Due to the pressing concerns of climate change and its impact on infrastructure design, civil engineering is in need of a major update. That’s what William A. Wallace, a longtime climate change consultant and university professor, argued in a recent op-ed online, also in print (ENR 9/16, p. 80). The commentary, taken from Wallace’s recently published book, “The Great Civil Engineering Overhaul” (ASCE Press, 277 pages), argues that reducing greenhouse gases and creating resilient adaptive infrastructure will require a revolution in professional practice. Although many civil engineers realize what needs to be done, some do not know what to do or are not prepared to take the necessary steps. The excerpt from the book and the added opinion resonated and prompted two very different but thoughtful responses.
▶ Roger R. Patocka, PE posted: Thanks, Bill, for lending your voice and shining some engineering common sense into aspects of our professional practice that I think are long overdue. Early in my career, an engineering journal review of a 1979 book by Dr. Edward Wenk Jr.’s Margins for Survival: Overcoming Political Limits in Steering Technology also clarified my understanding of engineering’s potential.
In his book’s epilogue, Wenk presciently identified the dangers of short-term thinking and moral bankruptcy (as exemplified in political policies such as Project 2025). He wrote: “However, the heart of the matter lies in our propensity to hold ourselves short-term, in Western society, with hedonistic abandon.
We seem to have made a cultural web where the predilection for the short term can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy that, through benign neglect of the long term, there may be none. Announcing economic growth as an end in itself, acquiring the fashionable and popular symbols of contemporary existence, focusing only on living and being, and abdicating personal responsibility to governmental or third-party institutions reflects a fact melancholy that we have neglected. a higher order of social orientation; we have abandoned a moral hierarchy”.
Wenk also published several other notable books. One is his 1996 presentations, Teaching Engineering as a Social Science. Another is called Making Waves. [That book] It inspired my development of an educational module for a community college technical design class for CAD technicians 20 years ago.
▶ Carl Summers posted: Engineers who save the world, a deep uncertainty at the same time. Balancing carbon reduction with climate protection infrastructure sounds like a plot twist for a superhero movie: Civil engineers against the climate crisis. Spoiler alert: They have to think way beyond the project. Congratulations to those who are strengthening themselves to build a future that won’t be wiped out by the next storm!
