From your acclaimed writer of The Pencil also to Engineer Is Human, The Essential Engineer is an eye-opening exploration of the ways that science and engineering must work together to address our world’s most pressing issues, from coping with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters towards the development of efficient automobiles and the seek out renewable energy sources. While the scientist may determine problems, it falls towards the engineer to resolve them. It is the inherent about THE FUNDAMENTAL Engineer: Why Technology Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems practicality of executive, which considers structural, financial, environmental, and additional factors that technology often does not consider, that makes engineering vital to answering our many urgent concerns.

Henry Petroski calls for us inside the research, advancement, and debates encircling the most critical challenges of our period, exploring the feasibility of biofuels, the progress of battery-operated vehicles, and the issue of nuclear power. He gives us an in-depth investigation of the various options for green energy-among them solar, wind, tidal, and ethanol-explaining the benefits and risks of each. Will windmills soon populate our landscape the way they did in previous centuries? Will synthetic trees, said to be more efficient at absorbing harmful carbon dioxide than real trees and shrubs, quickly dot our prairies? Can we build a “sunshade” in outer space to protect ourselves from harmful rays? Oftentimes, the technology already exists. What’s required is not so much invention as anatomist.

Just as the great achievements of centuries past-the steamship, the aircraft, the moon landing-once seemed over and above reach, the answers to the twenty-first century’s problems await only a similar coordination of science and anatomist. Eloquently reasoned and created, THE FUNDAMENTAL Engineer recognizes and illuminates these problems-and, most importantly, sets out a program for putting suggestions into action.

Photograph of THE BRAND NEW York Situations Building (c) David Sundberg/Esto