Engineers vs Economists

Let me tell you what the engineers do. As part of the engineering society, I feel that the development of human race lies within our hands. All the hard work, the dirty jobs and the painful long working hours are all bared on our shoulders. In simple words, engineers build roads, canals, buildings, houses, bridges, ships, airplanes, cars and towards the other extremes… engineers design and create microchip, tiny computers, recombinant DNA you name it. All of the most complicated things on earth, we build... and then we destroy them. We even succeeded in destroying the rain forests for land development, disrupting nature’s life cycle, increasing the concentration of pollutants in every drop of water you drink and every breath you inhale. Oh yeah, we did that.. Really do.. We then get blamed for the ozone depletion, the climate change, the oil spills, massive nuclear reactor explosions, the increment in death rate for cancer related diseases, the extinction of wild life… and the list goes on and on..

Underlying what we have done, what we have contribute, all our live and energy being centered towards the development and making life much easier for the race called homo-sapiens… does anybody know why we are being asked to do this? Is there a specific purpose why we wanted to pollute the air, deteriorate the environment, increasing the probability of pregnant mothers to be more prone to have a maldeformed child ?

We don’t really have any reasoning, we were ASKED to do this because the demand of the world citizen.. "am not putting the blame on public citizen" because this is the portion where bulk of the big shots country’s wealth came from.. it is the “Economists” whom is the architect that designed what is to be in DEMAND, decides and influences the super powers on what is to be trade off (our world, the environment) and what's not (the economy, stock exchange, liquidity should be on the highest priority), and to what magnitude it is going to be implement (small scale or big scale).

I quote this closing remarks fromRoland Clift (TCE Feb 05), "... that means, engineers now need to join in as social or political agents not just as technicians. Enabling the future generation's sustainability also means using our (engineer's) expertise to warn against actiities that will damage future generations, and to show there are other ways of doing things than the technologies we use routinely now."

Make sense? Perfectly overstated...

Have a think about it.