02.26.10
Essential Engineer – Time To Act
Check out this short promo for a book called the Essential Engineer.
At its heart, and beyond the grudging tone and sometimes confounding structure, “The Essential Engineer” does strike a point that lies deep and solid as bedrock. The times we live in now call not so much for scientists to measure daintily the likelihood of the next pending disaster as for men and women of action — informed by science, certainly, but also by common sense, economic reality and the social good — to roll up their sleeves and start figuring out how to avoid that disaster. To an engineer like Petroski, that means that it is time to build. And to a very large degree, he’s right. From clean energy and sound roads to safe food and effective medicines, the domain of the engineer is vast, and the need for productive optimism has perhaps never been greater.
Petroski reminds us, quite rightly, that while scientists may ring the warning when it comes to potential disasters, “warnings are not solutions — nor are they necessarily a death knell. It will be the optimistic engineers who hear the warnings not as doomsday scenarios but as calls to tackle significant problems.” The warning bells are ringing clear and loud. One hopes that Petroski’s own alarm, calling engineers to creative arms, is heard as clearly as a klaxon.