Two fascinating books an environmental scientist and engineer must read: A Memory Recall on some of the work done by Emeritus Professor Paul Mac Berthouex

I remember that I was asked in 1984 to teach undergraduate students of IIT, Bombay “Environmental Science & Engg” over 36 lectures. Earlier, there were three professors who co-taught this course splitting the course into compartments such as water pollution, air pollution and waste management. This was because those professors were specialized in these specific areas.

I realized that this way of “siloed” teaching is not going to lead to an integrated understanding of the students towards the “problem” and its “solution”. So I started looking for a book that could help me in this direction. The book I hit upon was Strategy of Pollution Control by Paul Mac Berthouex and Dale F. Rudd published in 1977. Prof Berthouex (Mac Bertho) is a civil and sanitary engineer and his mentor Prof Rudd was a well-known chemical engineer.  This was perhaps a great combination of Professors for writing Strategy of Pollution Control  – a truly unconventional textbook.

Strategy of Pollution Control is one of my favourite books even today. It is not media specific and emphasizes that you need to know enough of ecology, microbiology, chemistry, separations and strategies to manage pollution in an integrated manner. The book is so differently written with a “case study” approach and has an inspirational and challenging set of questions at the end of each chapter. I found that the undergraduate students at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay could “take on” this book pretty alright and they really enjoyed. (We get at IIT the brightest engineering students of India. So teaching with this book with them had really put me on toes! To my relief, Mac was kind enough to send me set of solutions to the problems).  Unfortunately, this book is not available anymore.

In 2017, Mac partnered with Professor Linfield C Brown and released “updated” and “expanded” version of this book in two parts. These books titled as Pollution Prevention and Control can be downloaded freely from https://www.arma.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pollution-prevention-and-control.pdf (Part I) and https://www.arma.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pollution-prevention-and-control-material-energy.pdf (Part II). The only drawback is that you will need to tolerate the advertisements that keep appearing on every other page. But at least, you get access to read some of the amazing content the authors have put together.

Environmental data analytics is a subject that has always fascinated me. Today, thanks for the availability of instruments that make data on air and water quality and emissions on 24×7 basis and globally we generate billions of data units. It’s sad that while we invest significantly in purchasing the continuous environmental monitoring instruments, we don’t even invest a fraction of these investments in cleaning and questioning the collected data and building capacity of students, regulators and policy makers. We seldom analyse and interpret the data to take informed decisions.  Read my blog that I wrote in frustration (anger?) with all the satire some ten years ago https://prasadmodakblog.com/2014/11/24/why-monitor-environmental-quality-why-not-generate-random-numbers/ . Here I vent out my frustrations on environmental monitoring and data and make some bold and hard hitting statements.

The subject of environmental data analytics (simply called in good old days as environmental statistics) has been Professor Mac Bertho’s forte. He together with Linfield C. Brown published the first book on Statistics for Environmental Engineers. This book is a must to all those who are confronted with volumes of environmental data and are interested to extract information and take decisions.

This book can in fact serve as a text book for professors who are interested to run a full course on Environmental Statistics. Mac was kind to pass to me soft copy of the book as well as the solutions manual.

This book and the solution set can be downloaded from my company’s website under the page of publications. Do visit https://emcentre.com/publications/ and grab copies.   You may find other useful publications as well.

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Paul Mac Berthouex is Emeritus Professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He received his M.S. in sanitary engineering from the University of Iowa in 1964 and his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970. Professor Berthouex has taught a wide range of environmental engineering courses, and in 1975 and 1992 was the recipient of the Rudolph Hering Medal, American Society of Civil Engineers, for most valuable contribution to the environmental branch of the engineering profession

I met Mac Bertho in London in 1986 at one of the conferences of International Association for Water Pollution Control (now International Water Association). I had presented then a paper on Optimum Allocation of Wastewater Loads in Rivers. Someone in the last row wearing a loose tee shirt got up and asked me a difficult question that I had to somehow make efforts to “dodge” and answer  “something”. That someone was  Professor Paul Mac Berthouex of University of Madison in United States.

We continued our association when I used to spend 3 months each year over three years at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK courtesy Professor A (Sam) James – another legendary professor. We met there in 1985 when Mac was Visiting Faculty at University of Newcastle. Our discussions on various topics of environmental engineering, especially on teaching methods were very lively and enriching to me. Those were indeed the golden days of my professional life. In 1992, we met again in Mumbai where Mac joined my team consisting of I. Kurki-Suonio and K. Noll to write  A Multimedia Postgraduate Course in Environmental Engineering – Air Pollution, UNESCO Series in Engineering Sciences. I was then the book coordinator and editor and I don’t even know if UNESCO published our work! We had camped in Matheran, a hill station near Mumbai, to plan the book!

We are still in touch even today although I haven’t seen him for over past 30 years! Thanks to the world of internet.  Here is a picture where you see Prof Mac Berthouex on the left and the great Professor G E P Box (contributor to the famous Box-Jenkins time series).

Today my bucket list includes writing a book with Mac on case studies. It does seem difficult but God willing we will do this bit.

I was happy to read that Prof Box was one of the mentors to the book Statistics for Environmental Engineers that Mac and Linfield wrote. It was Professor Box who once said ““All models are wrong – but some are useful”.

Who would disagree? Will you?

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