Who will fix our drinking water infrastructures in the next five years? Who will repair our failing energy delivery systems? Who will remediate the thousands of superfund sites around the country? Who will deal with our wastewater? Or find solutions to our food and agriculture systems? Who is going to deal with any of these vital issues? These are the challenges of tomorrow, today and the future, simultaneously, and environmental engineering is one of the core programs at RPI offering a valid approach to addressing these problems.

This is a plea for understanding—understanding how critical right now is for securing a means to empower our youth toward making a transition toward a sustainable future. My name is Christopher Kennedy and I am a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Environmental Engineering program and I cannot even imagine my life without having been through this program.

Why not change the world, you say? How can an institution ask this question without offering to its students the core knowledge of how earth’s processes are interconnected to everything we do and everything we use in the world. For engineering is at its core, an integration of how the technologies and processes of the world impact and shape an environment and its citizens. Our environment, to be exact; the environment that every single person on this planet is apart of.

Sustainability, go-green, eco-chic, the buzz words are everywhere, everywhere you look, environmental issues are front page news! With a world facing a myriad of crises all connected to a singular focal point—ecology—how can any accredited university provide a balanced education about our role in shaping a healthy co-habitation with the land, air, and water we all share, without providing the tools and resources for the leaders of tomorrow? The environmental engineering program facilitates just that.

I truly think that eliminating the environmental engineering program from RPI is an utter shame, an outrage for a university supposedly reaching toward a new plateau of research and international recognition. How can an institution eliminate the one program that should be expanded and looked at as an opportunity to begin to address the top engineering challenges of our future? What we need right now in the world is an environmental engineering pedagogy, because it provides students tangibility amid a world of abstract ecological and sustainability concepts. We need an ecological engineering pedagogy because it bridges the sometimes large gaps between science, application and the people, organisms and places that are affected thereafter. Please, students of RPI, band together and realize the importance of this resource at such a crossroads in our relationship with the Earth. We need leaders who understand the systems that we all rely on for our food, our water and everything in between. This is a plea for understanding, a plea that I know you will all answer in one form or another.

<b>Christopher Lee Kennedy