Volume 61, Number 1 – Editorial and society news

I concluded some issues ago that these ‘View from the Chair’ pieces get read by few people.  Like most printed pages, there is no feedback loop for immediate gratification or validation to see thumbs up (or thumbs down), but I have occasionally received a message from an AGS colleague or friend (all over 45 years of age) with a question or compliment, which I always appreciate.  While I have collected a little more verbal feedback (with emphasis on ‘a little’), I recall receiving about 6 total emails or texts relating to what I have written in 8 total ‘View from the Chair’ editorials for the journal over two years.  So my documented feedback has been about 0.75 communications per editorial – the stuff of journalistic dreams – and I would guess based on smelling the air that the average readership would be in the low double figures, perhaps 25 to 50 readers, on average, per editorial.  Because several of the pieces have been about AGS governance and strategy – inherently boring topics for most engineers, which I have acknowledged – preparing them has helped me to organise, and to refine my own thinking in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.  The pieces might just be too long, or they might suffer from too few images of cracked foundations, or not enough paleo-channels, or too many hyphens and too many conjunctions.  But I have really enjoyed and have found value in writing what admittedly at times has felt like a personal journal entry relating to my profession.  While I may submit more editorials in the future – and the occasional technical paper – this will be my last as the AGS National Chair, hence the above reflection.                  

On a few occasions I have learned or re-learned that a presentation should start with a summary for the audience of what they’re about to hear.  So in presentation format, you may be about to read about Engineers Australia (EA), politics in the United States, infrastructure in New York City, China, back to EA and the AGS.     

In representation of the AGS, I attended EA’s Forum of Engineers in March 2025 along with representatives of the EA-affiliated learned societies and colleges.  For one of the sessions involving around 70 people, we were separated by tables and asked to identify the biggest challenges facing the engineering profession(s).  My table discussed climate change, infrastructure resilience, an inadequate supply of future engineers, and one person mentioned the lack of engineers in positions of decision making.  I think that last concern deserves consideration and does have relevance, but as ideas from all tables converged, and votes were tabulated, I was surprised to see that the need for more engineers in positions of decision-making (or ‘at the table’) was getting pushed from all directions and shifted up to be recognised as our biggest challenge.  I had/have my doubts about this and shared my observation through a microphone that while I think the issue should be on the list, it felt a bit self-indulging to see it at the top.  

My high school years in Las Vegas coincided with a lot of local debate relating to Yucca Mountain, a site on federal land roughly 125 km north which in 1987 had been proposed by the federal government as a disposal location for nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.  In 1994, and then as a second year Civil Engineering student at Purdue University, I first heard someone’s observation about the lack of people educated as engineers in the United States Congress.  The person making that observation was Norman Augustine, the CEO of Lockheed-Martin at the time, and he also popularised an expression that ‘For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction’.  I counted six of 535 members of the United States Congress with an engineering degree (the AI tells me now that it was actually nine).  There was also a PhD physicist and a handful of other scientists, but the overall limited number of engineers and scientists in political leadership – who ultimately made decisions of far-reaching technical consequence – was curious to me.  In 1995 with a few days free from study, I drove from Indiana to Washington DC where extended family offered me a bed and warm meals in support of a visit to the US Congress.  I had called in advance and aimed to meet as many of the engineers as possible along with my two non-engineer Nevada state senators.  For good measure I also contacted the physicist and another scientist.  

The three engineers I ultimately spoke to or corresponded with were all proud of their educational background and readily agreed to the need for more technically minded leaders.  John Hostettler (R-IN) had previously made public statements about how his degree in mechanical engineering enabled him to pursue working solutions to problems that others might not see.  He welcomed me into his office, which I remain appreciative of, and I asked him about the complexities of social and environmental challenges, and what insight his preparation as an engineer could provide to a scenario like Yucca Mountain.  For the sake of transparency, I wasn’t then nor am now opposed to nuclear energy – Purdue has its own very small reactor on campus and I had friends who studied it – but the emotions were high, and the ‘not in my backyard’ effect was strong.  Still in the wake of a partial reactor meltdown in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Chernobyl accident in 1986, the public was understandably concerned about safety and it permeated the culture.  From Mr. Burns in an episode of the Simpsons:  ‘Homer, your bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island.’  The Yucca Mountain debate included not just Nevada, but every state with rail lines where the waste would be transported to Nevada, and the politics reached television screens between repeats of ‘Cheers’ to explain for everyone just how unsafe the whole plan was.  Or just how safe.  Public safety depended on which ad came up.  Our conversation was friendly and I got a better sense of how he engaged with colleagues on matters of technical and policy importance.  While I don’t think Hostettler had previously implied that engineers can fix anything, I had started to wonder if having more engineers at the table of the Yucca Mountain debates would make any difference at all.  And if there were more engineers, would it be a good thing if they all lined up on one side of the issue, likely in support?  And if I disagreed with the social politics of an engineer, would I still want to support them for public office?    

I spoke on the phone with Joe Skeen (R-NM) and corresponded with Jay C. Kim (R-CA), both with engineering degrees.  I also spoke with two scientists: Vern Ehlers (R-MI) in his office and Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) over the phone.  To avoid doubt, ‘R’ is for ‘Republican’ and a trend was apparent.  Eight of the nine representatives with engineering degrees at the time were Republican.  I was also able to meet my two state senators Harry Reid (D-NV) and Richard Bryon (D-NV) in their respective offices, knowing in advance that both were representing their Nevada state constituents in adamant opposition to the federal government’s plans for Yucca Mountain.  To avoid doubt again, the ‘D’ is for ‘Democrat’.  My suspicion after speaking with them all was that the problem might not be too few engineers and scientists in the US Congress – I did in my conversations hear from most about their engagement with a lot of technical advisors at different levels of government.  By the way, Churchill popularised the expression that scientists should be ‘on tap, not on top.’  Perhaps the problem was too many lawyers.  But then a legislature is there to make laws, so why be surprised at so many lawyers?  Thirty years later, the number of members of the US Congress with an engineering degree is not noticeably different:  the AI tells me in 2026 that it is now ten.    

From early 2002 to mid-2004 I spent most of my days logging boreholes somewhere around New York City.  I worked in many wonderful neighbourhoods that I would not have sought out at the time if not sent there for a geotechnical investigation.  This included a couple of months in 2003 working on the Upper East Side and East Harlem for the Second Avenue Subway Project.  One day after finishing I attended a public consultation session for the project and observed members of the public use their right to 2 or 3 minutes to post questions or ridicule a panel of representatives from the project (one member of the public just called them all idiots and didn’t post a question, which is what the consultation process enables there and obviously here and in many places and is probably a healthy outlet, if civil).  Construction of the first phase started some years later in 2007, and 2.9 km of tunnel with three new stations opened in 2017.

If you work in or around the Civil Engineering profession in New York City, it is inevitable that you will learn about Robert Moses.  Starting as the Parks Commissioner in 1934, and never publicly elected to anything, Moses accumulated a gargantuan amount of administrative power over some decades and drove public works projects at an extraordinary pace.  While he didn’t want to acknowledge some instances of shifting project plans to address the concerns of the wealthy or well-positioned, he prided himself on not shifting, and on a willingness to construct projects where they best served the public, regardless of who was affected.  And therein was the controversy, because undeniably, lower income people living in dense apartment blocks tended to feel the disruption of his projects most often.  Un-checked by New York City mayors and New York State governors as they recognised, he held more public sway than they usually did, having steered highways through the hearts of several thriving and often immigrant communities, he finally was stopped when trying to build an elevated motorway directly across Lower Manhattan in the late 1960s.      

Moses was incredibly energetic and very skilled at overcoming barriers, and at ‘getting things done’.  An online map entitled ‘‘Achievements of Robert Moses’ can clarify the scale of what he did, noting that he had a preference for bridges over tunnels, as he liked visible monuments.  While not an engineer himself, he saw the work of engineers in particular as being at the forefront of progress.  The power of Moses was critically dissected in a 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book of more than 1300 pages.  ‘The Power Broker’ by Robert Caro is critical reading for modern New York City history and was probably one of the most influential books for city planning in the United States shortly after publication.  Sub-titled ‘Robert Moses and the Fall of New York’, the final assessment of Moses was clear to anyone reading the cover.   He was an unpleasant person in many regards, but if there was corruption, it was related to the wielding of administrative power, and not the lining of his own pockets or those of others with public money.  He ‘got things done’ as an authoritarian with little regard for community consultation and difference of opinion.  So, in the last quarter of the 20th century, he became a benchmark in the United States for how not to undertake public works.    

In the years following the 11 September attacks, Robert Moses started getting a new look.  Despite the human tragedy, a lot of people still questioned why the rebuilt One World Trade Centre didn’t open until 2014.  And why the Second Avenue Subway – with the Phase1 design commencing in 2001 – required 16 years for those 2.9 km and three stations to be constructed.  The expression ‘Robert Moses is rolling in his grave’ became commonplace in the media while I lived there up through 2006, and the debate about his legacy in New York City – which includes public parks and pools and Lincoln Centre for the Arts and many things that survive beyond highways through communities – has been reborn and is far from settled.    

Occasionally I am involved with a project here in Australia that is on the fast track that struggles to get boreholes or CPTs into the ground at a reasonable time, such that a design must contend with seemingly more uncertainty than the normal uncertainty, making for a whole lot of uncertainty that has to be communicated on time, no delays, because the project, after all, is on the fast track.  I realise that communicating my frustration here is a form of preaching to the choir – of probably 25 to 50 singers – but with age I admit to also becoming more sympathetic to more aspects of the legacy of Robert Moses… as well as to accounts of construction progress in China as a direct competitor to the United States.  

The rates of construction in China over the last decades are undeniably remarkable.  A book that describes it well, and that got a lot of attention in the United States in late 2025 is ‘Breakneck:  China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’ by Dan Wang, a Canadian of Chinese origin who attended university in the United States and returned to China for a job shortly before Covid.  A short list of notable accomplishments (there are many many more) include:  

• From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as all active track exists in New York City.  (I looked at Wikipedia and found reference to a sub-period of this timeframe that included expanding the network from 65 km in 2003 to over 400 km in 2010.  Compare 335 km in seven Shanghai years to 2.9 km in ten New York City years, or arguably 16 years)      
• Within a few decades, China has constructed the longest high speed rail network in the world, ten times the combined length of Spain (second in world) and Japan (third in world).
• One of China’s poorer provinces Guizhou has built 45 of the world’s 100 highest bridges.  

Wang labels China as ‘an engineering state’ while the United States is ‘a lawyerly society’.  Of specific interest to the topic at hand:  in 2002 all nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee (effectively the head of the Chinese Communist Party and therefore the national leadership) were educated as engineers.  Leaders with a preparation in engineering – with varying specialties including infrastructure, manufacturing and aerospace – had become a tradition during the Premiership of Deng Xiaoping in the late 20^th Century.

The last bullet point above is revealing for a few reasons.  I have never been there, but understand from Wang that Guizhou is very mountainous so high bridges are to be expected.  But some of the bridges haven’t achieved much, and could be compared to several ‘bridges to nowhere’ that occasionally appear in the United States and in locations that make no economic sense other than to bring an expensive project to a politician’s backyard.  So China isn’t immune to some of the same political drivers that infect western expenditures.  And probably to a much greater degree than Moses, China likes monuments.  Around all the roads, bridges, and trains, visitors are still advised not to drink tap water anywhere in China.  Water treatment plants don’t make good monuments, so the engineering state appears not to have prioritised them in the recent decades of growth.    

Despite periodic protests, including during Covid when the population tired of what came to be perceived as government-excess while the world re-opened around it, China has been able to maintain ‘the consent of the governed’ as Wang refers to it in several chapters of the book, because the government has largely delivered.  China objectively has many challenges/problems, but the people can feel the many many accomplishments, and overall economic vitality.  While the starting point of the United States around the turn of the century was quite different, I would agree with Wang’s observation that the United States government in this time has largely not delivered for its people.  And these decades coincided with the export of massive amounts of manufacturing (and manufacturing capability, which Wang distinguishes) from the United States to China.  Consumers in the United States benefitted, but we’re seeing the long-term price.  While Wang doesn’t diverge from the main points of his book, I would agree with many people in believing that these trends contributed to the current state of politics in the United States and are the fault of both the ‘R’ people and the ‘D’ people. 

To be sure, Wang sees the competition between the ‘engineering state’ and the ‘lawyerly society’ as not yet decided, if it has to be.  And he thinks that for the benefit of their respective populations, each country should try to be more like the other.  Wang provides other examples of where the engineering and scientist leaders of China didn’t make the best decisions, sometimes with enormous consequences, and he explains how the ‘lawyerly society’ – with all its lawyers and attention to rights – had built-in mechanisms to prevent similar outcomes.  He also points to some countries in Western Europe that have found a more effective balance between environmental reviews, public consultation, and ‘getting things done’.      

I recognise a distinction to be made between arguing for more engineers as political leaders, and more engineers at the table where decisions are made, perhaps as organisational leaders at varying levels.  On some occasions the argument is in support of ensuring well-informed socio-technical decisions.  Especially when in the public interest as in the case of infrastructure, I am in full agreement with this need, even if I don’t believe it to be the number one challenge facing our profession.  Raj Aseervatham, EA’s former President who was present at the 2025 Engineers Forum (and was also a guest later in May at an AGS National meeting in Brisbane) wrote a related article for ‘Create’ on ‘Why more engineers should be leaders’ in which he cites a career experience when he felt some engineers were too focused on their expertise, and less inclined ‘to engage more willingly and deeply on the human or societal problem, not just the technical.’  

The argument for more engineers in leadership ‘to get things done’ (full-stop) is more perilous and should be reviewed with humility.  I absolutely believe that the United States needs right now to build more for its people – and that includes progressively upgrading bridges and roads at the end of their design lives – but society needs to bring the pendulum back with all its professions, not just the engineers.     

From so much of the discussion in the early chapters of Wang’s book – it lacks an index so I couldn’t easily search ahead – I anticipated a discussion of Robert Moses and ‘The Power Broker’.  It arrived in Chapter 7 with the heading ‘Learning to Love Engineers’.  For Wang, calling ‘The Power Broker’ monumental would be an understatement.  Some of the bad decisions Moses made are undeniable, but the book is now dated.  It played a part in the consolidation of ‘the lawyerly society’ and it helped to teach people in the United States ‘to fear and loathe engineers’.  Wang is not an engineer, but writers like him will be hugely influential in shifting, if not correcting, perceptions in a way that engineers won’t so easily.                     

Australia is obviously not the United States, and per capita, Australia has built more infrastructure in recent years.  But the pendulum still swings, and the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane is forcing a shift that will have to happen if all the infrastructure plans are to be realised.    

I’ve been honoured to serve as the National Chair for the AGS over the last two years and a bit.  Working mostly with our now General Manager Jon Gibbs and the collective national leadership, I’ve been honoured to lead our transition to a new public company limited by guarantee.  We’ve had a number of bumps along the way and I’ve learned things about organisational leadership – sometimes through my own mistakes – that I could not have so readily learned through other avenues in my career.  For the last two years we have been actively sending our chapter leaders, international society vice presidents and representatives, our journal editor, and invited members to the AICD ‘Governance for not-for-profits’ course.  And we are developing policies and procedures around the constitution to sustain the new organisation.  I believe we are doing our part in helping many of our engineering and geologist members to grow as leaders and are very much aligned with EA’s vision for the profession.          

As part of our strategic development, we held our first ever all-day strategy session in Brisbane on 6 February with an independent consultant.  I want to thank Jon for arguing in favour of an invitation list that extended beyond our Board to include our National Stakeholders Group and a few others.  Two days before the event I learned that all five of my predecessors in the National Chair role had confirmed attendance:

David Lacey:  2022-2023

Nina Levy:  2020-2021

Stephen Fityus:  2018-2019

Hugo Acosta-Martinez:  2016-2017

Darren Paul:  2014-2015   

In chatting with Jon after the event, I appreciated from him how rare it is for any organisation to have 12 years of six consecutive leaders in the same room… for all sorts of reasons (we both laughed).  My last honour would be observing the engagement of all five of those predecessors with AGS Limited as I conclude my time.

Tim Thompson
National Chair, Australian Geomechanics Society