| Steve Posselt, Chair 2018-19 We have seen some tough years, years of greed, years of burying discussion of climate change, species loss, habitat loss and decline in water quality. The Great Barrier Reef is more than half dead and will die. The Darling basin is a disgrace and is dying. The NSW coastal river that I live on is depressing. It has a D rating and the mud has reached within 2km of the mouth. All of the oysters have died. It’s all depressing. It depresses our members. Some give up but many of us have soldiered on. As late as 2017 city media boycotted my paddle to Paris because it was about climate change and climate change had been done, it was over, boring. Now it is on everyone’s lips. Last year sustainability was still a dirty word in many government departments. Fish ladders? What a useless pain in the neck. But hey, this year it is turning. It is turning because the bulldozer is at the gate. We can see it, we can hear the motor running. If we don’t do something it will come crashing through and we will be done for. It reminds me of a beer I was having in 1997 with a senior consulting engineer. His company had just been involved in the nutrient removal sewage treatment plant at Toowoomba. The plant had been built in response to the 1000km long algal bloom on the Darling River. Chris said to me that they were getting out of construction. There were no jobs. We needed engineers who could write reports, not build stuff. Ten years later we had a huge backlog of treatment plants required. We imported engineers. If you could spell “engineer” correctly you got a job maybe at $200k per year. It was chaos. Australia all of a sudden needed engineers who could build stuff, an expertise that had been allowed to whither on the vine. It is déjà vu for me. With the world waking up we will need sustainability practitioners. They will come from all disciplines of engineering. Sustainability will be embedded in everything we do. Engineers can embrace that, or they can fall behind. Everyone will want an engineer who understands sustainability. The time has come. The Sustainable Engineering Society is your ticket to keep up. | 
