In the world in which we now live, in the country in which we now live, and in the political climate in which we now live, it is very important to understand what environmental engineering is and why it is important to all of us.
To be brief, environmental engineering is the segment of engineering that is concerned with the application of scientific and engineering principles to be used in the protection of the human population from the effects of adverse environmental factors. In addition, environmental engineering is employed for the protection of the environment, be it local or global, from activities both natural and human. It is the aim, in the end, to improve the overall quality of the environment.
When we stop to think about it, the majority of the Earth is made up of water. A vast majority of that water is unusable in terms of the survival of human beings. We need to be very careful with the water we have or we will end up being in a very real condition where there is water all around us but not a drop of it will we be able to drink.
Rainwater is a vital part of the process when it comes to gathering the water that we can use for our survival. Roughly 25% of all rainwater becomes groundwater. It is groundwater that provides the flow of many streams and rivers throughout our land. Many of these streams, rivers, and lakes are windows to the water table.
The water quality reports that environmental engineering makes available to us indicate that almost half of the streams in the United States are polluted. In addition to the streams that are polluted, 47% of the country’s lakes and almost a third of the bays have been met with the same fate. The pollution in this country from a variety of different sources is contaminating almost all of our usable water.
It is not just the bays, streams, rivers, and lakes that are being polluted, however. We are also polluting the groundwater by the use of pesticides. It has been determined that there are over 73 different kinds of pesticides found in the groundwater in the United States. These pesticides, unless adequately filtered, eventually end up in our groundwater, rendering it useless for drinking.
The more skilled we become in our environmental engineering pursuits, the more we must realize that our very lives are in danger if we do not adequately take care of our water supply. When we think about the usable water on our planet, we realize that it is all we have.