From Guest Blogger Lizzie Weakly: Understanding What Environmental Engineering Can Do for Your Community

Environmental engineering primarily touches two sub-fields, civil engineering and biology. But each of these, in turn, is very broad. The field applies to everything from our global environment on down to the local level and interacts with other disciplines as diverse as space science, climatology, architecture, and geology. We notice it most at the local level, where we live.

The Local Environment

We live in communities large and small. The land we live on, the roads we drive on, the buildings we work in, the weather, all of it connects together and effects the comfort and cost of our lives. Many of us live around rivers or the sea, others on steep land, or in places where animal pests are present in large numbers. Environmental engineers shape the land and its ecology to enable us to live our lives no matter the growth in our numbers or the effects of the weather.

Civil Engineering

No single discipline is as much over-lapping with environmental engineering. Everything civil engineers do affects the environment. Every civil engineering project involves environmental engineers whose job is to reduce the negative effects of building on the local quality of life. There are more direct kinds of environmental engineering that are also civil engineering like flood, waste, and water supply management, creation of parks and open spaces along with minimizing the impact of their human visitors, and sound suppression around homes near airports or highways. If any of these seems interesting, a master’s degree in civil engineering should be your educational target.

Buildings we work and live in

Architecture is a branch of civil engineering and buildings have environmental impact both inside and out. The management of the inside environment, especially its air, is another branch of environmental engineering that impacts our daily life. Homes also have environmental impact. On the outside their construction can erode land and on the inside their shape and position affects the cost of keeping the home comfortable along with its “carbon footprint”. Impacts add up as communities grow. Environmental engineering works to reduce the negative effects of the growth we all want.

There is much more than civil engineering in the field. Environmental engineers might also be biologists working to maintain ecological systems in and around local development. They might be working with meteorologists to minimize sources of air pollution, in short almost anything and everything that has to do with the physical place we call home.