ABSTRACT
Engineers working on roads, rivers, dams, tunnels, bridges, landfill sites, quarries and buildings all have a profound effect on the environment. Some industrial landscapes, largely created by engineers in the canal age, for example, are now valued as exciting places to visit and enjoy. In our time, however, engineers have been rather more associated with the destruction of the environment. Roads have been and continue to be the subject of fierce environmental controversy. Rivers have been straightened out and their banks have been stripped of trees and concreted, as part of land drainage schemes. Waste management engineers have often assumed that landscapes which do not make a profit for their owners, such as woodlands and wetlands area automatically ‘derelict’ and therefore good places for dumping rubbish in.
