in the
strict “scientific” sense, degradation of the environment? For example, can we place