environment

Ingeokring Newsletter
programs cannot easily achieve professional
engineering registrations – although they often become
members of multi-disciplinary teams undertaking a
variety of construction projects and environmental
evaluations.
The engineering geologist and the civil engineer
together share the responsibility for ensuring the public
health, safety, and welfare associated with geologic
factors that may affect or influence engineering works.
Yet, in most cases, the public demands that the
professional engineers be held responsible for the safety
and integrity of their works. Thus the engineering
geologist may be considered as a specialist advisor to
the design team, and may hold a position similar to an
architect or other design specialist. In this role, the
engineering geologist often cannot provide legally
binding approvals of a design of an engineering work –
many laws require a Professional Engineer make such
judgments. There is a growing requirement for
establishing a separate professional registration of
geologists, especially for those individuals undertaking
engineering geology investigations.
Professional Liability and Professional Registration
Professional liability has become an important concern
for many professions in many countries and geological
engineers and engineering geologists are not immune
from this condition. These concerns have led to
increased professional registration requirements for
both geologists and engineers. Several competing
registration approaches have developed in the USA,
Canada, and Europe. In North America, the professional
registration of engineers has been legislated at the state/
provincial level since the early 20 th century and has been
accepted as needed to protect the public interests. The
case for an equivalent registration of geologists has
not been so clearly accepted, and in fact there has been
considerable opposition to such registration by many
geologists.
In the USA, procedures to register engineers and
geologists are administered quite independently by
distinct official boards of registration. While all states
have engineering boards, only about one-half the states
have geology boards. In Canada, the provincial
legislatures delegate the registration process to
professional associations, and in the majority of the
provinces a single association supervises the
registration of engineers and geologists. The concept
of professional registration is evolving in Europe. Once
again, geologists are tending to lag behind engineers in
embracing the need for professional registration.
International trends, especially the increased
globalization of markets for consultation services as
well as goods, have placed new pressures on the existing
professional registration procedures. The requirements
to have multiple registrations in several states or
provinces in North America, in order to undertake
projects at several locations, impose time and cost
constraints on individual engineers and geologists, and
their employers. Only limited reciprocity arrangements
currently exist between Canada and the United States.
Similar trends within the European Union have led to
new developments that promote European
designations.
The concept of professional registration for geologists
is still relatively young. Major constraints are the lack
of public acceptance of the need for registration, the
lack of “official” legal standing within some jurisdictions,
the objections of many geologists who see registration
as restricting their mobility and freedom to conduct
studies, objections by other professions, and
competition among professional societies for authority
to provide and supervise such registrations.
What Will the Future Bring?
Engineering Geology and Geological Engineering
appear to be at a crossroads – their ability to provide
the expertise to solve society’s needs and desires for a
more livable environment points toward a bright future.
Certainly, new and ever more challenging environmental
issues will make the design and construction of new
transportation and other facilities depend even more
on an accurate prediction of geologic conditions. The
increasingly sophisticated designs depend for their
success on the involvement and acceptance of the
geological engineer and engineering geologist.
Yet Geological Engineering does not have the advocacy
within the larger established professional societies to
ensure its growth or even survival as a designated
independent engineering specialization. Even the wider
field of engineering geology practice, encompassing
both geological engineers and engineering geologists,
is facing a similar identity crisis. This is occurring in
spite of expanding employment opportunities and the
recognition of the need for such specialists by potential
employers.
The limited, and shrinking, capacity to educate and train
new practitioners in these fields provides an even greater
threat. The majority of the academic programs are
relatively small. In many countries, universities face
economic pressures that encourage the elimination of
smaller “specialist” or “elitist” high-cost programs and
departments. Throughout Western Europe and North
America, the enrollment of students in engineering and
science, especially geoscience, has been falling for
several years. Many talented students are not selecting
the “tougher” courses of study demanded by
engineering and science fields. Topical areas perceived
as narrow specialties are apparently at a further
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