AEESP/AAEE Conference 2002

Changes in the discipline of environmental science and engineering (ESE) are reviewed and a case is made for continued growth of a new metadiscipline of Sustainability Science. This new field embraces economics, social processes, environmental processes, and industrial ecology. Research opportunities and examples of previous successes are discussed in the areas of: (1) sustainability metrics, (2) coupling of industrial ecology, economics and environmental impacts, and (3) decision support for individual, organizational and societal choices. Multiple skills and capabilities required to support the new metadiscipline of Sustainability Science are summarized. It is clear that pollution prevention and industrial ecology alone are not sufficient to achieve sustainability, because even systems with efficient material and energy use can overwhelm the carrying capacity of a region, or lead to other socially unacceptable outcomes. A critical aspect of Sustainable Science will be to understand the flow of information that supports and motivates the decisions that control material and energy flows and the consequent system sustainability, and it is this integration that will motivate many of the advances in our field in the 21 Century. Introduction: Evolving Focus of Environmental Science and Engineering As noted in the summary of a previous AEESP research meeting more than a decade ago (Luthy and Small, 1990), ESE has continued to adopt new approaches, insights and techniques from the fine scales of cellular and molecular biology, physics and chemistry, while at the same time addressing new problems of regional and global impact and complexity. As part of this growth, the scope of problems that have been examined has expanded from those requiring knowledge and characterization for a single media, to those involving multiple media and their interactions. At one time, single media studies focused on water, air, or solid waste treatment, with little consideration given to the other media where pollutants were transferred. Subsequently, the ESE field embraced a multimedia approach to treatment -and treatment was considered ineffective unless the pollutant was destroyed or rendered immobile. With respect to spatial focus, treatment issues were generally confined to a local or plant-level scale. However, as the ESE field matured, the temporal and spatial scales of problems increased. (See Figure 1.) First, environmental scientists and engineers (ESEs) tackled conventional pollutants on a regional scale (e.g., reactive gases in the atmosphere, nutrients, dissolved and suspended solids) and water quality issues such as eutrophication and turbidity, and air quality issues such