The engineering apologetics juggernaut known as Henry Petroski has turned out another timely reflection on technology and its social relations, with special reference to policy questions involving climate change, energy, and related challenges. But to what extent does the recognition of distinctions between science and engineering really promote effective engineering (or science) for policy?

Might physical and social power originate, function, and affect the world in similar ways—perhaps even have some causal connection?

Making historical work truly useful to people in the policy world will require reshaping the values of our own profession.

An international conflict over pollution from the smelter in Trail, British Columbia, was a harbinger of a type of transnational problem that has become of utmost importance. Historians of technology could make important contributions to a resolving these, because they are intimately linked with technology.

New works by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, J. L. Anderson, and Christopher Henke explore the reciprocal and interdependent relationships among living and nonliving components of environmental and technological systems.

Flood control is a national religion in the Netherlands. In 49 U.S. states, it’s Louisiana’s problem. —John McQuaid, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 13 November 2005 The whirlwind that swept through the American media after the devastation of New Orleans last August was hardly less ferocious than Hurricane Katrina itself. The Corps of Engineers was lambasted for [...]

The 150-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River that winds from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, once lined with indigo and cotton and sugar plantations, is today home to more than 150 petrochemical plants. This part of Louisiana is among the most toxic places in the United States, the site of acrimonious struggles between industry [...]

Since the destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina last August/September, I have pondered the strained links among cities, technologies, and catastrophes. In this I am probably like millions of other people. The only difference is that a few years ago I wrote a history of New Orleans’s relationship with the Mississippi. So, when Katrina [...]

Prologue: The Wyndham New Orleans Hotel, 19 January 2006, 6:30 p.m. Huge glass windows stretch from the eleventh floor reception area to the twelfth floor, where the ballroom is. It is the sixty-fifth annual meeting of the Association of Levee Boards of Louisiana. The association’s motto: “Without Flood Protection, Nothing Else Matters.” Behind me, the [...]

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were only the most recent in a long series of damaging blows to the Louisiana petrochemical industry. The lower Mississippi River region once offered an alluring prospect to the oil and chemical companies: ready access to raw materials, deepwater transport capabilities, cheap fuels, a mild climate, and a favorable political situation. [...]