“The moral field of environmental engineers in late-twentieth-century United States”
Ryan Hearty, PhD Candidate, History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University

According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, environmental engineers are uniquely equipped to address several of society’s “grand challenges,” such as to sustainably supply populations with food, water, and energy; to mitigate climate change; to reduce pollution and waste; to create smart cities; and to encourage informed decisions about our shared environments. Yet most of us have a vague understanding of what environmental engineers do and why they do it. Who are these engineers, and what is their relationship to the “environment” or environmentalism?

In this talk, Ryan will explore how environmental engineers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s dealt with environmental concerns in ways that differed both from other engineering disciplines and from an older generation of sanitary engineers.

Bio:
Ryan Hearty is completing a PhD in history of science and technology at Johns Hopkins University, where his work focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration in recent engineering fields. Ryan’s dissertation is about water quality management in the United States since 1945 and how experts defined, monitored, and modeled water pollution on behalf of state, regional, and federal agencies. Before pursuing graduate training in history, Ryan has worked as an engineer on the radio communications for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and has a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

This event is co-sponsored with Public Lands History Center