perspective of a local engineer

Admittedly, my perspective is that of an engineer, which tends to be narrow. The way an engineer thinks, step one, define the problem. Fence off a tiny little part of the Big Picture and focus exclusively on that. Don't get distracted by stuff going on outside the fence you have defined. Don't fall into the trap of an ever-expanding definition of the problem or your productivity for which you are paid will drop to zero. Engineers don't pretend to be up to dealing with the Big Picture. That's beyond our pay grade. Hence, the engineer jokes. Well of course God is a civil engineer, goes the punch line of one engineer joke. Who else but a civil engineer would locate a waste disposal facility next to a recreational area? Beware of engineers. They will solve the problem and in so doing destroy your world. In Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," the military approaches a brilliant scientist with a big problem, mud. Throughout history, armies have been at war with mud as much or more than with other armies. The scientist focuses his brilliant mind on this problem and comes up with a brilliant solution to it, ice-9. Ice-9 is just ordinary water but in a state nature has never expressed before. All water molecules need to turn into ice-9 is just a seed crystal of ice-9, a crystal this scientist figures out how to make. When any liquid water is shown the pattern of just one seed crystal of ice-9, the water molecules quickly attach to the seed crystal of ice-9 and turn into ice-9. It's not a new substance, just a new way to arrange its molecules. Ice-9 has this wonderful property that it freezes at 89 degrees Fahrenheit. Your army encounters some mud, just introduce one crystal of ice-9, the bog immediately freezes solid, and the army marches on to victory. That's productivity! Course, a downside of this is that a nearby stream of water freezes solid too and then all the worlds' oceans freeze solid, and any water based creatures that come into contact with ice-9 also freeze solid. The only survivor is a species of ant lucky enough to have blood with a high alcohol content and clever enough to gather ice-9 crystals, surround them with thousands of ants, raise the temperature to above 89 degrees, and then have drinkable water again. Ice-9 is completely fictitious, of course, but it illustrates how solving problems without a Big Picture perspective can itself be problematic. This pretty much sums up the 20th century. The 21st century, I suspect, will be pretty much about cleaning up after 20th century technical "solutions". We engineers, however, do have one virtue. We quickly learn from the school of hard knocks not to get too attached to any one game plan however lovely it was in concept. Our motto: always have plan B. When plan A goes kablooey, we don't throw a tantrum or indulge in blaming whoever is handy. Well ok, we do that, but then we move on to plan B. "Go forth and multiply. Subdue your world into submission so that you have dominion over little thing that creepeth and flyeth." That was plan A. Plan A combined with highly productive engineers and scientists is quickly turning into an unmitigated disaster that could render the planet uninhabitable. Onto plan B. What is plan B? That's for the jocks in management to work out.