Book review
Transition Engineering by Susan Krumdieck
Dr Susan Krumdieck is a professor of engineering at the University of Canterbury. She has spent a working lifetime contemplating energy, resources, and social constructs from an engineering point of view. Transition Engineering is aimed at her students, but is digestible by anyone with an engineering bent. It is the cleanest expression of the problems facing humanity, from a practical perspective, that I have ever read.
The concept is simple. She starts with how we will be in 2100 — no fossil energy, lower population, little or no mining, massive recycling — and asks how we get from here to there. More specifically, how we engineer our way from here to there. She addresses mega-problems and ‘wicked problems’ without shying away, an approach that has seen her become a founding member and trustee of the Global Association for Transition Engineering (GATE) in order to address them.
Chapters logic-sequence their way from The Mega-Problems of Unsustainability to the inevitable Conclusion, with a lesser look at the
“Transition Engineering is aimed at her students, but is digestible by anyone with an engineering bent”
economic implications — including taking a longer term, differently calculated view of return on investment.
I was particularly taken by the chapter discussing systems and what she describes as the “InTIME approach”. If I was left with an impression it was the realization that we have empirically built our infrastructure over the past 200 years but we now have to make the same kind of effort — curtailed by specific things such as oil reduction — in a much shorter time. ‘All hands to the pumps’ comes to mind.
This is a word-dense book, made palatable by its logical format and Robert Stannard’s outstanding illustrations. If coming cold to the subject, I suggest downloading James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency and Ronald Wright’s
A Short History of Progress; they make a good, easily readable curtain-raiser. Transition Engineering is the big game, and well worth the ticket.