Due to the pressing concerns of climate change and its impact on infrastructure design, civil engineering needs a significant update. That’s what William A. Wallace, a longtime climate change consultant and university lecturer, argued in a recent online viewpoint, 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 cutting greenhouse gasses and creating resilient adaptive infrastructure will require a revolution in professional practice. While many civil engineers realize what must be done, some either don’t know what to do or aren’t prepared to take needed steps. The book excerpt and added opinion resonated and provoked two very different but thoughtful replies.
▶ Roger R. Patocka, P.E. posted: Thank you, Bill, for contributing your voice and shining some common engineering sense on aspects of our professional practice that I feel is long overdue. During the early years of my career, an engineering magazine review of a 1979 book by Dr. Edward Wenk Jr., entitled Margins for Survival: Overcoming Political Limits in Steering Technology, also clarified my realization of engineering’s potential.
In his book’s epilogue, Wenk presciently identified the perils of short-term thinking and moral bankruptcy (as now exemplified in political policies like Project 2025). He wrote, “Yet the heart of the matter lies in our proclivity to fasten on the short run, in Western society, with hedonistic abandon.
We seem to have spun a cultural web where the predilection for the short run may constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy that by benign neglect of the longer run, there may be none. To herald economic growth as an end in itself, to acquire the fashionable and popular symbols of contemporary existence, to focus only on living and being, and to abdicate personal responsibility to government or third-party institutions, reflect a melancholy fact that we have neglected a higher order of social guidance; 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] 20 years ago inspired my development of an educational module for a community college technical design class for CAD technicians.
▶ Carl Summers posted: Engineers saving the world, one deep uncertainty at a time. Balancing carbon-cutting with climate-proofing infrastructure sounds like a plot twist for a superhero movie: Civil engineers vs. the climate crisis. Spoiler alert: they have to think way outside the blueprint. Kudos to those stepping up to build a future that doesn’t wash away with the next storm!
