Socially Responsible Engineering: Justice in Risk Management
By Daniel A. Vallero and P. Aarne Vesilind
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2007, John Wiley & Sons, softcover List Price: $49.99 (Member/Non-Member pricing will be calculated at final checkout.) |
What does it mean to be a “good” engineer, planner or design professional in the ethical sense? Although hundreds of books have been written about safety and health management, and thousands more about specific processes or industries, this book provides a unique focus on the environmental implications of engineering ethics and justice.
Engineers must make daily decisions that impact on the quality of life of those who live near the facilities, plants, structures and thoroughfares they design, and in the cities and communities they plan and build. The questions of where these projects are built, whom they are to serve, and how they will affect those who live near them are at the heart of Socially Responsible Engineering.
Topics include:
- The concept of environmental justice, including legal aspects, arguments against, and what engineers can do
- Moral justification for environmental justice, including distributive justice, virtue and empathy, and engineering and fairness
- Justice and the engineering profession, in society, politics, communication, ethics, law, education, terrorism, and war
- Direct to human health and welfare, including risk and reliability, risk perception, elements of environmental risk, such as
- Hazard identification
- Persistence
- Bioaccumulation
- Biological response
- Organic versus inorganic toxicants
- Radioisotopes
- Factors of safety
- Exposure estimation
- Direct risk calculations and
- Risk-based cleanup standards
- Indirect risks to human health and welfare, including
- Analyzing environmental impacts
- Photochemical smog
- Acid rain
- Ozone depletion
- Global warming
- Emerging health impacts, including cancer and hormonal/endocrinal dysfunctions
- Hazardous waste contamination
- Diversity, productivity and sustainability of ecosystems
- Green engineering, including
- Sustainable development
- Life-cycle analysis
- Pollution prevention
- Motivations for practicing, such as legal, financial and ethical issues
- Moral challenges and
- Effect on future population
Environmental justice (EJ) communities have suffered historical exposures to disproportionately high doses of potentially harmful substances. Such exposures have often occurred for several decades. These communities are home to numerous pollution sources, including heavy industry and pollution control facilities, or which may be more subtle, such as long-buried wastes with little evidence on the surface of their existence. Environmental justice communities have certain, specified socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. EJ communities must have a majority representation in the low socioeconomic status (SES), racial, ethnic and historically disadvantaged people, nationally or internationally.
Appendices include the physiochemical properties important in hazard identification of chemical compounds and radiative forcing and global warming. Also includes case studies of recent major global events, from Hurricane Katrina and the World Trade Center attacks in the US, to asbestos in Australia, arsenic in Bangladesh and cancer on banana plantations in Brazil, as well as practical examples of more everyday occurrences, such as the determination of the location of hazardous waste sites in various communities, effects of pesticides on sterility, and the saving the wetlands or as simple as the “coffee cup debate”—paper or polystyrene? Biographical sketches of environmental heroes (and some villains) are also included, emphasizing their specific contributions to the greater cultural and societal good.