CURRENT AND FUTURE DIFFICULTIES IN THE PRACTICE OF ENGINEERING GEOLOGY

The next five to ten years will be critical to the survival of engineering geology as a profession. A crisis currently exists in the quality of work being done in many sectors of engineering geology. If the professional geologic community does not accept the challenge to improve its overall performance record, the contributions that the engineering geologist can make will not be sought or valued by society. The opportunity to appropriately include geology in construction and land-use decisions will become more limited to non-existent if the work now assigned to the engineering geologist is relinquished to the geotechnical and civil engineering community.