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ECOLOGICAL ENGINEERING

The term “ecological engineering” was coined by Howard Odum, the founder of systems ecology. The field was pioneered by his student William J. Mitsch in collaboration with Sven Jørgensen [MiJ], but it is the work of many.

Its goal is to design systems that work *with* ecosystems rather than replacing them. Its central insight is that ecosystems have a self-designing capability: given the right conditions, nature assembles and maintains its own populations of species, food chains, and biogeochemical cycles, running on solar energy rather than fossil fuels. The ecological engineer’s job is thus not to build and control a system from scratch, as a conventional engineer would, but to act as a facilitator between human needs and natural processes, letting the ecosystem do most of the work. Doing this requires deep ecological knowledge.

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[MiJ] Mitsch, W.J. & Jørgensen, S.E. (2004). Ecological Engineering and Ecosystem Restoration. New York: Wiley.