This survey examines how mechanical engineers are being prepared to be responsible stewards of the environment by offering a multi-channeled look at a diverse collection of twelve US colleges and universities, with connections to the larger global context. This study enumerates the external influences of professional organizations, those responsible for program accreditation (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)), professional conduct (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), and licensure (National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, National Society of Professional Engineers). At the curricular level, this study presents current mechanical engineering curricula via core courses (required at most institutions) and non-core courses (required at a minority of institutions or elective courses). The curriculum study identifies fifteen core courses and uses the Open Syllabus Project and online bookstores to identify a representative textbook and classify the environmental content therein. Immediate results show the environment receiving sparse treatment in core course textbooks, institutions having zero environment-focused degree requirements, and a tendency towards offering electives that are narrowly focused on green technologies. Elective offerings mirror ABET’s recent move away from emphasizing the “broad education necessary to understand the impact” of engineering solutions to instead “consider the impact of” engineering solutions in an environmental context. Overall, the environmental education mechanical engineers are receiving is insufficient in amount and lacking in scientific and ethical foundation. Ideally, every mechanical engineering program should include coordinated environmental content throughout the curriculum and require at least one course that teaches both environmental design principles and the importance of environmental stewardship. A novel approach eschews the typical artes mechanicae course structure to teach environmental stewardship in the artes liberales educational tradition, emphasizing multi-dimensional thinking by employing great books style discussions of seminal scientific, ethical, and technological works.

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A Study of the evolution of the flight I faculty—and in particular its effects in I the realm of Nature and in human affairs—reveals analogies which are, perhaps, of more ithan technical interest. When due proportions have been established, it will be seen that the current period in the development of human locomotion is comparable to that very remote epoch during which Nature, having herself solved the problem of flight, exercised the faculty in accord with some inscrutable law. The analogy gains strength from the fact that changes of a profound kind in the conditions of life on this planet followed the evolution of flight in Nature; and that changes no less profound in character have taken, and are now taking, place as the result of man’s so-called ‘conquest of the air’ brought about by technological advancement.

THE tree of exact knowledge of Science and Technology is now so great that the whole growth is beyond the practical compass of a single museum; the branches, while interrelated through the central stem, are very numerous and the knowledge increasingly diverse in application, so that some differentiation is necessary for profitable study. This is particularly the case in subjects where the application and usage of the knowledge has wide social implications, such as in aeronautics. It is idle to consider human flight apart from the uses to which it may be put and its potential value; to appreciate the full significance of flight it is necessary not only to understand the technical basis of aircraft, but also the vicissitudes of human progress whereby the machine came to be invented and highly developed. For this reason, the treatment of aeronautics in a museum should go beyond the treatment accorded to some other branches of science and technology.

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