2013 Issue

47 sentatives in District 20. My hope is that this short article will describe why you should join me in becoming politically active. The fact that the Supreme Court had to intervene in a presidential election in 2000 might be indicative of themagnitude of the division in the United States. A book about the historical challenges for fair voting was released at that time, a coincidence, and that book helped provide added context on the messiness of democracy, as the President alluded [5]. II. THE HUMAN CONDITION A. Migration, Population and Technology Modern man has been roaming for ap- proximately 150,000 years, migrating and populating the known world. The Toba Catastrophe is thought to have reset popu- lation growth to near zero approximately 70,000 years ago. Some scholars believe that mankind may have first appeared in the NewWorld as long as 40,000 years ago. Figure 1 shows a plot of population growth for over the last three millennia. The popu- lation of hunter-gatherer economics of mankind is thought to have only allowed modest popula- tion growth. In other words, the popu - lation was constrained by the area of land available, a concept known as the agrar- ian limit. The figure shows population in- creased upon the introduction of new food sources in the 16th century, the introduction of the potato and corn from theNewWorld. The industrial revolution further improved food distribution, enhancing the slope of population growth in the figure. However, the invention of the chemical engineering process known as the Haber-Bosch Process [7], which allowed industrial production of artificial fertilizer in 1913, resulted in an explosion of world population growth [7] expected to approach 10 billion by 2050. The net result is that the population of mankind changed from being historically constrained by an agrarian limit to a new technological limit over a period of only 250 years. Mankind is leveraged by that dif- ference between the agrarian limit and the projected population. Just like a business can assume risk by being leveragedby debt, mankind has made a similar bargain with continued technological development. If technology fails, there could be a massive die-off. This is reminiscent of thebargainwith thedevil inFaust, the classicGerman story by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). B. Human Limits on Action Man is the product of evolution. Biology builds upon its own successful experiments, andman is a culmination of past successes. So our human thinking process is not unlike other animals, and our thinking process is better described as an enhancement of the abilities of other species rather than as a departure from their thinking processes. Figure2 ismyown simplisticmodel of human decision making. I use this model to explain thepolitical thought asmightbeencountered by knocking on a neighbor’s door during an election cycle. In the figure “stimulus” might mean raising an issue in current political de- bate such as the topic of “global warming,” for example. Thehumanmindprovidesquick Figure 1 - World Population cal action as individual engineers, each of us will grow to form a deeper understand- ing of ourselves. This proposed thrust should not be an individual effort. Engineering societies engaged in public policy will renew their commitment to their profession and drive economic and social renewal by: garnering renewed interest in STEM careers, sup- porting government action in community interests, driving the press to report on technical topics, promoting valuation of professional contribution, promoting tech businesses, supporting technical in- novation, and reversing the degradation of technical societies and a long-term default to take-over of technical societies by academia. TAKING POLITICAL ACTION | continued on page 48