The Creation and Control of Pest Situations Through Engineering: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

It’s a fair observation that most Americans have a rather poor sense of history and a visit to the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea makes one pause to reflect on the past. Aquaducts, viaducts, pyramids and other massive structures bear witness to the fact that ancient civilizations had good engineers. Barren hills, deserts on the march, and landlocked seaports buried under many meters of alluvium suggest that the ecologists of those early days didn’t have much say about how the landscape should be managed. Certainly the ancient engineers had failures as well as successes and what role their short-term successes and long-term failures played in the rise and fall of civilizations is a matter for historians to determine. Engineers, however, are only parts of socities and engineering is but one of many processes that influence long-term stability of civilizations. We cannot understand the whole by looking at a fraction of the parts but we may start by determining how some of the more important parts are interrelated in their structure and function. The purpose of this symposium is to examine some of the relationships between engineering and pest situations.