Environmental Consulting Fundamentals

This book was born of necessity. In 2000, I began teaching a graduate course, entitled “Environmental Investigations and Remediations” at Hunter College in New York City. I designed the course to be a survey course that would provide someone interested in becoming an environmental consultant upon graduation with the basic building blocks needed to start their career in this dynamic, multi-disciplinary field. There was only one problem—I couldn’t find a textbook to support the course. There were textbooks out there that covered only 1/3 of the course material, but none that covered the other 2/3 of the course. I was forced to cover that material with a combination of regulations and guidance documents that were, in general, far too detailed and obtuse for a survey course, or with material written for “citizens” that was far too simplistic.

So, in the course of the ten years that I taught the course, I started to fill in the reading assignments with my own writings, which led me to pursuing the “fully Monty,” namely this book.This is the book that I wish was available when I was designing the course. In fact, it is the book I wish someone had written when I began my career as an environmental consultant! It is designed for the student as well as the beginning practitioner.

Each chapter of this book covers a topic that merits a book itself; however, they are not intended to make the reader an expert in any of the topics presented. Nor, for that matter, will the reader be able to go out and perform an environmental investigation or remediation after reading this book. That skill requires not just the knowledge obtained from reading this book, but the field experience, ideally obtained under the apprenticeship of a more experienced hand.

Rather than placing an emphasis of formulas, equations, and regulatory requirements, this book emphasizes the thought processes that go into designing an environmental study, interpreting the data obtained from the study, and selecting the next step, be it further investigation or remediation. It also discusses the specific roles played by the environmental consultant, and the roles played by others in the investigation and remediation activities, thereby giving the reader the “big picture” of how these activities actually happen in real life.

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